In near-future America, sleep has been banned. Our unemployed, dream-prone narrator finds himself following Chevauchet, a diplomat from Onirica, a foreign republic of dreams, to resist the prohibition. On a mission to combat the state-sponsored drugging of citizens with uppers for greater productivity, they traverse an eerie landscape in an everlasting autumn, able to see inside other people's nightmares and dreams. When Chevauchet, the old radical, disappears, our narrator must take up Chevauchet's dictum that "daydreaming is directly subversive" and forge ahead on his own.