DC Comics introduced us to a whole new world of mind blowing characters and concepts through the comic book series The Sandman, which is written by Neil Gaiman. It is about the seven siblings who are known as the Endless. They came even before the gods and are the anthropomorphic embodiment of certain aspects of life. The Endless siblings are Destiny, Death, Dream, Desire, Despair, Delirium, and Destruction.
The comic book is named after the main character in the story, who is known by several names, including Sandman, Morpheus, and Dream, the third oldest sibling. He has one of the most important jobs in the universe, and it is directly tied to the lives of the mortals. In this video, we will be exploring everything about Sandman. So, without further delay, let us get right into the video and experience the genius of Neil Gaiman’s storytelling.
How did Sandman come into existence?
Like any child, the Endless siblings also have parents. But unlike the way things work in our world, the birth of the Endless has a different story. Their father is known as Time, and he is the actual embodiment of primordial time. Time is the beginning of everything from the universe to our existence. However, he was not alone. He brought all of creation into existence with the help of his partner, Night, the mother of the Endless. Similar to Time, Night is also a cosmic entity and the very embodiment of the everlasting darkness that predates the birth of the universe.
Now, their child, Dream, is the physical personification of all dreams, stories, and nightmares that do not exist in reality but come to life in a world of dreaming, the place where we go after we have fallen asleep. After the creation of the universe, life forms appeared, and they were capable of dreaming. With the birth of these life forms, Dream of the Endless came into existence, the ruler of the realm of Dreaming.
Dream is not a god. In fact, he is much older than them. And the Dreaming is directly connected to Morpheus, a.k.a. Sandman or Dream. He has complete control over his domain, and it can be whatever he wants it to be. He has also created beings known as dreams and nightmares who inhabit the Dreaming realm and serve Sandman by helping him with various things.
The first comic book appearance elaborates on the character
The character of Sandman was created by writer Neil Gaiman and comic artists Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg. We are introduced to him in the comic book series The Sandman, Issue number #1, which was published with a cover date of January 1989. The issue is titled “Sleep of the Just.” The story begins on June 6th, 1916 in Wych Cross, England. Professor John Hathaway has just arrived at Fawney Rig, the home of Roderick Burgess, also known as Lord Magus. He is a fanatical magician and the founder of an occult organization known as the Order of the Ancient Mysteries.
The professor is carrying the Magdalene Grimoire that he stole from his employers at the Royal Museum to bring to Roderick. He just found out that his son, Edmund died when his destroyer was sunk last week off Jutland. So, in order to see his son again with the magician’s help, he has finally agreed to give Burgess the Magdalene Grimoire. Apparently, along with his magical Order, he plans to use the Grimoire to perform a ceremony and cast a spell through which he can summon and imprison Death of the Endless.
Four days later, on 10th June, we meet four individuals from four different parts of the world. Ellie Marsten in Toronto, Canada, Daniel Bustamonte in Kingstone, Jamaica, Stefan Wasserman in Verdun, France, and Unity Kinkaid in London, England, are all about to have their last peaceful night of sleep. Back at Wych Cross, Roderick Burgess is about to perform the ceremony at the witching hour. He is the kind of misinformed magician who tends to bring chaos into the world.
He wants to have Death under his control so that he can use her powers to meet his own malicious needs. He starts the ceremony by offering a few things. A coin made from a stone. A song that he stole from the dirt. A knife from under the hills. A stick that he stuck through a dead man’s eye. A claw ripped from a rat. Blood from his own veins. A feather he pulled from an angel’s wing. The spell had now begun, and Burgess could not stop now, even if he wanted to. After a few moments, inside the boundary he has created, a dark masked figure appears, lying unconscious on the floor.
At first, he thinks he has successfully summoned Death but soon realizes that his magic has failed. This being is not Death. Burgess still decides to imprison him and steals his mask, his clothing, the ruby that hangs around his neck, and a small bag of sand that he was carrying.
Suddenly, things seem to change. The four individuals we met started going through something we had never seen before. Ellie, Daniel, and Unity have fallen into a kind of deep sleep, never to wake up. And Stephen, a young soldier in the German army, has been diagnosed with Shell Shock. He is unable to fall asleep at all and eventually kills himself after his discharge from the army.
On the other hand, Burgess has trapped his prisoner in a crystal cell. He tries to get him to talk but receives no response. A few years have gone by since this incident took place in 1916. It is now 1920, and Professor Hathaway has come under suspicion regarding the missing books and manuscripts. He realizes that Roderick used him, and he now feels helpless. So, he wrote up a suicide note containing all information about Roderick and his order and then stabs himself. But Roderick, along with his son Alex, uses a magical tool and burns that suicide note to ash.
