What is "dreamchild"

n. 1 An imaginary child representing a concept, usually personifying a puerile or puellile ideal. 2 A child who is not physically extant, due to being dead or for not having been born.

Dreamchild is a 1985 British drama film written by Dennis Potter, directed by Gavin Millar and produced by Rick McCallum and Kenith Trodd. It stars Coral Browne, Ian Holm, Peter Gallagher, Nicola Cowper and Amelia Shankley and is a fictionalised account of Alice Liddell, the child who inspired Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

The story is told from the point of view of the elderly Alice (now the widowed Mrs Hargreaves) as she travels to the United States from England to receive an honorary degree from Columbia University celebrating the centenary of Lewis Carroll's birth. It shares common themes with Potter's television play Alice (1965).

The film evolves from the factual to the hallucinatory as Alice revisits her memories of the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Holm), in Victorian-era Oxford to her immediate present in Depression-era New York.

Accompanied by a shy young orphan named Lucy (Cowper), old Alice must make her way through the modern world of tabloid journalism and commercial exploitation while attempting to come to peace with her conflicted childhood with the Oxford don.

Dreamchild was the sixth solo album released by Toyah Willcox since leaving Toyah, and was released in 1994 via Cryptic Records in Germany. It is the album with the least amount of input from Toyah herself, as almost every track was composed by Mike Bennett, with Toyah contributing lyrics to only one track. The dance nature of the album also contrasts with the rest of her catalogue, making Toyah appear like more of a guest vocalist than the leading artist on her own album.