The Wonderland Inside You

Dreams and games of Let’s Pretend are more than they seem. We’ve been looking for meaning in dreams for a long time and games of Let’s Pretend occupy much of our childhood and don’t end at adolescence or even at adulthood.

I was watching the Alice in Wonderland reboot, today, with Johnny Depp as the Hatter when I began to realize exactly who, or rather what, each of the main characters represented. Each one is one of our many inner selves:

Alice is easy. She’s a young girl finding her voice. She’s cornered and knows that she’s expected to behave in a certain manner but would rather do anything else. She hides down a rabbit hole in order to get some perspective and time to grow a spine.

Fighting an imaginary foe, the Jabberwocky, gives her the confidence that she needs to face her real life enemy. The enemy is a choice that must be made, but it’s a decision that will change the course of her life and she’s being asked to make it at the tender age of only 16 or so.

“Down a rabbit hole” is an expression that we use to talk about impossible conspiracy theories and other insanity, so we can clearly understand how every character in the story came to be mad. The Hatter and March Hair are obvious targets for our tendency to label people as crazy but there are all different kinds of “crazy”.