The sleepy sickness also seems to be spreading since countless people are falling asleep, and they never wake up. Ten years have gone by since Burgess imprisoned that being. It is now 1926 and he still has not spoken a single word. Now, Alex Burgess has found a picture of the being in a grimoire called the Paginarum Fulvarum. As it turns out, the being Roderick summoned and imprisoned is Dream of the Endless. In 1930, Ruthven Sykes, the right hand man of Roderick and second in command of the Order of Ancient Mysteries disappeared with his mistress Ethel Cripps. They take with them many of the order’s treasures and around 2 lakh pounds of its cash.
He also took Dream’s weird looking mask. After Roderick declared a magical war on him, he traded that mask with a demon for an amulet of protection. However, a few years later, in 1936, his lover, Ethel Cripps, walked out on him and took Dream’s helmet with her. So, his amulet also disappeared, and he died due to Roderick’s magic. Meanwhile, even after all these years, Ellie, Daniel, and Unity have still not woken up. The universe is also aware that someone is missing and tries to replace him.
A guy named Wesley Dodds goes out at night wearing a mask, and he puts evil people to sleep with gas, then sprinkles sand on them and leaves them for the police to find. It looks like he got this idea in his sleep, and after acting on it, he stopped seeing the man in the strange helmet. This man he speaks of is definitely Sandman, a.k.a. Dream. Wesley Dodds sleeps the sleep of the just. The year is now 1947, three whole decades since he captured Dream and he has not aged a day while Roderick Burgess has now grown old. He still tries to talk to Dream who could have given him power beyond his wildest dreams but refuses. With this, Roderick’s time comes to an end and he dies.
The year is 1955, and Ellie Marsten has been diagnosed with Encephalitis lethargica. She now wakes only four to five times a year and still thinks she is eight years old. Daniel Bustamonte is awake but he does not speak. People call him a zombie, a walking dead man. Unity Kinkaid is now in a nursing home, still asleep. Back at Wych Cross, Alex Burgess now lives at his father’s house with his partner Paul McGuire, who is also the new second in command of the Order of the Ancient Mysteries. Dream has now been imprisoned for 40 years.
Alex goes to see him and tells him that he also wants the same thing as his father did, power and immortality. But with a cold stare, Dream once again refuses. It is 1968, and it looks like the guards who are supposed to be looking after Dream are starting to act lazy. 1970, and Alex is also starting to grow old and tired. He has also handed over the reins of the Order to Paul, even though Paul does not believe in magic. Alex has now started obsessing over Dream and he continues to read that one page again and again from the Liber Fulvarium Paginarum where he first found out about Dream.
1972, 1978, and 1982, another decade goes by and not a word from Dream despite Alex’s many threats and attempts. A few more years go by and it is now 1988. Alex, at last, resents everything he has done so far in order to get any kind of information out of Dream. He is now in a wheelchair and claims that he cannot even sleep properly, only because of Morpheus, the King of Dreams. A new day and Paul has once again brought Alex on his wheelchair down to the basement to talk to Dream. Obviously the conversation is one sided.
But this time, something happens that is about to work in Dream’s favor. When Paul is turning Alex’s wheelchair to take him back to his office, one of the wheels slightly goes over the magical boundary through which Dream has stayed imprisoned. It makes a cut as if an opening in the boundary. Nothing happens yet, but one of the guards named Ernie accidentally falls asleep while reading the newspaper. And he enters the world of dreams when Sandman utters to himself “it begins.”
In the dream, Ernie is on a beach. Beaches are full of sand, and like we as saw earlier, when Dream was summoned into the mortal realm, he had a pouch of sand with him. In Ernie’s dream, we see Morpheus’s hand as he grabs hold of some sand. Immediately, Ernie wakes up and goes to check on the prisoner. Dream appears to be acting as though he had died. In an instant, they call Paul McGuire to check. Over the seventy years of his imprisonment, Dream had never done something like this before. So, they actually think something might have happened to him.
Paul unlocks the crystal glass and as he steps inside to take a closer look at Dream, Dream lifts his face and blows the sand from his hand toward everyone’s eyes, and like hypnosis, they all fall asleep. A naked Dream stands up and escapes for home, the Dreaming realm. His captors wake up and are surprised to find out that he is no longer there. Dream is weak, alone, and hungry.
