Morpheus’s power over dreams permitted his creator to go anywhere in space and time, and to craft exquisite, autonomous narratives in which his hero could figure prominently or not at all: one installment would relate the tale of an African queen who falls tragically in love with the immortal Morpheus another would depict William Shakespeare and Lord Strange’s Men staging an impromptu performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for the fairies and elves who inspired the play. Roughly eight or nine issues into “The Sandman,” Gaiman dispensed with the shell-game superhero construct and just started telling stories. His breakthrough series “The Sandman,” published from 1988 to 1996, ostensibly chronicled the adventures of Morpheus, a gothic embodiment of the god of sleep and dreams who, after having been captured and released on Earth, must rebuild his neglected netherworld while occasionally righting wrongs on our plane of existence. Dreams are also a symbol of ultimate storytelling freedom: rather than a setting where traditional narrative rules do not apply, they are a space where an ambitious, resourceful writer can rewrite those rules entirely.īefore he was a relentlessly prolific author of adult and children’s fiction, and a British expatriate living in Minnesota, amassing literary awards the way couch cushions accumulate loose change, Gaiman made his name writing comic books, at a time when the medium wasn’t known for its creative liberation. Hayes sing show tunes in a place you’ve never seen before yet intuitively recognize as your childhood bedroom. They are not simply a nighttime stage where you and your Grandma Sophie and President Rutherford B.

Maybe the right question to ask about Neil Gaiman isn’t “Why is he so fixated on dreams?” but “Why aren’t more of his fellow fantasy writers as obsessed with the topic as he is?” After all, dreams would seem to be the ideal subject matter for any author of speculative fiction.

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman