Quote 52
"So I wasn't dreaming, after all," she said to herself, "unless – unless we're all part of the same dream. Only I do hope it's my dream, and not the Red King's! I don't like belonging to another person's dream," she went on in a rather complaining tone: "I've a great mind to go and wake him, and see what happens!" (Looking-Glass 8.1)
At first, the question of who dreams the adventure in Looking-Glass World, Alice or the Red King, seems to have some kind of deep philosophical significance. Is she generating her own adventure, or just a character in somebody else's? But at second glance, we realize how crazy this sounds. Of course Alice is the dreamer, and of course she's in no danger if the Red King wakes up.
Quote 53
"Have you invented a plan for keeping the hair from being blown off?" Alice enquired.
"Not yet," said the Knight. "But I've got a plan for keeping it from falling off."
"I should like to hear it, very much."
"First you take an upright stick," said the Knight. "Then you make your hair creep up it, like a fruit-tree. Now the reason hair falls off is because it hangs down – things never fall upwards, you know. It's a plan of my own invention. You may try it if you like." (Looking-Glass 8.36-39)
The Knight's plan is crazy, but not because it wouldn't work. If you could get your hair to grow upwards, then it wouldn't fall off. It's just that making it grow upwards is impossible. Madness and impossibility are two different things in this fantasyland.
Quote 54
Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway. . . . (Wonderland 1.14)
The object of Alice's "quest" in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is freedom – getting out of the "small passage" that confines her and escaping into "the loveliest garden you ever saw." What the passage and the garden represent is up for debate, but it's no accident that Alice's freedom is represented by the natural world and the outdoors. Like most children, she hates being cooped up inside and longs to get out and explore.