“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.” — Alice
Some people bring home fridge magnets from their holidays. Others collect postcards, ceramics or little bottles of something they will probably never open. I seem to have developed a rather more specific habit: wherever I go, especially when I am away from my hometown, I keep an eye out for Alice in Wonderland.
It has become my own little treasure hunt.
Over the years, my collection has grown to include reading lamps, plaques, badges, brooches and other curious little objects carrying an Alice in Wonderland motif. I particularly love finding them while travelling because there is a story attached to each one. I haven’t simply ordered it online after deliberately searching for it. I have stumbled across it somewhere I wasn’t expecting, which somehow feels far more appropriate for Alice.
After all, Alice didn’t exactly make an appointment to visit Wonderland. She followed a White Rabbit.
My fascination with Alice in Wonderland goes all the way back to childhood, although my interpretation of Alice has changed as I’ve grown older. As a child, I saw the curiosity, fantasy and peculiar creatures. As an adult, I notice another side of her. Alice questions everything. She challenges ridiculous rules. She argues with authority. She enters an unfamiliar world and refuses to accept that everything around her makes sense simply because somebody says it does.
That has occasionally made me wonder: what would Alice be like if she grew up?
Would she remain the polite little Victorian girl in the blue dress?
Or would Wonderland eventually turn her into a wild child?
I received a rather hilarious answer to that question while on holiday in Spain.
Alice Has Grown Up
A few days before travelling, I had already been thinking about my Alice collection. I wondered whether I might find another piece while I was away. I didn’t know what it would be or where I might discover it. It was more like a playful challenge I had placed into the universe: Let’s see whether Alice turns up.
In my mind, it became an experiment in synchronicity.
Then one night in Spain, I found myself wandering through a busy market at around midnight.
The atmosphere was completely different from walking through a shop during the afternoon. The market stalls were still glowing beneath their lights, people were passing in every direction, and rails and walls were packed with funny, rebellious and slightly outrageous T-shirts.
And there she was.
Alice.
Except this was certainly not the Alice of my childhood.
Against the wall hung a black T-shirt with a vinyl print depicting Alice looking as though Wonderland had finally pushed her over the edge. She had tattoos. She had a cigarette in her hand. She looked tough, rebellious and thoroughly unimpressed with anybody who might suggest that she ought to behave herself.
I had to laugh.
Apparently, Alice had grown up.
After years of drinking mysterious potions, arguing with queens, being ordered around by playing cards and attending tea parties with completely unhinged guests, perhaps this was inevitable.
My childhood question had somehow appeared on a T-shirt at a midnight market in Spain.
Of course I bought it.
Maybe I’m Not the Cute Alice Either
When I finally wore the T-shirt, I realised there was another reason I loved it so much.
I know I’m not always the cute, innocent Alice people imagine wandering around Wonderland in her little blue dress.
There is a rebellious Alice in me too.
The one who questions things, challenges what doesn’t make sense and occasionally thinks, No, I’m not following that rule just because you told me to.
Maybe that is why this particular Alice caught my attention.
She wasn’t the childhood Alice I had expected to find in Spain; she was closer to the grown-up Alice I sometimes recognise in myself. A little tougher, a little wilder and no longer afraid to show that she has another side.
There was something wonderfully comical about putting the T-shirt on and thinking, Actually, yes. This Alice makes sense.
Perhaps growing older doesn’t mean losing Alice’s curiosity. Maybe it means discovering what happens when that curiosity gains confidence.
The sweet Alice still exists, of course. But perhaps somewhere between childhood and adulthood she learns when to stop politely accepting nonsense.
I can relate to that.
A Little Test for the Universe
What made the discovery particularly amusing was that I had been thinking about finding Alice before I even arrived in Spain.
I wasn’t desperately searching every souvenir shop or interrogating market traders about Lewis Carroll memorabilia. I had simply planted the thought in my mind:
Will I find Alice in Spain?
