Dreams Have No Consequences

Portraying Dorothy’s time in Oz in a dream makes all the stressful things she has experienced, and all the choices she has made (minimal as they were; she is largely passive in Oz) simply meaningless because they were inconsequential. Moreover, the fact her journey was specifically a dream just worsens how inconsequential it was and makes extracting any meaning from it weaker and less believable.

For comparison, consider the alternative of Dorothy’ journey in Oz just being her playing through a video game. When people play video games, they often have agency on the course of events in a game, or at least the order, speed, and style they use to explore its world and meet their goals. A video game also often requires skill (e.g., organized button pressing, memorizing elemental types to maximize damage in RPGs), and so victory is achieved by one’s own conscious effort, and rarely by happenstance. Furthermore, while a dream is a singular experience created from an unconscious jumble of brain activity that usually makes little if any sense and quickly fades away, a video game is something millions of people can experience and appreciate firsthand. Its characters may not be real, but they can be loved, and visited repeatedly, and people may bond with others over a love for the characters.

Dream Characters Don’t Matter

The premise of Dorothy’s journey being a dream re-contextualizes all the people she has met and cared for, and who cared for her in turn, as not real. Of all the ways her companions could have been portrayed as not real, this is the worst: as dream characters, they don’t in any way exist independently of Dorothy, and they exist in some rudimentary, transient state for only a few hours of Dorothy’s life, at that. In contrast, had Dorothy’s companions been, for example, robots, self-aware illusions, or AIs within a virtual world, then at least they would have existed beyond Dorothy, continued to exist after Dorothy’s journey, and so would have had the potential for a purpose beyond helping Dorothy.

The meaningless of Dorothy’s experience as a mere dream is further worsened by the movie introducing three farmhand characters who were clearly remixed into her companions: not only were her companions not real, but they weren’t even original.  In sum, her traveling companions were, at best, mere tools her troubled semi-conscious self generated, all for the apparent purpose of learning the lesson “there’s no place like home”, and it is only by happenstance that her companions appear to be coherent, likable, and believable people.

Self-Centered Premise

The idea of Oz-as-a-dream overemphasizes Dorothy’s importance to Oz to a narcissistic-seeming degree. Dorothy is not simply an especially important, perhaps super-powerful or prophesized protagonist. Rather, the entire world of Oz does revolve around Dorothy, in the sense her semiconscious mind not only created it with ease, but continually generates it, and it cannot be separated from Dorothy herself. By not existing outside of Dorothy’s dreaming mind, Oz appears to exist specifically for the protagonist, the only real, important person within it, to learn “lessons” of some sort.

It’s worth comparing The Wizard of Oz (1939) to The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (2005), which has a somewhat similar starting premise, dream elements, and portal fantasy genre. The protagonist, Max, created an entire dreamworld-planet and all its inhabitants by bringing his dreams to life via de facto reality warping superpowers, but understandably others initially doubt his dreamworld is real. However, the planet and its people do exist independently of Max’s dreams and Max himself, and can make their own decisions. This is made especially clear in the film’s climax, where one of the other planet’s villains wreaks havoc in the “real world” in a way that is clear to everyone.

Conclusion