Through the Looking Glass that I wanted to focus on was the Red King. As we mentioned in class, when Alice finds the Red King sleeping, Tweedledee and Tweedledum tell her that the King is dreaming about her. In fact, they say, they are all figments of his dream, and they warn that if he wakes up then they will all disappear. This is obviously quite startling to Alice, who is certain that she is the one who is real. The twins make her so upset that she begins to cry, but she then exclaims that “If I wasn’t real…I shouldn’t be able to cry” to which Tweedledum responds: “I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears” (165). Alice puts faith in her reality because of her ability to sense the world around her, yet this is called into question by the idea that what you experience could be not real. This lack of control of reality provides us with a nice foil to the dreaming found in Life is a Dream. While Alice is told that she might be a part of a dream, Segismund is manipulated to believing that he is the one conjuring the dream and the events that he is experiencing are not real. Both characters believe that the world that they are in is real, because of their ability to interact with their senses. When Segismund challenges the idea of the dream, he claims that it feels exactly the same as the cell where he lived for so many years. Both stories end with the characters continuing their questioning of reality, never sure whether the experiences they had were real or dreams.