Dream

Dreams Family the Endless

When Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series began, Dream had been inadvertently captured by the magician Roderick 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

Morpheus' appearance ranges widely 'depending on who's watching'. People generally perceive him as wearing a style of dress appropriate to their region and era. He appears to be light skinned when interacting with white characters, but the people of "Tales in the Sand's" primordial African city see him as a star-eyed black man. Although he is most often seen in human form, Morpheus appears as a magnificent black cat when speaking to the lonely cat-pilgrim of "Dream of a Thousand Cats" and as a cat-headed god when addressing feline goddess Bast; DC superhero The Martian Manhunter sees Morpheus as a Martian god in the shape of a flaming alien skull and identifies him as Lord L'Zoril, but Mr. Miracle, looking at him simultaneously, sees Morpheus as a man. However in Season of Mists, he appears in the same form to all the Gods (The Egyptian Goddess Bast Comments "I much prefer you in cat form, Dream old friend"). In The Dream Hunters, which is set in ancient Japan, Morpheus appears as a Japanese man to a Buddhist monk and as a fox to a fox spirit. It is unclear whether Morpheus's appearance is determined by the expectations of onlookers or if he chooses to manifest himself in different forms. He does deliberately change the style of his clothing to be less conspicuous when he visits the waking world.

He customarily wears black, sometimes with a flame motif. In battle he wears a helmet made from the skull and backbone of a defeated enemy god. This helmet, which resembles a World War II era gas mask, is also his sigil in the galleries of the other Endless.

Dream's speech is portrayed in black wavy bubbles with white text, meaning that he communicates not telepathy, but Morpheus can speak and everyone hears him in their minds.