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| Similar theme exist in ALICE IN WONDERLAND & CHANGED IN THE NIGHT |
Life-death, time-space, reality-dreams are only a few of the themes that exist in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and CHANGED IN THE NIGHT.
What
is time and space? If the past is only a dream and the future does not yet
exist, then is the present moment the only reality we have?
Are UFOS real? Is there more than one Universe? Who are we and where do we
come from?
In this modern day Alice in Wonderland story, Allana Odette Blair is plunged into similar philosophical and scientific themes. For
example, when Alice falls down the rabbit hole, she experiences abandonment and
extreme loneliness; Allana in CHANGED IN THE NIGHT suffers abandonment and
loneliness after being visited and marked by aliens. Both girls are cast into
an alien world that's beyond reality and both are lost psychologically, trapped
in solitude and misunderstood.
Growing up is the death of childhood; therefore, death is closely connected
to the protagonists in both the Wonderland story and CHANGED IN THE NIGHT. Death permeates
Alice's enchanted garden in Wonderland where the Queen of Hearts appears to be
the Goddess of Death, and death hovers in Allana's painted forest where her dead
brother taunts her and leads her into more complicated puzzles.
In the Alice in Wonderland story, there's much to decipher,
and this is also true in CHANGED IN THE NIGHT. The theme of Time and Space
exist in both stories. Alice has the Mad Hatter; Allana has Mr. Zee, and we
learn about time and space through these characters. We think of time in hours,
minutes, and seconds or days, weeks, months, and years. The Mad Hatter's watch
shows the date, not the time; at one point, the Mickey Mouse clock in CHANGED
IN THE NIGHT is missing an hour; the cuckoo in the clock over the kitchen table
is permanently stuck half in and half out of the little door.
Unlike us, a clock can repeat its measure of duration. We
live in the conscious knowledge that we can never go back to a given point in
the past even though we can turn the hands of a clock back or move them
forward. Because of psychological time, however characters in both Alice in
Wonderland and CHANGED INTHE NIGHT can leave and return to the same place.
Allana can hear Great-Aunt Grace give advice and she can see her brother Jack,
now grown.
There's nothing straightforward or simple in CHANGED IN THE
NIGHT. Everything is cause and effect. One door leads to another. After Allana accidentally
kills her twin brother, Jack, nothing is the same again. I deliberately chose
the death date as December 7, 1941—the day Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor—because
it led to America dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few years
later. And this began the never-ending arms race so that today countries all
over the globe have in their possession nuclear power, a capability that can destroy
planet Earth.
War is constant, death inevitable, and grief a given. Our
science has created destructive power that is greater than our ability to
contain it. We have become instruments of our own destruction.
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| Symbolism and metaphor prevail in both stories. |
Like Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Allana in CHANGED IN THE NIGHT is stuck
in a limbo of sorts where nothing is quite as it seems. In both the classic story and the new release, symbolism sprinkled throughout in doors, riddles, puzzles and time; therefore the protagonists must deal with a lot of
metaphoric "smoke and mirrors" in story, dreams, and reality.
After Allana's abduction by aliens, her psychological world
unravels even further. UFOs, however, might be the ultimate reality or wake-up
call, the government's long kept secret, the reason for the arms buildup, as
well as, the men in black, and the sudden early retirement of Uncle Gordon from
the Air Force.
Through Mr. Zee, her not-so-human tutor, Allana learns about Occam's Razor, Einstein's E = mc2, and Schrödinger's Cat;
she discovers that science is a double-edged sword; there's good and evil in all, and reality is not what it seems.
she discovers that science is a double-edged sword; there's good and evil in all, and reality is not what it seems.
She also discovers that anything is possible—even loving the enemy—and that letting go might be the bravest act of all.
