New York Wonderland

“Psychosis is a conflict between the inner self and the environment, which takes the form of perceptual distortion, such as delusion or hallucination” Sigmund Freud.

Wonderland Manifesto 

Our wonderland takes place below NYC on the subway, specifically throughout eight train cars. However, in this story, we will only depict 3 of those carts. Each part of the wonderland is inspired by famous children stories along with famous historical cases that have represented psychosis. Examples of these would be Dracula, Frankenstein. The story will be told through the perspective of the train conductor, who is watching her by camera. As our protagonist finds herself moving through each car in the she will begin to act different depending on which historical document she sees. The documents will be in the form of advertisements and papers on the train. She will not be able to understand what they are saying, but seeing them will create a change in her. The reader would have to have a little knowledge of famous horror stories such as the boogey man, dracula, etc. Our protagonist is a teenage school girl. She will struggle to escape the wonderland, but will find herself in another part of the train until the end of the story. We will include situations that we each may have experienced while riding the train, while also coming up with situations that would easily be deemed insane. For example, in one car, everybody might just be waiting for the next stop, and in another the protagonist might be stepping into a car where she believes there are monsters and ghosts everywhere.  The reader should understand the subway system in New York before reading this story. Because there are various definitions of insanity throughout history, we chose to focus on a specific form of mental illness. An important note is that in order to understand what is occurring in the story, the reader would have an idea of what Psychosis is. Psychosis is a mental illness that manifests itself in hallucinations and delusions. The reader should know what are hallucinations and delusions before reading the story.

We decided to provide a sample of the story to give a feel for what our character is experiencing.

“A quick sweep of the car shows that all of the possible suspects are stable, none have had any change in activity. The mother who recently boarded is reading something on her ipad while her daughter is looking at our second brunette girl in question. This seems to agitate the brunette a bit, she is shifting her feet and awkwardly looking around. As the little girl is relentless with her fixed gaze brunette #2 looks and sounds as if she is almost growling at the small child. Growling? can’t be, girls do not growl. Whatever this girl is doing does not seem to phase any passenger on the train, not even the little girl’s own mother, who is still fixed on the words upon her screen.”

Reference from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “But I don’t want to go among mad people, Alice remarked.

Oh, you can’t help that, said the Cat: we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.

How do you know I’m mad? said Alice.

You must be, said the Cat, or you wouldn’t have come here” (Carroll, pg. 77). We felt that this quote went very well with our world. representing the growth of the protagonist in the story. The protagonist will go from cart to cart, initially not understanding anything of the world, and leaving the world possibly insane.