My first thought about the voice was that it must be God. The creator/ruler of the Silver City where the angels lived. But why would she need to ask which one was dead? Unless that was just ‘part of the ceremony’. That whole catacomb/maze beneath the Necropolis Letharge was just strange. Until then, I didn’t think there was anyplace that Death could not go. Again, maybe it’s just will not rather than cannot. Hard to tell for certain which rules are built in, like Cliffy says and which are tradition. Like Dream can’t kill unless it’s to save the dreaming. Or unless it’s his son.
That is an excellent theory about Delight/Delirium. That had never occurred to me.
I always assumed they set the rules themselves, or perhaps earlier incarnations did. I sometimes wonder if setting those rules was what caused Delight to change. Youth and beauty are antithetical to structure and laws, and the divide between the two may have led to Delerium’s state.
A few people have commented around the fact that Dream engineered his own death in the series but I think it is worth elaborating on and helps illustrate the Loki/Puck relationship in his plans. Not pawns but manipulated by Dream and not even deliberately.
Dream was basically sick of his job and had come to the conclusion he was no longer even good at it as he was too rigid to change. He was also too duty bound just to quit like his brother. Even early on in the series he was deliberately confronting entities that could kill him (like Satan) on their terms almost like he was trying to get killed and using the excuse that it was his duty to do so. When that didn’t work he started (unconsciously) setting up a no win situation for himself. He was in extreme denial the whole time but every step he took just because he was ‘duty bound’ to do so.
In the end it gets more and more clear that he’s using any reason not to get out of this trap. For instance he could have killed the woman that was fueling the furies but that would have involved killing his ex which would have broken a rule that apparently he himself made. He left the dreaming because he promised his maid he would come to her if she called. All of this he could have easily just bent once and prevented the furies from taking over the dreaming.
He only realized what he was doing at the very end though and only when Death pointed it out to him. It was pretty clear he could have gone on even longer but once again he did his duty and died instead of holding on just a few more days until the woman behind the furies finally died on her own. He used his own rules to trap himself so his only option was to die.
That’s one of the things that makes the series so intense for me. Very early on if you know what the end is you can see him make step after step that leads him down a path he made.
That’s right. I suppose this means that I need to re-read the series.
Gee Darkhold, when you put it like that, it all seems so clear!
Great summary! Thanks to everyone that has responded! I think this has been my most successful thread ever.
Hijacking my own thread here. Does anyone think the endless in general are pretty cruel, sometimes? Thinking here about Delerium putting the idea of bugs on the highway patrolman, plus the way Dream treated Nuala, I know he never asked for her, but he knew how smitten she was with him. Couldn’t he have let her down a little bit easier? And don’t even start on how he treated Nada. Plus Desire is very often cruel, but that might just be part of the job. Destruction set things up to kill anyone looking for him, understandable I suppose, but it only worked on the humans. I’m out of examples, but I don’t think it pays to cross an endless. I think that was the best example of how Dream ‘grew’ over the course of the series. He started to see how his actions could cause so much pain, sometimes inadvertently.
Karen Berger had a group of books she edited in the late '80’s, largely with UK talent, that started with Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and eventually grew into Vertigo. They included Sandman, Hellblazer, Swamp Thing, and the Grant Morrison runs on Doom Patrol and Animal Man, plus a couple of miniseries like Black Orchid. They weren’t in the horror mold like the EC Comics or the DC horro books of the '70’s, and they were more closely integrated into the superhero DCU than Vertigo would later become. But they dealt with more adult themes and included the occult and supernatural which were mostly absent from the rest of DC’s line at the time, and they were marketed for adults only. (I remember you had to sign that you were 18 or over to get a subscription, which is why I bought Sandman on the newsstand.)
–Cliffy
It does seem that the only one of the lot who is genuinely nice is Death. Of course, we never see her get really and truly pissed off at anyone, probably because she knows that she’s always going to win in the end, so there’s no reason to get too worked up. On the other hand, Dream suggests more than once that when she does get worked up, she can be worse than any of her brothers or sisters.
I have a question:
During the however many years Sandman was a captive (about 50 or 60), was there any discernible difference in dreams throughout the world?
And why did his siblings not come looking for him?
And how did they accidentally grab Dream instead of Death?
