Wonderland revisited

I had suspected Mr Carroll of reading my diary for some time and the publication of Alice in Wonderland confirmed it. Although he changed my name to Alice, it is actually Mary Wunder. The events he so whimsically described in his two novelettes did not occur, at least not as he wrote them. Let me explain.

I was off in the woods near my family's home in Essex, England. I often went there to play as I was an imaginative and excitable child and this irritated my parents greatly so I tried not to be underfoot as much as possible.

That day, I remember clearly, I was playing tea party with my stuffed white rabbit. We had just had our first imagined cup when I heard a noise coming from a little further in the brush. It is hard to explain it. Low and humming at first with a high pitched whistle that sounded like a whirrrrlllll. Too young to know curiosity killed the cat I went to investigate.

What I found was mystifying. I wouldn't know what to call it except to say it was a doorway torn into the ground like a page torn out of a book. It was about the size of a seat cushion except that it kept forming and reforming in different shapes with many rough angles or smooth like a circle or a few like a triangle. Except it never quite took those shapes either, merely resembled them for a moment and changed again. The coloring was extremely odd, too. It would shift colors rapidly throughout the spectrum and at random, sometimes becoming reflective like a mirror or striped, checkerboxed or a dozen other patterns I can't begin to describe.

Had I been a less inquisitive child I would have fled at the very sight of it; I merely stood transfixed. I got a little closer until I was hovering above it. The oscillations grew more intense. In my distraction, I dropped my stuffed bunny and it fell directly into the portal. It swirled around as though in a whirlpool but otherwise stayed put. I reached out to try and fish it out. As I grabbed ahold of it, we were both pulled with a great force into the doorway. I was through the looking glass.

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Before I go any further, I must say my story here varies quite a bit to the account of young Alice in the story and is a quite a bit shorter and more bizarre. Wanting to write a children's book I suspect Mr.Carroll sanitized my version quite a bit to make it more palpable to his audience. I don't blame him, I merely wish to point out the fact.
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There is no possible way to properly catalogue my experience, so I will attempt to do so via contradiction. I immediately had the sensation of falling yet I also felt I was floating. I would feel exceedingly heavy and then feathery light. Some moments I felt as though I were encased in concrete one moment and swimming in pudding the next. The sensations my body and brain took in changed so rapidly I have no basis of comparison whatever. Hot then cold then wet then dry then frozen then on fire. Sometimes all at once or a mixture. I might have been sick except all he parts of my body and mind felt as far away from each other as a distant point on the horizon.

All around me were shapes that vibrated and changed color and shape and texture and smell and sound so often I never quite knew what it was I saw. Several times I thought I saw a face in the jumble, the way a rock will sometimes seem to look like a person. but it would vanish and become incomprehensible just as quickly.

My young mind, attempting to sort out meaning where there was none, began to see other shapes as well. A man in a hat. A caterpillar. A grinning cat. A face splitting into two and back into one. Some would collide with me for a moment and the images would completely vanish.

Finally one did not disappear. It was like a large black cloud and turned in strange orbits but remained aimed directly at me. It made a strange faraway and suddenly close sound that was very much like a large group of people whispering. It suddenly collided with my arm and it was as though hot tea had been spilled on it. It slopped against my leg like sold muck. I started to shriek, my voice seeming a great distance away. The cloud reeled away and began to shift from form to form even faster. My brain at this point mercifully gave way and I lost consciousness. 

I awoke. I was back in the woods behind my parents house. It was dark and there was no moon in the sky. I ran back to the house as fast as my legs could carry me. My parents were waiting for me. They demanded to know where I had been. I tried to explain but they called me a liar and my father thrashed me as I cried until there were no tears left and I was sent to bed without supper. Between the pain and delirious confusion I didn't know what had really happened either but I risked another beating by lighting a candle and writing down everything I could remember. I wasn't caught and did the same thing every week until I had every detail as exact as possible.

I don't know what really happened to me that day, if it all really happened or if it was just a delusion or the result of an overactive imagination. I do know that no matter how many times in the months and weeks I went looking I never found a trace of my stuffed white bunny again.