Alice in Wonderland

The Girl Who Fell Into a Dream

Alice was bored. Spectacularly, magnificently, heroically bored.

She sat on the riverbank next to her sister, who was reading a book with no pictures and no conversations — which, in Alice's opinion, was barely a book at all. The afternoon was warm. The bees were humming. A butterfly landed on Alice's knee, looked at her, and seemed equally bored.

Then the rabbit appeared.

He was white, and he wore a waistcoat, and he was running — not the way rabbits usually run, but the way people run when they are late for something important. He also had a pocket watch, which he kept checking with increasing panic.

"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear," the rabbit muttered. "I shall be TOO late!"

Alice sat up. Rabbits don't wear waistcoats. Rabbits don't carry watches. Rabbits don't say "oh dear." Unless something very unusual was happening.

She followed him. Across the meadow, through the hedge, and — without quite realizing what she was doing — right down a rabbit hole in the hillside.

She fell.

Not fast — slowly, as if the air itself were made of pillows. She drifted past shelves built into the walls of the tunnel — shelves with jars of marmalade, and books, and maps of places that didn't exist. A teacup floated by. A playing card — the seven of hearts — fluttered past like a leaf.

"This is very unusual," Alice said to no one, because there was no one to say it to.

She landed — gently, like a feather — on a pile of dry leaves at the bottom.

Wonderland was... well. Wonderful isn't quite the word. Wonderful suggests that things make sense in a pleasant way. Wonderland made no sense at all, in a way that was sometimes pleasant and sometimes alarming and always, ALWAYS surprising.

The first creature she met was a cat. Not a whole cat — just a grin, floating in midair between two branches. Then the rest of the cat materialized around the grin, as if the smile had been there first and the cat was an afterthought.

"Where am I?" Alice asked.

"That depends," said the cat — the Cheshire Cat, he called himself — "on where you want to be."

"I want to be somewhere that makes SENSE."

The cat's grin widened. "Then you've come to the wrong place entirely."

She found the tea party by accident. A long table in a clearing, set with cups and saucers and teapots, all mismatched, some cracked, one upside down. At the head sat a man in an enormous hat, pouring tea into a cup that already had tea in it.

"No room! No room!" the Hatter cried when he saw her.

"There's PLENTY of room," Alice said, sitting down.

"That's what makes it funny," the Hatter said, and poured her a cup of tea that turned out to be slightly warm air with a memory of sugar.

A dormouse slept in the sugar bowl. A March hare buttered his watch. The Hatter told a riddle that had no answer — "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" — and seemed perfectly satisfied when nobody solved it.

"This is nonsense," Alice said.

"The best kind," the Hatter agreed.

Alice wandered deeper. She met a caterpillar who asked "WHO are you?" and didn't wait for the answer. She met playing cards who painted white roses red because the queen liked red better. She heard the queen herself — "OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!" — echoing from somewhere she couldn't see, which was alarming until the Cheshire Cat explained that the queen said this to everyone but never actually did it.

"She's all bark and no bite," the cat said. "Rather like a teapot."

"Teapots don't bark," Alice said.

"Exactly."

The deeper she went, the stranger it got. And the stranger it got, the sleepier she became. Not frightened-sleepy. Not bored-sleepy. The kind of sleepy that comes when a dream has gone on just long enough and your body knows, even if your mind doesn't, that it's time to float back up.

The colors softened. The sounds blurred. The Cheshire Cat's grin faded last — hanging in the air like a lantern, then dimming, dimming...

"Are you waking up?" the cat asked, from very far away.

"I think so," Alice murmured.

"Will you come back?"

"I don't know. Can you come back to a dream?"

The grin flickered. "You can always come back to a dream," the cat said. "You just have to fall asleep."

Alice opened her eyes. She was on the riverbank. The afternoon sun was low. Her sister was still reading. The butterfly was gone.

The bees hummed. The river whispered.

Alice lay back on the warm grass... the sky was orange and pink and impossibly wide... and she could still see it — just barely, at the very edge of sleep — a grin, without a cat, fading slowly into the last gold light of the afternoon...

And the teacups clinked softly in a clearing that existed only when her eyes were closed... and the dormouse snored in the sugar bowl... and the Hatter poured tea into cups that were already full...

And Alice fell asleep on the riverbank... her hand trailing in the cool water... the rabbit hole open somewhere beneath the hill, waiting... always waiting... for the next time she was bored enough... and brave enough... and sleepy enough... to fall.