Semi-Daily Scribbles

Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World – Coursera Assignment 2
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass

“Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else.” To answer Alice’s inquiry, I suggest she’s a fine scientist. Her inquisitiveness makes her view Wonderland as an anthropologist and physicist would. In dreams, Alice needn’t adhere to Victorian gender roles. She is at the forefront of scientific exploration.

We meet Alice with her sister on a bank, daydreaming, when the White Rabbit appears. Alice the Anthropologist takes a trip to the spirit realm when she jumps. Shamans visualize portals like holes in hedges to travel to the underworld. A tunnel transports the shaman to a reality populated by animals and plants that offer spiritual guidance. The wisdom Alice seeks in Wonderland is how to say goodbye to childhood without forgetting its magic. The impossible is so easily managed when one is seven. “For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.”

“Through the Looking Glass” offers Alice lessons in physics. Can time run backwards in other universes? According to the White Queen it does.

“The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam today.”

“It must come sometimes to ‘jam today,’” Alice objected.

“No it can’t,” said the Queen. “That’s the effect of living backwards.”

The great advantage, the White Queen tells Alice, is that one’s memory works both ways. One can say this is the foundation for time travel. Alice also debates cake and backward causation with the White King, a Lion, and a Unicorn. “You don’t know how to manage Looking-glass cakes,” the Unicorn remarked. “Hand it round first, and cut it afterwards.”

Alice achieved muchness when her dreams challenged our perceptions of reality.