Joe is an imaginative young kid of 11 who happens to suffer from Type 1 diabetes. Without supervision and insulin, he can easily slip into a delirious, disassociative state that presages coma and death. One fateful day, his condition causes him to believe he has entered a vivid fantasy world in which he is the lost savior — a fantastic land based on the layout and contents of his home. His desperate attempts to make it out of his bedroom and down the mountainous stairs to find food, switch the lights on, and answer the phone to his mother, transform into an incredible, epic quest adventure through a bizarre landscape of submarine pirate dwarves, evil Hell Hounds, Lightning Lords, and besieged castles; a landscape which allows him to work out his own and his family's problems.