The novel has two settings: Alice's house, where she falls asleep, and the world of the Looking-Glass. The Looking-Glass World at first looks like a direct mirror image of Alice's house. After she steps into this mirror-image world, it becomes more expansive. Although there are many regions through which Alice travels, they are all laid out on a chess board. Alice's dream involves advancing across the board, from one square to the next, until she reaches the eighth row and turns from a pawn into a queen.
There is a tension between the rigorous structure of the chess board and the outlandish nonsense Alice encounters in each square along the way. There seem to be almost no reliable rules in the Looking-Glass World. The direct mirror images of real-world objects and the logic Alice first notices quickly become less predictable. For instance, in Chapter 5, Alice ends up in a shop run by a sheep. Suddenly, she and the sheep are in a boat, rowing along past rushes Alice wants to collect. Just as suddenly, they are out of the boat and back in the shop. At the end of the chapter, Alice tries to walk toward a shelf and ends up walking through the woods toward a high wall, where Humpty Dumpty is seated. She never knows what new and strange experience awaits her next, and yet she always knows that she is trying to get to the next square. The Looking-Glass tension between the bizarre and the predictable is especially obvious with the Knights: they look ridiculous but technically behave according to the rules of chess, constantly falling sideways off their horses to emulate the L-shaped movement of Knights in the game.
The strange setting is very dreamlike. It reflects Alice's inner experience of the world, even if it is a distorted representation of "objective" reality. Ultimately, Alice finds that the Looking-Glass World is a pretty perfect reflection of her subjective reality. Her job as a child is to grow up, constantly moving toward certain milestones (chess squares) on the way to adulthood. Along the way, baffling things constantly happen to her, and she must simply accept them and move on.