There were several instances of sleep disturbances from people losing the ability to dream to people falling asleep and not waking up again for years. Dream also states the dreaming decayed ‘badly’ while he was away. It’s not exactly clear what that means to humans though.
Death states she knew where he was but couldn’t help for some reason. The others don’t strike me as the helpful type.
Just hubris. They didn’t know what they were doing and it wouldn’t have worked anyway if Dream had not been so weak.
To add one view to this, in one sense, Loki had to kill Carla, because she was an echo of Nada (every black female in the series was, and every one died by fire until Dream died.)
Thanks Cliffy! I’m taking notes.
I did like John Constantine’s appearance in the early books. (He’s in the Hellblazer line, yes?) Wasn’t sure if his regular series was the same way. Also need to check the Lucifer TPBs and just today learned of a spinoff called “The Dreaming”.
So far as differences in dreams while Dream was captive, that was how the Corinthian found out he could walk out into the waking world, so lots of people got to have their nightmares become real.
Death was nasty for millions of years, but I think became positively mellow by the time of the series. Either because of her collection of floppy hats or the practice of ‘becoming mortal’ one day very hundred years. Wouldn’t want to cross her, but the worst she would do is take you ‘early’ or refuse to take you, I think.
Grabbing Dream instead of Death was definitely a mistake, they didn’t know who he was for a time. IIRC. I agree it wouldn’t have worked on Dream if he’d been at full strength.
In the intro of Endless Nights, Neil has a one-sentence summary of the series that does a good job of describing what is going on with Morpheus:
“The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision.”
And one of the things that astonishes me is, if you go back to the beginning and know what the end is going to be… his decision seems perfectly reasonable. For him. Which is an awesome show of characterization and writing.
A question about Daniel: is he in some sense a regeneration of Morpheus or a completely new entity altogether?
Death made a statement about a genocide on another planet that required her attention. I take this to mean that the other Endless also attend all realms of existence. Was there ever an episode in which Dream controlled the dreams of animals? I read them all but it’s been years and I don’t remember.
I think Gaiman should- if he hasn’t- more prominently feature Mad Hettie in a plot. She’s an old bag lady referenced by Hob Gadling as having ranted and raved and begged on the same street corner in London for centuries, but to my knowledge her back story is never mentioned.
They referred to an earlier Vortex. Could that have been Krypton?
Not all realms of existence; on a text page, when a reader asked how Morpheus could have visited Prez Rickard in the 1970s, Gaiman explained that it was the Dream of a different Earth/dimension. In that story, one of the monks at the beginning said “There are many, many Earths. Well, not so many now…”
As for animals, he’s certainly involved with cat dreams, as in “Dream of a Thousand Cats.” Also, that Egyptian cat goddess in a different story complained he wasn’t wearing his cat face, so she had trouble figuring out what he was thinking.
Yes. 
My recollection is that she appears a bit more prominently in Death: The High Cost Of Living, but I don’t remember what all we learned about her.
Mad Hettie’s first appearance is actually in Hellblazer (the Internet tells me ish #9), written by Jamie Delano. Those three books were in continuity with each other in the beginning (the triumvirate ruled Hell in that early Sandman issue as a result of the infernal civil war that Moore wrote in Swamp Thing). That broke up as Veitch left Swamp Thing, Delano moved off Hellblazer and Ennis moved in his own directions, and Sandman became a marquee title. (It seems to me that Ennis’ Hellblazer was meant to utilize the triumvirate but had to rejigger it because DC didn’t want him getting in the way of Gaiman’s plans for Lucifer’s abdication.)
But you shouldn’t feel a burning need to dig this stuff up just because it’s related, because it’s related in an awfully tangential way.
Throughout the late '90’s and early Aughts, Vertigo had basically a cottage industry of putting out Sandman spin-offs, most of which (that I’ve read) aren’t all that great, and none of which are necessary to appreciate Sandman. The Dreaming was an ongoing and wasn’t very well regarded, although I haven’t read more than an issue here and there. There are also a million “The Sandman Presents” minis of greater or lesser quality.
The Lucifer series, OTOH, which started with a Sandman Presents mini, is the bee’s knees.
–Cliffy
Neither. He is the same being in that he is Dream.
But he is not Morpheus. Morpheus was a particular facet of Dream, Daniel is a different one.
It’s a lot like explaining the Holy Trinity. 