In The Silver Chair, Eustace Scrubb and his friend Jill Pole are called into Narnia by Aslan to rescue Prince Rilian, the son of Caspian, the king of Narnia. The prince has been missing for years. Unbeknownst to the king, Rilian is being held captive--and under an enchantment--by the evil Queen of Underland. With the help of a marsh-wiggle (a tall, man-like creature who lives in the marshes and has webbed feet like a duck's) named Puddleglum, the children, after many adventures, find the prince and break the enchantment.
However, just as Rilian and the others are about to escape from the Queen's subterranean castle, she appears. When the prince asks the Queen to allow him to return to his own land of Narnia, the Queen throws a magic powder into a nearby fireplace, which makes it difficult for the others to think clearly. The Queen then tries to convince Rilian that Narnia does not exist. When she inquires as to where Narnia is, Puddleglum responds that it is in the "Overworld," above her underground kingdom. The Queen mocks this idea and suggests that this other world is merely a dream. In response, Puddleglum speaks of his memories of seeing the sun. When the Queen asks what the sun is, the prince explains that it is like the lamp that is hanging from the ceiling of the room, only bigger and brighter. The Queen responds:
When you try to think out clearly what this sun must be, you cannot tell me. You can only tell me it is like the lamp. Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children's story.
Falling increasingly under the influence of the Queen's magic, the prince and the others start to agree, but then Jill remembers Aslan. The Queen asks what Aslan means. Eustance responds that Aslan "is the great Lion who called us out of our world." When the Queen professes not to know what a lion is, Eustace likens a lion to a cat, which leads the Queen to respond: "You've seen cats and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it's to be called a lion. Well,' 'tis a pretty make-believe, though, to say truth, it would suit you better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world." Hearing this, Puddleglum, the prince, and the children are on the verge of succumbing completely to the Queen's magic when Puddleglum decides to use his foot to stamp out the fire. The room fills with the smell of "burnt marsh-wiggle" and then:
"One word, Ma'am," he [says] coming back from the fire, limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up all those things---trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world that licks your real world hollow."
What Lewis seems to be doing here, through the words of Puddleglum, is responding to the argument that "God" and/or "Heaven" are merely figments of our imagination. We wish such things to exist, and so we imagine they exist, modeling them on things that exist in the real world. For example, Sigmund Freud argued that human beings have a "desire for a Father [God] to comfort us through the woes of life" (Norman L. Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, p. 264); thus, we have imagined a God who is merely a projection of our human fathers. However, Lewis seems to be arguing, if this is true, why is it that these supposed figments of our imagination (God and/or Heaven) are so superior to the things they are allegedly copied from? Indeed, Geisler suggests, "Freud may have it backwards. Maybe our images of earthly fathers are patterned after God, rather than the reverse" (p. 266).
In short, Lewis seems to be telling us--ironically, through the medium of a fairy tale--that belief in God has to be more than mere wish fulfillment. It is insights like this that make the Chronicles of Narnia so worth reading--even for those that believe they are too old for fairy tales! Perhaps that is why Lewis wrote to his goddaughter Lucy Barfield in his dedication to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: "Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again."
Image of C. S. Lewis from Wikipedia.org