Sandman: Dream of the Endless

There is a difference between living and being alive. Dream is that difference. Any mindless single cell can grasp that spark of life and survive. To rise above takes vision.

It's a mistake to believe that dreams only come at night, when you're sleeping. Those technicolor moments of strangeness are the work of Morpheus, but so are the waking dreams.

We glimpse and reach for ideas, thrown up from the firmament of our minds, things that no-one ever conceived before, but one. We distract ourselves from boring reality with daydreams cast into a wondrous world. He planted those seeds too.

Dream is one of the Endless, in Neil Gaiman's graphic novel series The Sandman. The third eldest, there was only Destiny and Death before him. Sentient things lived and died, that was all. Morpheus made reality a much more interesting place in which to reside.

He is the monarch of imagination; the being who flicked each spark of inspiration. He is awen - architect of the weird and wonderful; creator of nightmares; and deliverer from the dreary and the dangerous. He takes us out of ourselves, shows us things, then sets us back into the world.

Sometimes we flee. Sometimes that flight is into his mercurial embrace.

Edgar Allan Poe once wrote that 'all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream', and Morpheus is the Dream.

I've use the names Dream, Sandman and Morpheus interchangeably throughout this article. They're all the same being.  He has many, many more titles, labels and faces than that.

It's said that we all make God in our own image, and it's no different for the Endless. He is Oneiros, Kai'ckul, Murphy, Lord L'Zoril, Prince of Stories, my Lord Shaper. His name changes with those who look upon or otherwise encounter him.

For cats, he is a gigantic black tom with eyes blazing as stars; to the Dream Hunters of ancient Japan, he appears as the spirit of a fox. In other dimensions and other worlds, he might seem as a glittering dust cloud, or the uncanniest of brightly sentient plants.

Wherever someone or something has conceived of such an omnipresent being - the overseer of dream and reality - then he gained another name and aspect.

As for his true form, they are.  All of them.

What happened next? You will have to turn to The Sandman graphic novels to discover that. I could waffle on all day here and still never do it justice.

Neil Gaiman told his epic tale of Dream's capture and resultant destiny across 75 issues of his comic book series. Those chapters were collected together into ten graphic novels.

Another is playing out at the time of writing - a 25th anniversary story called Overture.

Though Dream is undoubtedly the main protagonist of these stories, he's not alone. Rich, vibrant characters weave their own Fates around him. His hand only lightly discerned at times, practically a cameo appearance that changes everything. Or, at least, provides insight into the bigger picture.

These are intelligent tales, drawing upon a wealth of real world mythology and legend, as well as historical events. But true genius lies in the fact that Neil Gaiman can make us view entities, as divine or ethereal as the Endless, as thinking, feeling, emoting creatures just like us.

When Death throws a loaf of bread at Dream's head, basically telling him to stop being so emo about things, siblings everywhere find empathy.  When the Muse of Epic Poetry berates Morpheus for his deficiencies in romantic relationships, there's nothing too different than in a billion worldly love affairs gone wrong.

The Sandman is an infinite being who controls the fabric of reality itself. Yet he seems so very human. It's only natural. We all see the aspect best suited for us to understand the visions on offer. We all make Morpheus in our own image.