There is something deliciously Alice-like about doing that in a foreign country. You leave familiar streets behind, wander somewhere you have never been before and see what crosses your path.
For me, this is where Carl Jung becomes fascinating.
Jung developed the concept of synchronicity, which he described as an “acausal connecting principle”. In simpler terms, synchronicity refers to coincidences that appear meaningfully connected even though we cannot demonstrate that one event directly caused the other.
That distinction matters.
Jung wasn’t simply saying that if we think hard enough about something, the universe is obliged to deliver it. His theory was stranger and, to me, much more interesting. He was fascinated by those moments when our inner world — our thoughts, dreams, emotions and symbols — appears to correspond with something happening in the external world.
There might be no obvious causal connection between the two events, yet their meeting feels extraordinarily meaningful to the person experiencing them.
That is exactly what intrigues me.
I think about Alice.
I travel to Spain.
I wander through a market around midnight.
Among hundreds of designs, objects and T-shirts, my attention suddenly lands on a rebellious Alice staring back at me.
Was that T-shirt already hanging there regardless of whether I had thought about Alice? Of course.
But why did I happen to encounter it after setting myself that playful little challenge?
That is the part I find fascinating.
The Bee That Suddenly Flew Away
This wasn’t the first experience that made me think about synchronicity.
Last year, I found a bee beside me that appeared to be dying. I wanted to save it, but there seemed very little I could do. I concentrated intensely on this tiny creature and spoke softly to it, hoping somehow that it would recover.
Then something happened.
The bee suddenly began to rise.
It lifted itself, flew straight past my nose and disappeared upwards and away.
I remember watching it in complete surprise. One moment I thought I was sitting beside a dying bee; the next, it was airborne.
There are perfectly ordinary biological explanations for why an exhausted bee might recover. Perhaps it had simply been resting. Perhaps warmth or time allowed it to regain enough energy to fly. I don’t have to reject those possibilities to appreciate how extraordinary the moment felt to me.
That is partly why Jung’s synchronicity interests me so much.
The meaning of the experience doesn’t necessarily depend upon proving that my thoughts caused the bee to fly. What stayed with me was the strange alignment between my intense wish for this tiny creature to recover and the dramatic moment when it suddenly did.
For a few seconds, my inner thought and the physical world seemed to meet.
Those are the moments I remember.
Following My Own White Rabbit
Perhaps this explains why Alice in Wonderland continues to fascinate me as an adult.
Alice follows something unusual.
She doesn’t know where the White Rabbit is going. She doesn’t know what lies beneath the rabbit hole. There is no itinerary, no review and certainly no sensible Victorian adult standing beside the entrance assuring her that the Mad Hatter has excellent ratings.
She follows curiosity.
And curiosity changes everything.
That is also how I like to think about synchronicity. I don’t want to spend my life trying to force meaning onto every coincidence. If I believed every misplaced teaspoon or passing pigeon was delivering a cosmic message, I would probably never get anything done.
But I do enjoy noticing patterns.
I enjoy those peculiar moments when a thought seems to echo back through the physical world.
The rebellious Alice in Spain was one of them.
There was another layer of humour to the discovery because this wasn’t the sweet Alice I might normally have imagined adding to my collection. This Alice looked as though she’d finally had enough of everybody’s nonsense.
Maybe that is what happens after decades in Wonderland.
Perhaps grown-up Alice doesn’t politely ask the Cheshire Cat for directions anymore. Perhaps she tells him to stop speaking in riddles and give her the postcode.
Perhaps she refuses the Queen of Hearts altogether.
No, you may not have my head. I’ve got plans later.
And perhaps she finally tells the Mad Hatter that six hours of tea is excessive.
There was something strangely satisfying about seeing her transformed from childhood innocence into this rebellious figure.
Wonderland Was Never Entirely Innocent Anyway
Thinking about the T-shirt also made me realise that Alice was perhaps never quite as innocent as popular culture sometimes remembers her.
Wonderland itself is bizarre, unpredictable and occasionally threatening. Alice changes size, loses control of her surroundings, meets creatures who challenge her identity and encounters adults who are absurd, argumentative and authoritarian.
