Wednesday, November 12, 2014

J. W. Dunne and the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz

I have lately been reading A Question of Time by Verlyn Flieger which discusses among other texts the text of J. W. Dunne An Experiment with Time.  This work is an experiment dealing with dreams and time.  J. W. Dunne conducted an experiment in which he would record his dreams the moment he woke up and discovered that dreams would happen later in life.  He thought that dreaming was a way to get out of the time of this world and flit in and out more freely between times.  This could be the distant or near past or future.

Now for some perspective, the work An Experiment with Time was written in 1929 and the film The Wizard of Oz was released in 1939.

The film has a dream sequence that is not present in the original text by L. Frank Baum.  In the movie Dorothy falls asleep and dreams the land of Oz.  In the book Oz is a real place and Dorothy visits the land frequently and eventually settles there.  Now this would not be unusual except for the fact that time and dreams were already being played with and manipulated in literature and science (as in J. W. Dunne).  So it is interesting that the mode used to make Oz more believable was a dream, the very mode to actually visit Oz at the time.

I think there is a connection between the movie and the text.  I think that the film was adapted to make it more believable for the time period.  I also think that the dream frame that the movie used follows closely Dunne's experiment and had influence on the film.


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