The Book of the Sandman and the Alphabet of Sleep

While traveling, two naturalists take refuge in an abandoned log cabin and discover Das Alphabet vom Shlaf– an alphabetical treatise on various facts about sleeping, including topical poems and accompanied by humorous anthropomorphic animal paintings. The naturalists include this book in it's entirety (pages [ix-xxxvi]) as a precursor to the rest of the book which goes on in much detail to explain the science and stories behind how the Sandman works: he travels the world each night on his immortal donkey Suzanne to put all living things to sleep by flicking sleep sand into their eyes – made from sand from an underground river, collected by aardvarks, sieved carefully, shoveled into sacks, and given a sleeping spell by small choirs of pixie families who sing songs through a stretched-out spider web...