Yet she keeps questioning them.
There is already rebellion inside her.
She doesn’t obediently accept nonsense. When characters behave ridiculously, Alice notices. When authority becomes absurd, she challenges it. Her curiosity repeatedly gets her into trouble, but it also keeps her moving.
Perhaps that is one reason Alice has survived for generations.
Beneath the blue dress and childhood innocence is a girl with an independent mind.
Maybe the tattooed Alice on my Spanish T-shirt isn’t such an outrageous reinvention after all.
Perhaps she is simply Alice after a few more chapters.
And perhaps that is why I recognised a little bit of myself in her.
Why We Notice What Matters to Us
There is, of course, another psychological explanation for experiences like mine.
When something becomes meaningful to us, our attention becomes more sensitive to it. Anyone who has suddenly become interested in a particular car knows the feeling. Before considering buying one, you barely notice it. Afterwards, the same model seems to be everywhere.
The cars haven’t suddenly multiplied.
Your attention has changed.
The same could certainly apply to Alice. Because she already occupies a place in my imagination, I’m naturally more likely to notice her among hundreds of other images.
But I don’t think that makes the experience any less special.
In fact, I think it makes it more interesting.
Jung’s concept of synchronicity occupies that curious territory between psychology, symbolism and our desire to understand why certain coincidences affect us so deeply.
The question doesn’t always have to be, Did I magically cause this to happen?
Perhaps another question is:
Why did this particular coincidence mean so much to me?
That is where synchronicity becomes personal.
There is a difference between demanding that the universe obey you and remaining curious enough to notice when life produces an extraordinary coincidence.
I prefer the second.
It leaves room for mystery.
Bringing Wonderland Home
Eventually every holiday ends, the suitcase has to be packed and all those little treasures collected along the way come home with us.
But some souvenirs carry far more than their physical value.
My Alice T-shirt could easily be described as exactly what it is: a black piece of clothing bought from a Spanish market stall.
To me, however, it represents a story.
I thought about Alice before travelling. I wondered whether I would find her. I treated it as a playful experiment with synchronicity. Then, at midnight in Spain, surrounded by people, lights and rebellious T-shirts, there she was — except Wonderland had apparently given her tattoos, a cigarette and an attitude problem.
It was ridiculous.
It was perfect.
And then I put her on and realised that perhaps the biggest surprise wasn’t finding Alice at all.
It was recognising her.
The Alice I found wasn’t simply the sweet childhood character I had been collecting for years. She represented another Alice — older, bolder and rebellious. She could still be curious and sentimental while having enough fire in her to challenge whatever didn’t sit right with her.
Perhaps that is part of growing up.
We don’t necessarily leave our childhood selves behind. We add layers to them.
The curious child can become the questioning adult. Innocence can gain experience without disappearing completely. The girl who once followed the White Rabbit can eventually decide which rabbits are actually worth following.
That is why collecting Alice in Wonderland pieces has become more than simply accumulating objects for me. Each unusual discovery marks a place, a moment or a memory. My collection is slowly becoming a physical map of encounters — little pieces of Wonderland found in the ordinary world.
And maybe that is why synchronicity remains one of my favourite subjects within mysticism.
We can explain probability. We can talk about selective attention. We can acknowledge the human mind’s remarkable ability to recognise patterns. None of that has to remove the pleasure of experiencing a coincidence that seems almost mischievously well timed.
Perhaps the universe isn’t sending me Alice.
Perhaps I’m simply very good at spotting her.
Or perhaps, every now and again, the inner world and the outer world really do meet in ways we don’t completely understand.
I don’t need to settle the argument.
I’d rather keep the mystery.
Because somewhere in Spain, on an ordinary market wall at midnight, I went looking for the Alice of my childhood and found her rebellious older sister instead.
And when I wore her, I realised she suited me rather well.
Maybe Wonderland knew exactly which Alice I needed to find.
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