Dream of the Endless

Description

 
Like his siblings, Dream is neither a living being, nor a god. He is the anthropomorphic personification of dreams or dreaming itself. When the first thing in the universe dreamt, he was born. As long as something in the universe dreams, he will exist. He appears as whomever is viewing him expects him to appear: a Martian sees him as a disembodied energy being, a cat sees him as a cat, humans see him as human and so on. 

History

 

The Sandman

Captured & Imprisioned

When Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series began, Dream had been inadvertently captured by the magician Robert Burgess, who was trying to capture Dream’s older sister Death in order to ransom her freedom for power and immortality. When Dream was offered this same deal he refused and instead waited patiently for his chance for escape and revenge. When Roderick Burgess died of old age (cursing Dream's stubbornness to the end), his son Alexander continued to keep Dream locked up. After 70 years of imprisonment within Burgess' magic circle, one of the guards nearby Dream’s magical cell fell asleep and Dream escaped into the guard’s dreams. 
 
After exacting his revenge on Alex Burgess by condemning him to endless waking, Dream slowly made his way back to his home in the center of the Dreaming, finding it dilapidated and nearly destroyed. It took a while to rebuild his domain, reclaim his lost tools and corral all the dreams and nightmares that had run rampant in the both the dream realm and the real world in his absence. 
 
A pair of these dreams were Brute and Glob, who had resurrected the golden era Sandman superhero and trapped him and his living pregnant wife Hippolyta Hall (the Fury) in the dreams of an abused foster-child Jed who was kept locked in a basement. Dream banished the dead “Sandman”, freed Jed and told Hall that the child she was carrying had lived long in dreams and that one day Dream himself would come for him. Shortly after the child’s birth Dream visited him and named the child Daniel.

At another point Dream joined his sister Delirium on a quest for “The Prodigal,” the one Endless that had abandoned his realm and his responsibilities: Destruction. This quest eventually led them back to Dream’s son Orpheus who had existed for thousands of years as just a head. In return for the information of Destruction’s whereabouts, Dream agreed to kill his son, releasing him from his long imprisonment. Because he has shed family blood, he had set in motion catastrophic events. He sent Loki and Puck, two legendary figures who had been hiding in the Dreaming, to fetch Daniel and bring him to Dream’s castle. In doing so, they put Daniel on a fire, burning away his mortality.

Hippolyta Hall went insane and with the help of the witch Thessaly, another extremely long lived human, went on a search for him. She encountered instead “The Kindly Ones”, the vengeful aspect of the three Fates (otherwise known as the Furies or the Hecatae), and joined them. Instead of fighting them off, Dream left himself open to attack and his sister Death came for him.

Personality

 
Dream is a noble, tragic hero, very much in the traditional style of heroes of Greek tragedy. He is sometimes slow when dealing with humor, occasionally insensitive, often self-obsessed, and is very slow to forgive or forget a slight. As Mervyn Pumpkinhead remarks, after the end of one of Morpheus' invariably disastrous romances, "He's gotta be the tragic figure standing out in the rain, mournin' the loss of his beloved. So down comes the rain, right on cue. In the meantime everybody gets dreams fulla existential angst and wakes up feeling like hell. And we all get wet." Near the end of the Brief Lives story arc, Desire says of Dream, "He's stuffy, stupid, and thinks he knows everything, and there's just something about him that gets on my nerves."

On the other hand, Morpheus is consistently aware of his responsibilities, both those to other people and those that go with his territory. This trait makes him both dependable and fair-minded. It is implied that before his imprisonment he was in some ways crueller and more blind to his flaws. Much of the Sandman series is focused on Morpheus' desire to atone for his past behavior, i.e. helping past lovers Caliope and Nada. It is perhaps his changing and moving forward that makes his character the way it is. Morpheus shares a close, reciprocal bond of dependence and trust with his elder sister, Death. He consistently strives for understanding of himself and of the other Endless, but is ultimately defeated by his most tragic flaw, his inability to accept change. As Lucien remarks in The Wake when asked (by Matthew, the raven) "Why did it happen? Why did he let it happen?", "Charitably...I think...sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change." 

Appearance

Typical Dream appearance

 

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