The Wonderful Bed is a 1912 children's book by Gertrude Knevels. It follows the dream world adventures of the three children Rudolf, Ann, and Peter who are staying overnight at their aunt's house. Rudolf is the brave, deliberately cheerful, and bold oldest child. Ann is the conscientious worry wort middle child. Peter is the disagreeable, gluttonous, impulsive youngest who isn't being bullied enough by his older siblings. At the beginning of the story they are all in the nursery of their aunt which is an unusually cavernous room with a fire place, cupboard, and a single big four post canopy bed. Ann is complaining about the size of the place and the bed, Rudolf is comforting her, and Peter has lost interest in bothering Mittens the cat and started rifling through the cupboards despite having been told to leave them alone. The others chastise Peter before taking the box from him and going through its contents. It holds an old tea set, tin soldiers, and a corncob doll which Rudolf nearly burns before their aunt arrives. Resisting her entirely justified anger, their aunt tells them the stories of her youth, how much she loved the corncob doll, and about the little neighbor boy who gave her the tin soldiers. Then it's time for bed and the old servant Betsy shows up with a warming pan to bathe and and tuck in the children. Betsy is brusque and the siblings feelings of alienation in the room is intensified as they are crammed into the four poster. Left to themselves and hardly ready to pass out the children build a cave out of the sheets and begin crawling from the head of the bed to the foot.
At some point the children notice they have gone from exploring a sheet tent that they are pretending is a cave to an actual cave. Thus begins the romp through dreamland, or wonder Land, or Narnia. This book isn't big on the world building. Soon they encounter the warming pan which is enlarged, sentient, mobile, and angry about having been sat on and it chases them out of the cave. From there the three encounter business geese, pirate cats, animate tin soldiers, the sandman, candy mice, and a knight-mare. The best of the dream land cast is the False Hare; a rabbit that speaks almost exclusively in falsehoods. The character that communicates entirely in sarcastic remarks is a lazy and repetitive joke and he's still my favorite character. The kids responses are as follows: Rudolf is having a fun adventure with sporadic interruptions to care for and reassure his siblings, Ann is worrying about everything with sporadic interruptions to care for and worry about Peter, and Peter is completely oblivious to everything except food and has no verbal filter or self preservation. None of them experience any character growth which is fine because the whole book probably occurs over two to four hours. Eventually they are sent back as their aunt's dreams and collectively return to the real world.
This story feels like a transitional form between Alice in Wonderland and the Phantom Tollbooth. While I think it's inferior to either it is still pretty good and I'm somewhat surprised that I'd never heard of it before finding it on LibriVox. Its slightly more than three hours of puns and whimsy with no larger message or point beyond the fun.