A retired public figure and history professor begins to lose his memory and must learn to be more discreet as he expresses himself.

Set in 1932, at the height of prohibition and the growing American eugenics movement, the state of Vermont passes a law allowing for sexual sterilization of "idiots, imbeciles, feeble minded or insane persons likely to procreate." Dormancy follows a young woman and her new husband who work the land and earn a small income herding sheep and working with lumber. The couple is lured into a rural clinic where they subjected to the sadistic goals of the doctors and eugenics field workers. For this modest family, life will never be quite the same...