The narrative begins when a bored young girl named Alice follows a waistcoat-wearing white rabbit down a deep tunnel and finds herself falling slowly toward the centre of the earth. Upon landing in a long hall with locked doors, she discovers a tiny golden key and a small door opening into a lovely garden, but she is far too large to pass through. Her subsequent adventures involve dramatic shifts in size caused by mysterious bottles and cakes, leading her to weep a vast pool of tears that attracts various talking animals.
After swimming ashore with creatures like a mouse, a duck, and a dodo, Alice continues her pursuit of the white rabbit and inadvertently wanders into the tidy house of W. Rabbit, Esq. There, another mysterious drink causes her to grow so large that she fills the room entirely, forcing the inhabitants to deploy a lizard named Bill to investigate the chimney. Escaping into a thick wood, she encounters a giant puppy and engages in a famously philosophical conversation with a blue caterpillar smoking a hookah upon a mushroom.
The caterpillar teaches her how the mushroom's top and stalk can alter her height, allowing her to eventually reach her proper size and pass through the doorway into the beautiful garden. Inside, she discovers three gardeners frantically painting white roses red to avoid the wrath of the tyrannical Queen of Hearts. Alice joins the royal croquet game, played with live hedgehogs and flamingos, where arbitrary death sentences are constantly issued but never actually carried out.
The journey concludes at the shore of the sea, where Alice meets a melancholy mock turtle and a sleepy gryphon who demonstrate the steps of the lobster quadrille and sing sorrowful songs. When the royal trial of the knave of hearts begins with chaotic demands for sentences before evidence, Alice indignantly objects to the absurdity of the proceedings. As the entire pack of playing cards rises into the air and rushes at her, she suddenly awakens to find herself lying with her head in her sister's lap on the sunny riverbank, realising the entire sequence was a wonderful dream.
