“Was I sleeping again?” said a bewildered voice as she adjusted the stiff muscles from her desk. She looked around the classroom. There was not one familiar face.

“Mmm, miss Alice… it’s 4th hour, you started my class in the 1st hour. It seems to me that you need to get more sleep at home.”

“Umm, yes ma’am” said an embarrassed Alice and she scrambled out of the classroom carrying all her belongings.”

“Hurry Alice! Or you’ll be late for the next class.”She heard the teacher yell.

She didn’t bother going to 5th hour class, instead she ran home as fast as she could, past the queen’s statue, past the exquisite gardens, past the tree with a hole in it, past the garden walls, past her still iron gate, right up to her plantation home, and directly into her exquisite parlor where her dad sat concentrated on the couch amongst spread out papers and a type writer. He looked at her with one eyebrow up, as the grandfather clock chimed noon: “Alice,” he said “why are you home? Are you ill?”

“Oh father,” Alice fell into her dad’s arms. It was a safe place, safe enough for her to cry. As the tears rolled down her porcelain cheeks, her father adjusted her chin towards his restrained water filled with eyes. In the most sincere voice; and unshaken by his crumbled work that sat below his daughters pleading knees he asked,

“Did it happen again Alice?”

“It did” she said, and she cried knowing her dad had been right. Something WAS wrong, maybe she didn’t need friends or freedom. Maybe staying at home and acquiring a Tudor for her lessons was her only option. Maybe her dad was right.

She wondered what her mother would have thought, certainly she would know more about sleeping. After all she was told she rested below the surface 2 days after Alice was born. It was quite odd for Alice to think of her this way.

Suddenly, a yawn swept over her face and her eyes fell like weights. The limbs of her body turned to dough and just before falling to sleep she remembered her father saying, “I wonder where her mind goes to when she sleeps… I wonder what lands does she dream..: I wonder I wonder I wonder, oh my dear Alice, how I wonder”

He carried her to her bed where she awoke amongst her dreams to follow a very late rabbit down a hole in that tree in her yard. She slept for 3 days falling from large to small, watching a caterpillar on a leaf smoking a hookah, joining a mad hatter’s tea party and meeting a tyrannical queen who had a knack for card tricks.

When she awoke, she wrote a book in between her home lessons, waves of sleep, and the loving arms of her father.

She called that book Alice in Wonderland

And whether it was a true story or not, it is in fact true that the story was Alice’s account of her life. Where she lay somewhere between the present and the wake of her dreams.

Somewhere in a sleep paralysis world, unfixed by her dilemma, she indeed wrote that book and it has been my favorite book ever since. After all, dreams come and go whether we are awake to acknowledge them or sleeping to remember them, there is one thing for certain… dreams are only relevant to the living.

And that book lives on and breathed life into my soul over a hundred years later, saying, “Do Not be afraid to dream.”

(Disclaimer: This story claims Alice was a victim of sleep paralysis and is not an a definitive parallel account of the actual author Lewis Carroll’s book. None the less, it is a true charm in history and made for a very fun writing prompt. Thanks for reading.)