Alice’s dreamworld, Wonderland, does not come to her all at once as a fully developed alternative space. Rather, Alice must travel a path to reach Wonderland – the rabbit hole. The dream space, however, begins even before that – and we see in the story how seamlessly Carroll blends together or transitions from the waking world into the sleep state. “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank,” we read at the start of Chapter I, “and of having nothing to do: once or twice she peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’” The shift is underway here as Alice's attention slackens. The scene continues, “So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close to her.” With the surprising appearance of the White Rabbit, the landscape has shifted from waking to dreaming space. The rabbit announces this shift, though at first the space remains much closer to waking reality than the world in which Alice will find herself later on in the story.  The first sign that this dream reality differs fundamentally from waking reality is that the White Rabbit talks. Alice overhears him say, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late.” Carroll points out that though the rabbit’s ability to speak surprises Alice, she also sees it as “quite natural.” The ability to hold these contradictory ideas together without a sense of cognitive dissonance marks the first point of Alice’s adaptation on the logic of the dream world. With that, Alice is in the dream while not yet fully in the dream-world, in Wonderland.

Alice’s entry into the fully realized dream world comes with her descent down the rabbit hole. She comes to the hole quite normally, following the movements of the White Rabbit. When Alice sees the rabbit pop down into the hole, she (deploying her dream logic) assumes that she can do the same. Once in the hole, the dream space takes a decided turn toward the bizarre. At one point on the way down the hole, for example, Alice “looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves.” At another place “she saw maps and pictures hung on pegs.” Upon taking a jar from one of the shelves she reads its label and discovers that it is orange marmalade. The journey down the rabbit hole emphasizes the cognitive dissonance introduced with the rabbit. Alice is in a completely fantastical space and yet the space contains elements exactly like dark narrow spaces she knows (like the pantry or a closet) together with objects one would find in these spaces (marmalade).

In addition to the blend of strange spatial elements (rabbit hole) with ordinary ones (maps, jars, shelves) the trajectory of the space itself is important here. The hole tunnels down. Alice is falling. The fall seems to last for a long time. The entry into Wonderland might be natural, but it provokes a wide range of emotional responses: from fear and anxiety on the one hand to boredom and blithe indifference on the other.