A troubled insomniac in 1890s England falls suddenly into a sleep-like trance from which he does not awake for over two hundred years. During his centuries of slumber however investments are made that make him the richest & most powerful man on Earth. But when he comes out of his trance he is horrified to discover that the money accumulated in his name is being used to maintain a hierarchal society in which most are poor & more than a third of all people are enslaved. Oppressed & uneducated the masses cling desperately to one dream that the sleeper will awake & lead them all to freedom.