“Life, what is it but a dream?”
“A dream is a wish your heart makes, when you're fast asleep, in dreams you will lose your heartaches, whatever you wish for, you keep…” is a line from a very famous song featured in Disney’s Cinderella. I never paid much attention to these words as I’ve sang them probably a thousand times throughout my 23 years. Never questioned their validity or how they applied to the world, but truly, this idea is prevalent in every story ever written. From songs, to films, to literature, to our daily lives the idea of dreams and sleeping are vastly important. It is not merely something that people do during the REM cycle of their nights, but also something that they strive to accomplish in their lives, and is generally used interchangeably with the word ‘goal.’ Keeping this in mind it should be no surprise that the idea of ‘dreams’ are not only one of the key subjects in class discussion, but in all of the stories as well. Each heroine experienced their dreams differently, but each understood that what they experienced during their time asleep was the most important of all.
For Sleeping Beauty, it was not that she was dreaming, but her lack of dreaming that concerns the reader. “Right after touching the tip of the spindle, the girl collapsed on a nearby bed and fell into a deep sleep” (Grimm 99). She was cursed into a dreamless sleep, which is the worst thing imaginable for a witch to do because then the princess would spend eternity in a world of nothing; a world where there are no wishes, hopes, joys or happiness. Luckily for her, a prince was waiting to rescue her from this horrible state, but what if he wouldn’t have come along? To spend forever without dreaming is horrible thing to imagine, which the sorceress must have known, thus choosing this as her princess’ fate. Sigmund Freud believed that dreams are “a realization of unfulfilled desires” and the princess probably didn’t realize how important her dreams were until they were taken away. It wasn’t until the prince kissed her awake that her desires could be fulfilled and they could live happily ever after (Freud).
Lyra from His Dark Materials experiences her profound dream in a very different way than the rest of our heroines. “Oh, but my dream, Will- can’t tell you how strange it was! It was like when I read the alethiometer, all that clearness and understanding going so deep you can’t see the bottom, but clear all the way down” (Pullman 670). She dreams, when induced into sleep by her psychotic mother, of speaking to her friend Roger, who is stuck in the land of the dead and is afraid. She believes, because of this dream that she needs to speak to him and ask him to forgive her, to move on not only with her life, but to fulfill her destiny, whatever that may be. When she tells Will, he too believes in her dream, because he wants to speak to his recently deceased father to ask for guidance. Her dream tells her what she should do, which can be connected to Jungian dream psychology. Jung wrote: "The reason for this exceptional position of dreams lies in their peculiar mode of origin: they do not arise, like other conscious contents, from any clearly discernible, logical and emotional continuity of experience, but are remnants of a peculiar psychic activity taking place during sleep. Their mode of origin is sufficient in itself to isolate dreams from the other contents of consciousness, and this is still further increased by the content of the dreams themselves, which contrasts strikingly with our conscious thinking" (Jung). It was in Lyra’s conscious that knew what she must do, and without her dream as a guide she never would have known the course she needed to take. If Mrs. Coulter had never induced her into this sleep would Lyra and Will have known what they needed to do? Perhaps, but more likely not, making this presentiment-type dream far superior to its dream-brethren. Not only because it was more realistic, but also because it contained a foretelling aspect, which led them to the next step in their journey, the true path they were destined to take.
Alice from Alice in Wonderland is the victim of a reality-seeming dream. She is completely lucid in the dream and feels like it is reality, although she is confused by it greatly. Her time in wonderland was nonsensical and fantastic, seemingly unreal, but real all the same. She awakes at the end, in her sister’s lap and is confounded by the realness of what she just experienced, “‘Wake up, Alice dear!’ said her sister. ‘Why, what a long sleep you’ve had!’ ‘Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!’ said Alice…” (Carroll 125). But when Alice attempts to explain the dream to her sister, because she had not experienced it, it did seem incredible, yet yearned to understand it herself. Although her sister does try to imagine it, it seems so unrealistic that she cannot wrap her mind around in entirely. Perhaps this is solely because she wasn’t there with Alice, or perhaps because she had lost the childish ability to believe that dreams are reality. In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice awakes in the same manner, although she had already experienced the same thing before. She is confused and disoriented, and believes that her cat, because it was there too, remembers as well. The last line in the story is “life, what is it but a dream?” in which Carroll helps the reader to understand that we too are living in a dream, awaiting the day we will wake up and realize it (Carroll 239).
Dorothy from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz had a dream occurrence much like Alice, where she had an amazing experience, only to wake up and realized it was only a dream. In the film version, the viewer discovers that all the characters in the dream are in her ‘real’ life in Kansas. The fascinating part of Dorothy’s dream is that she sleeps, eats and lives her daily life during it. Mainly in dreams, such as Alice’s, the dreamer doesn’t do these practical everyday things, instead, they live a super-human existence, where these mundane things aren’t necessary. But it seems that Baum makes a point of mentioning these things, and making it clear that certain characters, like the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman don’t need these to survive as the Lion, Toto and Dorothy do. While in the field of poppies, all of the characters (aside from the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman because they were not “made of flesh”) fall into a deep sleep (Baum 112). If not for the mice that the friends had saved earlier, they would have perished. Unlike Coleridge’s drug-induced slumber, this one did not breed brilliance; it was a deep, dreamless slumber. The emphasis on dream versus reality is a major theme in both Alice and The Wizard. But dissimilar to Alice, Dorothy realizes that she has to experience the dream to see that reality is the most rewarding, whereas Alice likes the dream better than reality.
All of the characters found in literature dream and sleep, and those who cannot feel as if they are without a vastly important part of their life. Dreams can help to fulfill our goals, show us to treasure our lives and help us understand our destinies. Many live their lives dissatisfied because they long for their dreams to become reality, while others learn to treasure their lives because the dream is never as good as the reality, because “life, what is it but a dream?” (Carroll 239).
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