Follow The Yellow Brick Road -- the book by Sam Alibrando, Ph.D.

Dorothy is stuck in Kansas. In the 1939 film, nothing is terribly wrong with her life, but she is bored and lonely. She longs for “somewhere over the rainbow,” for something more – a wish she is soon to realize. However, in the book, Dorothy’s Kansas is bleak, devoid of any life and color, depressing. It is a cruel place to live by any standard. There is no thought of a rainbow, only grim existence. However, a twister is about to change all that.

As so often is the case, change does not take place in a vacuum but is rather a response to a life event. Dorothy’s life-changing event is nothing less than a natural catastrophe that literally lifts her meager one-room house into another world.

Dorothy arrives in a strange land, a colorful land, a land of danger and a land in which she is about to grow up. The film emphasizes the fact that Dorothy’s journey is merely about gratitude, about realizing that “there’s no place like home.”  However, Baum’s book does not reflect this same kind of sentimentality. Dorothy’s journey to the Land of Oz is not about appreciation but about transformation.

By the end of her journey, Dorothy has finished her work in the Land of Oz and is to return home. In the film, Dorothy never really visits Oz: She has simply had a dream. However, in the book, it is not a dream at all. Dorothy’s experience has been real, and by magic, she returns to Kansas a significant time later. She returns to a rebuilt house in Kansas, an improvement over the family’s previous one-room farmhouse. This is noteworthy. When we successfully go through an Oz experience ourselves, inevitably the new home base that we form, personally or interpersonally, is almost always better and improved.  This is the hero’s journey, this is how we grow and change.