I'm going to Disney World," said Lorena Bobbitt cheerily upon being released from the particular set of ordeals that had become her life. It's become a common tag line for Americans celebrating such closures, or simply suffering from that old "there-must-be-some-way-out-of-here" feeling of postmodern frenzy. Disney World: the ultimate escape, the "nowhere" destination that is "just like the world, only better."

After all these years of avoiding it, I had begun to feel pressure to check it out. For one thing, it had become difficult to face my Long Island students as a Disney virgin, and maintain credibility as an authority on popular culture. And so I dragged my daughter (the one person always willing to accompany me into cultural terrain where no one else will be caught dead) and headed south, at the height of the summer-vacation season, to meet the Head Mouse.

It was an experience for which, I confess, I was ill prepared. To visit Disney World is to be transported, in more ways than one: to be immersed in a universe that is somehow totally "Other," "Elsewhere," even as it is - paradoxically - the most mundanely quintessential of American landscapes.

There's nothing here that you haven't seen or experienced a million times, every day of your life, in every mall and airport and multiplex and fast-food franchise. And yet, to find yourself - like Dorothy in Munchkin Land - suddenly set down in the middle of a vast landscape in which no trace of anything noncommodified, non-simulated, nonregulated, non-smiley-faced, is visible or reachable, is to suffer a profound mental disorientation. Most people seem gleefully and instantaneously to adapt to this new psychic environment. I did not do so well.

"Transported" is actually a perfect term to describe the experience of being Disney-fied. From the minute you hit the Orlando airport, you enter a system of transit that moves you effortlessly, via monorails and people movers, through underground tunnels decorated, almost nostalgically, with scenes of the "real" Florida, the one that Disney so strenuously attempts to supersede and render superfluous. From there, it's a quick ride to the 28,000-acre enclave - a self-contained, self-regulated fiefdom in the middle of, but wholly separate from, the state of Florida. And then it's into another, even more elaborate system of monorails that whisk you, with utmost efficiency and ease, through a series of prescribed routes to preplanned itineraries.

"Day One," begins the Disney guidebook you probably selected from a shelf full of choices - Disney With Kids, Disney on a Budget, Disney for Honeymooners, Disney Without Kids - at your local Barnes and Noble. And then come pages of dauntingly detailed, rigidly precise schedules of events and sights and rides, accompanied by timetables, tips, rules, and coupons to help you complete the exhausting course.

"You must stay at least six days," said my travel agent, with a Disneyesque cheeriness, "or you'll never see everything." Never mind that "everything" on Day Six was pretty much the same as "everything" on Day One.

Indeed, the sameness, the static predictability of this wholly managed, wholly simulated world of "Taylorized fun," as it's been described, seems to be a large part of its appeal. Nothing can possibly go wrong here, because nothing can possibly happen.

But the nothing that endlessly doesn't happen is designed to fill the senses and the hours with comfort, amusement, and a kind of luxury not typical of most American lives. The "family-rate" hotels and restaurants of Disney World are commodious, yet relatively affordable and free of the appearance of class distinction. Our hotel room was by far the largest and most lush I've ever occupied at my own expense. The hotel restaurants were surprisingly posh, too. And since none of the 26,000 "cast" members who served us (no one works at Disney World; even the staff of waiters, cleaning persons, yard workers, and so on are "players," dressed up in Disney costumes) is allowed to frown or be rude or irritable, the service is regal.

There is a "style" at Disney World that - in sharp contrast, certainly, to my Manhattan neighborhood - is uniform in its middle American, asexual, uninflected sameness. Oversize unisex T-shirts and walking shorts - almost all, save those of the Day One new arrivals, marked by Disney logos - are the standard-issue garments from which most visitors diverge in only minor ways. (A young woman in our hotel dressed in high fashion "cruise wear" stood out as odd.)

This sense of classless luxury and unthreatening sameness has its attractions. People who visit regularly as children develop attachments to the place. Many even choose to get married here. There was a Disney wedding during our stay, actually, to which we were invited - via telecast. The groom, who had proposed here the previous year, gave the bride a gilt-edged Disney Cinderella book and a shopping trip to Treasure Island. The bride told the world that she first fell for him because, "He had very good manners; that was important to me."

Good manners are important to everyone at Disney World. So is shopping. And Treasure Island - like virtually every edifice of every kind in Disney World, whether a restaurant, a hotel, a ride, or an actual store - is filled with virtually identical items of clothing, housewares, food, toys, games, and media products all imprinted with the Disney motifs.

There is a synthetic spirit of democracy about all this that is seductive. The working-class family that has saved all year for a week's vacation is indistinguishable from the CEO and his kids who are virtually slumming. The stress of competition - whether sexual, material, or status-based - seems to dissolve. I have never seen so many small children forced to wait in so many long lines in so much heat with so little nagging, whining, crying, or fighting. Nor have I ever spent so much time with so many people and seen and heard so little unpleasantness, conflict, hostility. And why should there be any? These are the very things one comes to Disney World to escape.

I overheard one couple telling another that they had flown all the way from California, although they could have gone much more cheaply to Disneyland, because "you really get away from the world here. It's like an oasis in the middle of nowhere. No one can get to you and you don't have to worry about what's going on in the world." That, it seems, is how most people want it. Every morning when I bought my New York Times there were five copies on the counter. Every evening when I returned, four were still there.

My grandmother would have said, "So what's not to like?" (My students' version was, "Like, you didn't like it? Like, that is just too weird!") My daughter Alison and I did indeed feel un-American, but by Day Three we were bored silly, and by Day Four we were seriously antsy.

Even Epcot Center's famously "erudite" (by mass-culture standards) presentation of scientific, historic, and geographic wonders, at first intriguing, was ultimately a drag - but again, a perversely democratizing drag. Here, in a series of elaborately constructed national and scientific pavilions, are all the wonders of the world, all the culture, knowledge, and productivity that mark the greatest achievements of human civilization, commodified, packaged, and converted into lowest-common-denominator infotainment.

Each pavilion celebrates the cultural and historic achievements of a different global location. Each ride charts the course of some branch of learning or progress. And each is exactly like the other.

Want to visit China but a bit short on cash? Come to Epcot, where you can spend a couple of hours watching videos of highlights of Chinese history, eating Americanized versions of Chinese dishes served by an appropriately costumed "cast" of wait persons, and browsing and shopping among the many, many, many booths and enclaves filled with all the Asian-style chotchkes and souvenirs you can carry (most of which are available at any mall, but not in one convenient setting).

Want to know about the history of communications? Just jump in the first open seat in the little train and take yet another easy, sight-filled ride. Little wooden puppets, meant to represent key figures and scenes in communication history, bob about, sing, and act out facts and dates and major breakthroughs. There's Sam Morse, looking very much like Ted Turner, but with longer hair.

Perhaps the ultimate Disney experience is the MGM-Disney Studio ride, a series of clips and scenes from movie history, every one of which is a simulation of a simulation of a memory of a simulation. For memory itself is what Disney has most ambitiously and arrogantly confiscated, transformed, patented, and retailed.