Alice, Luna, and Dreaming

I went over to Luna's today. We watched Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which I couldn't stand the first time I saw it and found only marginally more enjoyable this time around. I chalk it up to Luna's presence, as she's a fellow Alice fan and we were able to discuss the book together.

In case you haven't seen the movie, I'll try to explain the basic premise. Alice is a young woman who has had strange dreams all through childhood. She's proposed to at a party, runs away because she doesn't know how to respond, and falls down a rabbit hole. This lands her back in the dream-world from her childhood, which has turned darker and edgier because... well, it's Tim Burton. Alice has to try and save Wonderland — annoyingly called "Underland" in the film — from the Red Queen, who has taken over.

I do have to admit that the film wasn't as obnoxious as I remembered it being. Though I wouldn't call it a good movie in its execution, some things about the basic storyline actually weren't bad. The whole idea of a darker and edgier Wonderland makes some sense when you consider that Alice was a little girl (seven, in the book) when she first dreamed of Wonderland, and as an adult the dreams could have reasonably become darker and less childlike. Growing up does that to people.

Luna and I actually ended up having a conversation about dreams after finishing the movie. I usually can't remember my dreams, but Luna apparently remembers hers often. She even remembered dreams she'd had as a kid. She told me a few of them. They were all pretty funny, cute kid stuff. Stuffed animals coming to life, imaginary friends, that kind of thing.

The dreams I can remember having are generally like my normal life, but a bit off. I'm at home but my house doesn't look like it does in real life, or I'm on vacation at the beach but it doesn't look like the beaches I've been to, or some other detail of my life has been altered. The thing is, I never recognize these details as being wrong within the dreams themselves. They feel familiar, normal. They feel like actual memories. Sometimes when I first wake up I have trouble remembering what's real and what isn't. Dreams are funny like that.

One of the things I really love about the original Alice books is that they use dream-logic; incredibly strange things happen to and around the protagonist, without making any sort of sense, and they're hardly ever acknowledged as being more than slightly odd. The characters act as though everything that happens is perfectly normal, with the exception of Alice herself, and even she rarely finds things alarmingly strange. It's a perfect depiction of how dreams are, I think. The people you see in dreams never realize that things are as strange as they are, and half the time you yourself don't notice anything wrong.

It's almost scary when you think about how easy it is for your mind to lie to itself.