The Only Dream in the Book
In January 1890 Lewis Carroll told a newspaper that there were no dreams in Sylvie and Bruno. In the table of states of consciousness he published in 1893 there is one, on pages 262 and 263, and it is marked with the letter for the ordinary state.
The narrator has stayed behind at the foot of a tree, facing some "venerable ruins half buried in ivy". The picnic is over: Lady Muriel and Eric have left in the carriage, Arthur and the Earl on foot, and he means to make a sketch and take the train back. "It is a very drowsy day," he says to himself, turning the leaves of his sketch-book for a blank page. Then the two walkers are back. Arthur has come to remind him that "the trains go every ten minutes". "Nonsense! It isn't the Metropolitan Railway!" "It is the Metropolitan Railway," the Earl insists. "This is a part of Kensington." "Why do you talk with your eyes shut?" says Arthur. "Wake up!" The narrator blames the heat, and asks: "Am I awake now?" "I think not," the Earl judicially pronounces. "What do you think, Doctor? He's only got one eye open!" Then it is Bruno who cries: "And he's snoring like anything! Do wake up, you dear old thing!" He and Sylvie set to work rolling a heavy head from side to side. But the one who finally opens his eyes is the Professor, who sits up and asks, with his old-fashioned courtesy, "whereabouts we are just now—and who we are, beginning with me".
The scene is in chapter XVIII, "Queer Street, Number Forty", on pages 262 and 263 of the first edition of Sylvie and Bruno, the novel Carroll published with Macmillan in December 1889. The book puzzled many readers, with its sudden changes of scene and with what they took to be "dream-children" brought into real life. On 9 January 1890 Carroll wrote to the St. James's Gazette, which printed the letter the next day. The book, he explained, was written on the theory that fairies really exist and can assume human form, and the "I" of the story passes through three stages of being: real life, the "eerie" stage in which he can see fairies, and trance, in which his body seems asleep while his spirit is free to pass into fairyland. Then a flat sentence: "There are no 'dreams' in the book." The reason he gave was a matter of craft, not doctrine: the many imitations of his two "dream-stories", the two Alice books, had "effectually barred" him from writing any more fiction of that kind.
Four years later, in the preface to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, signed "Christmas, 1893", Carroll set out the "theory" of the story again, pointing to A. P. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism (1883) for the transference of one's "immaterial essence". This time the states carry letters: (a) "the ordinary state, with no consciousness of the presence of Fairies"; (b) the "eerie" state, in which one is conscious of one's actual surroundings and also of the fairies; (c) a form of trance in which, unconscious of one's surroundings and apparently asleep, one's immaterial essence migrates elsewhere, in the actual world or in Fairyland. Then a table: "I will here tabulate the passages, in both Volumes, where abnormal states occur." For twenty-eight passages across the two volumes, Carroll gives the place where the narrator, called the "Historian" in the table, finds himself and the letter of his state. The row for "262, 263" reads: among the ruins, "dreaming", state a. It is the only time the word appears in the table, and it is filed as the ordinary state. The next row starts on the same page 263: "sleep-walking", state c, with Sylvie, Bruno and the Professor "in Human form".
The first volume had already given the conditions for the eerie state. In chapter XIV, on page 191, the narrator explains when you are most likely to see fairies. The first rule is that "it must be a very hot day". Then: "you must be just a little sleepy—but not too sleepy to keep your eyes open, mind." And you ought to feel a little "fairyish": "the Scotch call it 'eerie'". One more detail concerns the author's own dreams. In the 1889 preface Carroll says that some of his ideas came to him in dreams, from no cause he could trace, and he points to at least two "dream-suggestions" in the book, lines on page 88 and page 332.
So much for the documents; from here on this is our reading. The recipe on page 191 and the scene on page 262 begin the same way, with heat and drowsiness. What separates them is the eyes. Keep them open, a little sleepy, and you see the actual world and the fairies at once: that is the eerie state, the threshold. Close them and you dream, and the dream is made of trains, Kensington and friends who come back: it has no fairies in it, and the 1893 table files it in the column of ordinary life. In Carroll's scheme a dream is not a border between two worlds; it is one of the things that happen on this side. And the 1890 sentence, "there are no dreams in the book", is not quite contradicted: the one dream the table admits is classed as a state in which there are no fairies.
That leaves page 263, the only page that appears in two rows of the table. The dream ends there without anyone waking up from it: the head the children roll is no longer the narrator's but the Professor's, and the one who opens his eyes asks who he is. A moment later, when the narrator points out that the harder problem is how to get back, the Professor answers: "Viewed as a Problem, outside of oneself, it is a most interesting one. Viewed as a portion of one's own biography, it is, I must admit, very distressing!"
A Note on Sources
Carroll quoted from scans of the first Macmillan editions (1889 and 1893) on the Internet Archive, checked against the Wikisource and Project Gutenberg transcriptions; the 1890 letter from an online transcription.
What is new. The three-state theory of Sylvie and Bruno is well known and discussed: the Society for Psychical Research's Psi Encyclopedia cites it, for example, and in 2022 Felipe A. Matti read the eerie state itself as a threshold, in an article in the journal Metaxy. What we add is the juxtaposition of three details: the sentence in the 1890 letter ("There are no 'dreams' in the book"), the single "dreaming" row of the 1893 table, marked with the letter a, and the eyes-open rule on page 191. We found no study that puts them together, but our search was limited to online resources in English, Spanish and Italian: if the connection has already been made, we will gladly note it.
Facts and reading. The text of the scene, the rule on page 191, the 1889 preface, and the 1893 preface and table are checked against scans of the first editions. Carroll's interest in psychical research is already recorded by his nephew Stuart Dodgson Collingwood in the 1898 biography, which says he was for some time an enthusiastic member of the "Psychical Society"; according to the Psi Encyclopedia, his name appears in the SPR Proceedings membership lists from 1883 to at least 1889. That the border runs through the eyes, and that in the scheme the dream sits on the side of ordinary life, is our interpretation.
What we don't know. We read the letter to the St. James's Gazette in a transcription, in the online collection "The (almost really) Complete Works of Lewis Carroll", which gives the issue of 10 January 1890 as its source: we have not seen the newspaper page. We do not know why Carroll put an ordinary-state row in a table of "abnormal" states, or whether the contradiction with the 1890 letter was deliberate: the preface does not say.
Editions. Page numbers are those of the first editions (Macmillan, London, 1889 and 1893), which are also the ones Carroll uses in the table.
Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno (1889), the letter to the St. James's Gazette (1890) and the table of states in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893)
In 1890 Carroll writes that there are no dreams in the book. In 1893 he tabulates his narrator's states of consciousness page by page: there is a single "dreaming" row, on pages 262 and 263, and it is marked with the letter of the ordinary state, the one in which fairies cannot be seen.