The red planet turned out to be ruled by a ruthless capitalist who owned not just every square inch of property, but even the air. Of course, once you got to Mars, as Nemo did in 1910, you might have noticed that the line between fantasy and reality was not so firm as you had first thought. Slumberland also abounded with butterflies large enough to umbrella you during a rainstorm, a giant turkey that gobbled up houses for Thanksgiving, a glass princess who shattered if you kissed her too passionately, carriages that were pulled along by horse-sized rabbits, and airships that could carry you to Mars.
These slaves and imps were among the more disturbing oddities that Nemo encountered during his nocturnal voyages. There were other signs that Slumberland was hardly an ideal egalitarian society, including the rough treatment meted out to African “jungle imps.” Slumberland even had slaves, a profession recently abolished in the daytime America. In the echoing hallways of Slumberland, Morpheus was constantly receiving curtseys and bows from courtiers draped in colorful attire that combined the fripperies of eighteenth-century Versailles with the colors of a circus. Unlike the daytime republic governed by President Theodore Roosevelt, Slumberland was ruled over by King Morpheus, a Jove-like patriarch whose furrowed brow and Old Testament beard commanded respect. Nighttime allowed Nemo, a shy seven-year-old whose hair became rumpled as he tossed and turned in bed, to escape into the fabulous and slightly sinister realm of Slumberland. The family’s regular rounds included hosting cousins and in-laws, going to church on Sundays, and making the occasional jaunt to the department stores-which were just starting to emerge as palaces of consumption. His frumpy parents kept up appearances in a solidly genteel household, complete with a white picket fence on the outside and an African American maid toiling away in the kitchen. By day, the boy was firmly lodged in the respectable and decorous world of middle-class white America. At the beginning of the last century, a little boy named Nemo was haunted by recurring nightmares of a bizarre and unruly land where the conventions of everyday life were turned upside down.
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