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 and 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 hierarchical society in which most people are poor and enslaved. Oppressed and uneducated, the masses cling desperately to one dream - that the sleeper will awake, and lead them all to freedom.