Han Solo is frozen in carbonite at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. He is thawed out in Return of the Jedi and immediately announces that he can’t see. He was, by Lando’s account, in hibernation sickness — alive, aware, and going nowhere for the better part of a year.

The theory is simple. What was he doing in there?

The case

Between the two films, Harrison Ford played a rogue archaeologist in a battered leather jacket who hates a specific fascist regime, improvises his way out of every plan, gets rescued by the woman shouting at him, and is chronically afraid of one specific thing.

Han Solo, meanwhile, is a smuggler in a battered vest who hates a specific fascist regime, improvises his way out of every plan, gets rescued by the woman shouting at him, and would have every reason to dream about being somewhere with air and daylight.

Same face, same posture, same deeply held belief that a plan is something you announce after it has already gone wrong.

The best piece of evidence

The snakes.

Indiana Jones is famously, specifically, disproportionately afraid of snakes. Han Solo spent his final conscious moments before freezing in a room with Boba Fett, a bounty hunter, headed for a gangster whose personal pet is an enormous reptile in a pit under the floor.

You could argue the causality runs the other way. We prefer it doesn’t.

The obvious objection

Yes, we know. Different studio, different universe, different decade, and George Lucas produced both, which explains the overlap far more efficiently than a year-long hallucination inside a slab of frozen alloy.

We have considered that explanation carefully and rejected it on the grounds that it is boring.

What we did about it

We wrote it a song. “Carbonite Dreams” came out as a single in 2019 and it is, as far as we know, the only piece of recorded music committed to this position.

It’s also the fan theory we’d defend hardest at a convention panel, which tells you something about how we spend our time.

Listen to “Carbonite Dreams” →