So, he decides to get some food from passing dreams. He enters the dream of Mort Notkin, another guard who had fallen asleep. Apparently, he is having a small party with some movie stars. Dream quickly picks a few food items and walks out of Notkin’s dream. Next, he needs some clothing. Despite being weak, he imagines the texture of fabric against his skin and sculpts it from a dream space.
We now see Morpheus, the King of the Dreaming realm in his attire. A grey t-shirt, black pants, and a huge black cape with flames on the edges. All he wants now are the tools that were stolen from him and revenge from his former captor. On the other hand, people all over the world who had fallen into the sleepy sickness have now woken up. Clearly, it is because Dream is no longer imprisoned. Since he shares a direct connection to the Dreaming realm, whatever happens with him, also affects the mortals.
Now, when Paul goes to see Alex to give him updates about the latest escape, he finds that Alex has been sleeping. We are taken to Alex’s dream, where he encounters Sandman. Alex immediately realizes what has happened, and he starts apologizing to Dream. In a gruesome rage, Dream tells him that he and his father brought great chaos to their own world by doing what they did. Alex says it was all a mistake and that they were actually trying to capture Death.
From Dream’s reaction it is clear that if they had succeeded in summoning Death, they would have brought an even greater danger to the mortal realm. Dream asks him for his tools, a pouch, a helm, and a ruby. But it looks like Ruthven Sykes had stolen all of it about 50 years ago. Dream finally decides on Alex’s punishment and condemns him to Eternal Waking. It is a never ending state of nightmare from which Alex will never wake up.
Every time Alex thinks he is about to wake up, a different nightmare begins. He will now continue to jump from one nightmare to the other for the rest of his life. The issue comes to an end with Paul trying to wake up Alex as Dream says, “And I have showed him fear.”
A little help to know him better
Now, let us take a look at his appearance and how the eyes of the people he meets perceive him. In Dreaming, Sandman can be seen as a tall man with a thin body and a pale skin tone. Another strange feature is his eyes which do not appear as eye balls but are in the shape of two stars.
In fact, they even seem to turn red when he is angry. Normally, he always wears a black cape that sometimes has flame designs on the edges. We saw him in this clothing for the first time after he escaped his imprisonment. One would expect him to look comparatively cheerful, given the fact that he is the embodiment of all dreams. Instead, he always seems rather melancholic and grim.
His helm, which is also his sigil in the galleries of the other Endless, is made from the skull and backbone of an enemy he once defeated. When you look at it, it might remind you of the gas masks that were used in the World War 2 era. Dream wears his helm during times of battle. The original model for Dream was actually Peter Murphy, who is the lead vocalist for the post punk goth rock band Bauhaus.
But, if you look closely enough at the primary physique and face structure of Dream, it will look quite similar to the combination of a teenage Neil Gaiman, the lead vocalist of The Cure Robert Smith, and the Uzbek Russian ballet dancer Farukh Ruzimatov. Now, even though Dream has a form of his own, he still appears differently to people based on how they perceive him. Usually, they tend to think of him as a part of their region and, therefore, see him in their clothing and form. This is evident throughout the comic book series.
Despite his actual pale and white skin texture, when he appears before the people of Tales in the Sand’s primordial African city, they see him as dark. To the Martian Manhunter, Dream appears as a burning Martian skull, but when Mister Miracle is looking at him at the same time, he seems like a man.
To a Buddhist monk in The Dream Hunters, which is set in ancient Japan, Dream looks like a Japanese man and like a fox to a fox spirit. While communicating to the lonely cat pilgrim in Dream of a Thousand Cats, he appears as a big black cat, and when visiting the Egyptian feline goddess Bast, he appears as a cat headed God.
For the most part, Dream has always been a narcissistic, stubborn, and insensitive character. He has always wanted a partner in his life, but he has gone through many failed relationships throughout his journey despite trying his best. Dream often fails to realize his fault in things and is quick to blame others. He once told his lover Nada that he wanted to make her queen of the Dreaming. But to his misfortune, she refused. As a result, out of pride and anger, he banished Nada’s soul to hell.
Perhaps it is the trauma of not getting what he craves that turned him so cold. In fact, his janitor Mervyn Pumpkinhead has said about Dream that “He has got to be the tragic figure standing out in the rain, mourning the loss of his beloved. So down comes the rain, right on cue. In the meantime, everybody gets dreams full of existential angst and wakes up feeling like hell. And we all get wet”. Even his siblings often fail to understand him. However, his older sister Death is the only one who is seen as his confidant and frequently lectures him to improve his behavior.
