SOURCE: "Dreams of Power in Alice in Wonderland," in Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious, Cornell, 1990, pp. 55-61.

In the following excerpt, Thomas explores the themes of power and linguistic mastery in Alice's dreamworld.

I do hope it's my dream and not the Red King's! I don't like belonging to another person's dream.

—Alice

Lewis Carroll's dream-child Alice dreams of the adult world as a chaotic, crazy realm, but also as a territory she wishes to enter and possess as her own. Dickens's Scrooge turns that dream wish around. He dreams of his childhood innocence and desires to repossess certain features of it in his old age. Common to both dreamers is the wish to bring the experience of childhood together with that of adulthood, to see life whole, to transform what threatens to be disjointed and meaningless into a coherent narrative rather than...