Life, what is it but a dream?

The two dream novels of Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1864) and Through the Looking Glass (1870), ended with the above words: Life, what is it but a dream?

The literature of the great ‘outsiders’ of society is littered with that question about reality: is this life a dream and our dream life the reality? Which is more real?

Keats in his poem Ode to a Nightingale included the line “Do I wake or sleep?”, and in the final chapter of the second book, Through the Looking Glass, which was entitled “Which Dreamed It?”, Alice says: “Who do you think dreamed it all”?

Other literary greats have mused on this theme. Shakespeare in The Tempest says “We are such stuff/As dreams are made on”; Shelley in Adonis says “He is awakened from the dream of life”; Tennyson says “Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams”?; and finally, the words of Wordsworth from Immortality Ode (“Whither is fled the visionary gleam/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream”) are echoed by Carroll in the final poem of the two novels where he says: “Lingering in the golden gleam/Life, what is it but a dream”?

The poem beautifully expressed his obvious love for the seven-year-old Alice which never dimmed, and his own struggles with the passing of childhood, the passing of time, lost love, ageing and death. He preferred the dream world of the books than ‘real’ life. Moreover, Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole enabled Carroll to address the ‘waking world’ as a fiction rather than as a criticism of the way society is structured, including all the inequities of society.

The Gnostics long ago held the view that this ‘physical’ world is indeed the dream world. For the Gnostics, the prime source of existence was The Pleroma, the place where we live without the need for our avatars. These avatars, our soul containers, are only needed to exist in the lower world, which was created to enable our souls to develop in a contained world.

The lower world is a simulacrum, a copy of the prime world, an artificially-created intelligent biosphere where we play the game of life. The lower world is the dream world. It’s not real, it’s an illusion. The Bushmen of the Kalahari believed this too, their saying was: There is a dream dreaming us”. And the Australian Aborigines say that this world is The Dreamtime: the world we call ‘reality’ is just the source of all material appearances. Physicality is unnecessary once we leave the Dreamtime.

Which brings us back to Alice. At the end of Through the Looking Glass, in the chapter entitled “Queen Alice”, at the coronation banquet after her coronation as queen, and after the absurdly formal dinner-party breaks up into pandemonium, she cries out “I can’t stand this any longer!”, thereby freeing herself from the game, the dream and the mirror world.

This is exactly what happens when we have matured as souls sufficiently to return to the ‘external world’ beyond the contained development world of the simulacrum. We leave the low frequencies of the ‘lower aeons’ and graduate back to the prime source of existence.

26 February 2024

[Book review: Lewis Carroll – “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass”]