Another reason behind Dream’s cruelty could be that since he has access to the subconscious minds of all life forms, he is the only one who has the knowledge of the hidden darkness that lurks even inside the good people.
Later on, he also makes several attempts to atone for his past self and is constantly guided by Death and her advice. Apart from that, he is someone who always makes sure to fulfill his responsibilities. After his older brother Destiny, Dream is the one who is regarded as most responsible when it comes to his duties.
The death of Dream and its aftermath
Lyta Hall is the only daughter of Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor. After the death of her husband, Hector Hall, she realizes that she is pregnant. However, around the time of Hector’s death, Morpheus was missing, so the dreams, Brute, and Glob tricked Hector into thinking that he was the new Sandman. Eventually, in the Dream Dimension, a pocket of the Dreaming, Lyta finally met Hector again and the two got married.
When Dream returned, he sent Hector’s soul to where the dead were supposed to go and sent Lyta back to the land of the waking. Dream also told Lyta that he would return for her son one day since he was made in the Dreaming and so he belonged to this realm. After three years, when Lyta left her son Daniel alone for the first time, someone kidnapped him. She assumed the kidnapper to be Dream and called upon the Furies for her vengeance.
The Furies are also known as the Kindly Ones or the weird sisters we met earlier in the video. Despite their rather helping nature, when they appear as the Furies, they are known to punish oath breakers, patricide, matricide, and anyone who violates the divine law. In order to take Lyta’s revenge, the Kindly Ones arrived at the Dreaming, and its destruction began. They killed innocent and loyal dreams and wrecked the entire realm.
Before all of this happened, Dream had chosen to walk the path of redemption in order to fix his past mistakes. When the Kindly Ones were destroying the Dreaming little by little, Dream realized that he could not stop them. He also wanted to atone for killing his own son Orpheus. So, when he realized that the Corinthian, a nightmare created by him, had saved Daniel, he decided to speak to him.
Upon seeing Daniel alive and safe, Lyta tried to stop the Kindly Ones, but their wrath had reached the point where it could no longer be contained. Dream told Daniel that after his death, Daniel would become the new Dream of the Endless, and with that, Sandman handed the eagle dream stone to Daniel. He knew that the only way to stop the Kindly Ones from completely destroying the Dreaming was to allow his own destruction.
Death visited Dream for the last time while he was still alive, and she knew that he took this step because he wanted to give up his duty as Dream of the Endless, but could not just run away from it as his brother Destruction did. When he came face to face with the Kindly Ones, he did not put up a fight and gladly gave his life in order to save the Dreaming. After that, as he had decided, Daniel became the new Dream of the Endless.
Soon after, the Endless siblings decided to hold a wake for their brother in the Dreaming. So, the Endless gathered the book of ritual and Dream’s cloak from Litharge. In the Dreaming, they laid down his body, and his siblings, along with a few friends, paid tribute to him by giving speeches. After all the goodbyes had been made, they put his body on a canal boat that floated away from the Dreaming realm in order to become a star.
The true powers of this cosmic entity
As the personification and master of all dreams, Sandman is one of the most powerful beings in the universe. Since he is an Endless, he is immortal, and diseases and age do not affect him. We saw during his imprisonment that he spent all those years without aging a single day and also stayed alive without any food or means of sustenance. In fact, after his escape, he was able to gain back his strength quickly.
Basically, an Endless can never die, but they can be replaced by passing on their powers and personality to someone else, just like Dream passed on his gifts to Daniel Hall, who continues to live as the Dream of the Endless. Dream has the power to go anywhere on Earth he wants. By using his sigil, which is the helm, he is also able to travel to the realms of his other siblings. He has the ability to open interdimensional gateways and even traveled to hell when he was on the quest to retrieve his stolen items.
He also has the power of dream conjuration, through which he can easily control the outward behavior of humans by conjuring dreams or nightmares in their sleep. Just like what Sandman did to Alex Burgess in his sleep. Sandman can also walk through the dreams of different people at the same time and is also able to take things from their dreams. We earlier saw that he stole clothing and food from the dreams of random people.
Since he has complete control over the realm of the Dreaming, he can do or create anything he wishes there. Morpheus claims that dreams and reality are far closer to each other than most people believe. He is also capable of producing Illusions that appear to be so real that he can physically and verbally engage with them. And as if that was not enough, he can also plant new ideas or concepts in the minds of the mortals.
Well, guys, that is all for today; we hope you enjoyed watching this video as much as we enjoyed making it for you. Have a fantastic day ahead!