Through the Looking Glass

I was listening to the latest podcast from The Sound of Young America, with guests Neil Gaiman and Henry Selick talking about the new film Coraline, which opens on Friday. It's a stop-motion animation film about a girl, Coraline, who goes through a bricked-up wall to another world where her "other" parents are amazingly kind and sweet to her, and fantastic things are constantly happening. Of course, there's a dark side.

It got me thinking about the "other world" idea in general, from books dating back to Alice in Wonderland. Why is it that art conceives of other worlds as simultaneously more wondrous and more terrifying than our own, a heightened roller coaster of thrills and chills that makes our own world seem like a walk in the park? Is our own world that emotionally placid that we hunger for experiences that make the highs higher and the lows scarier? Do we conceive of the world as being "dull" because we have to spend every day of our lives in it? If we could go away to other places like Alice or Coraline, maybe our own world wouldn't seem so monotonous. 

I've probably oversimplified or missed something obvious. Oh well.