1 English book club 1 Alice's adventures in Wonderland

wikipedia a écrit:Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS), also known as Todd's syndrome or dysmetropsia, is a neuropsychological condition that distorts perception. People may experience distortions in visual perception of objects such as appearing smaller (micropsia) or larger (macropsia), or appearing to be closer (pelopsia) or farther (teleopsia) away than they actually are. Size distortion may occur in other sensory modalities as well.

Will self a écrit:I think, [Carroll] was a heavily repressed pedophile, without doubt. It’s a problem, isn’t it, when somebody writes a great book but they’re not a great person

Alice is confronted by plenty of dangers, but she ultimately finds “the right Alice,” and opportunities for the development of her personality.

Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole could be a route to the unconscious, particularly when we bear in mind that she seems to be dreaming throughout the story. The tunnel could also be a phallic symbol of penetration.More psychosexual imagery emerges when Alice lands – the line up of doors with their locks and keyholes, and the curtain, symbolic of clothing, which Alice must move out of the way, are all potentially telling of the author’s mindset.‘Every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own or, rather, he arranges the things of his world in a new way,’ Freud.

Can you have a ring without a bell? A bark without its dog? In the weird quantum world you can. The Quantum Cheshire Cat Experiment, named after the mischievously grinning feline Alice encounters in Wonderland, has turned from theory to reality the remarkable feat of separating particles from their properties. Physicists were able to separate neutrons from their spins, like the Cheshire cat and its grin, and in doing so further question our understanding of the world around us. We are taught that the universe is made up of mana different particles - light of photons, atoms of electrons and protons and neutrons - and that these all have specific properties such as charge and spin. The idea that somehow these particles could exist without their properties, and ever stranger that these properties could exist without their particles, is a notion that goes against our intuition though one that is permitted by quantum theory.

Some researchers think humans live in two worlds because our nature, according to them, is double! In the quantum world particles are also waves which can be found simultaneously in two places, or pass through obstacles that one would think impassable. Hence that novel


When we read the testimonies of those who have experienced NDE (Near Death Experience) we find coincidences in the sensations they feel with what happens in the infinitely small : crossing walls, finding themselves everywhere and in one place simultaneously, the sensation that time no longer exists. It looks strangely similar to the waves/particles duality
doesn’t it ?