The word comes from the title of the English children's book "Alice in Wonderland", where Wonderland is a world full of strange dream-like events, and paradoxes. For instance: "The Cheshire Cat vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone." Perhaps the most famous chapter is called "a mad tea-party". The author was Lewis Carroll (who in real life was Charles Dodgson, a logician at the University of Oxford.)