Stevenson imagines sleep as a nightly solo journey to a strange country the child can never quite remember by morning, which is a fair description of how dreaming actually feels to a small child. Its unhurried pace and the title's now-common phrase for sleep make it a solid bedtime read.
From A Child's Garden of Verses. See the whole collection.
From breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.
All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do—
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.
The strangest things are there for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the land of Nod.
Try as I like to find the way,
I never can get back by day,
Nor can remember plain and clear
The curious music that I hear.
Public domain. Text from A Child's Garden of Verses (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition