When she was seven years old, young Alice Liddell went gathering mushrooms in the woods. After finding several beneath an ancient oak, she popped one into her mouth.
An hour later, a large, anthropomorphic rabbit came along, wearing a waistcoat and carrying a pocket watch, complaining about being late for some appointment. Alice later remembered following it down a dark hole...
Thus, Alice began learning early on about the psychoactive effects of particular plants and fungi. Now, 40 years later, psychiatrist Dr. Alice Liddell-Dodgson takes on two nine-year old patients who have had remarkably similar experiences. One is the daughter of a London investment banker. The other is being raised by her aunt and uncle on a wheat farm in rural Kansas.
Wendy Moira Angela Darling and Dorothy Gale are as different as two young girls can be, but they – as well as Dr. Liddell-Dodgson – have all experienced what she terms as ‘delusional psychosis.’ After a year of ‘Doctor Alice’s’ treatment and counseling, Wendy and Dorothy have accepted that their experiences in ‘Neverland’ and the ‘Kingdom of Oz’ were nothing more than visions, the product of extreme physical and emotional trauma – little different from Dr. Liddell-Dodgson’s own girlhood delusions of ‘Wonderland.’
But were they delusions?
What are the odd slippers Dorothy was found wearing the morning after a cyclone? Where did they come from and why does she refuse to take them off? And why does Wendy’s mother speak so strangely about old Celtic folk legends? What do they have to do with a buccaneer ancestor and a Lost Cause of two centuries ago?
Even Dr. Alice, a woman who has dedicated her life to science, finds herself confronting disturbing reminders of a manic-depressive haberdasher and a dangerously psychopathic monarch with a fetish for decapitation...