Reichertz describes “the last of the three major distorting elements (joining the world upside down and the looking glass) that contribute to Carroll’s fantasy is dream” and specifically discusses the development in the form of the “dream vision.” Reichertz argues that, “to a twentieth century reader, dream is the most obvious of the elements at work, but it was rarely used in children’s literature prior to the Alice books” (61). In Alice, Carroll constructed a world where the rules and modalities common to our world, while present in a new form, have at once permission to animate, interact and skew to his volition alone.

According to Alwin Baum, who in his essay Carroll’s Alices: The Semiotics of Paradox, explains that “Carroll remarks in his diaries that the world of dreams seems as “lifelike” as the other, and (Carroll) suggests that there is little basis for calling one reality and the other fiction” (67). Reinstein however believes that, “perhaps Carroll was able to succeed where others before him had failed because in his personal life he directed his fertile imagination and lively affection almost exclusively towards children” (172).

Fantasy literature has its bellwethers, there are the Aesop Fables and the Brothers Grimm, clearly moral in their teachings, and there are the classic once upon a timers, as seen in stories like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and who doesn’t think of Cinderella anytime there is a step mom involved. Lewis was able to write so well for children because he wrote to them, and not only to them but to the child in himself and us all. Likewise, as Donald Glover points out in C.S. Lewis: The Art of Enchantment, Lewis was gifted with, “the genius of … choice of event and description lies in their appropriateness…he knew the archetypal state of childhood… (that) he invariably chose the appropriate image, action, or response for his children” (138).

Reinstein relays this story about Carroll, “when asked by a visitor, Mr. Girdlestone, about children, Carroll said that he found it much easier to understand children, to get his mind into correspondence with their minds when he was fatigued with other work” he goes on to say that, “I asked him if children ever bored him. He had been standing up for most of the time, and when I asked him that, he sat down suddenly. “They are three-fourths of my life…I cannot understand how anyone could be bored by little children” (173).

In his book The Chronicles of Narnia, Collin Manlove reveals that Lewis did not write “specifically for children at all, but wrote in the fairy-tale mode because… (previously) the reader had been asked to enter a child’s world; now the child’s world was entering that of the adult reader” (9).

Holbrook argues that for Lewis writing was a way to escape and a matter of survival for his soul. Holbrook surmises that “(people) yearn to go back to the beginning again, to reexperience birth…often a symbolic impulse behind fantasies... (like) symbolic moments in Alice in Wonderland” (71). The necessity for this rebirth was to recapture a time when existed in him a feeling of innocence and endless possibilities absent the constraints of adulthood and the mundane repetitions that infest it. When the rent is due you don’t need a reality check to realize the rest of your days are fated to punching the clock, buying the groceries, and endless wasted hours standing on line at the check out, post office or bank.

It is precisely within the security of childhood, a time prior to responsibilities and the loss of innocence, when the world is magic. Sammons argues that Lewis himself was acutely aware of his burning desire to write on behalf of his vanished childhood, admitting however, that even he did not know what made him, “in a particular year of my life, feel that not only a fairy tale, but a fairy tale addressed to children, was exactly what I must write—or burst.”