About

Dream of the Endless (Daniel Incarnation)
Note: The Dream I will be portraying is the result of what happened after the entire Sandman comic series, so his personality will be kinder then the previous Dream.

One of the seven Endless, inconceivably powerful beings older and greater than gods, Dream is both lord and personification of all dreams and stories, all that is not in reality (which, in turn, Dream may define by his existence).[1] He has taken many names, including Morpheus and Oneiros, and his appearance can change depending on the person who is seeing him. Dream was named the sixth greatest comic book character by Empire Magazine.[2]
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Morpheus usually appears as a tall, thin man with bone-white skin, black hair, and two distant stars looking out from the shadows where his eyes should be. Most often they are silver or white, but when he becomes angered, they have been known to turn red.

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 huge black cat when speaking to the lonely cat-pilgrim of Dream of a Thousand Cats and as a cat-headed god when addressing the Egyptian feline goddess Bast. 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 Mister 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 (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' 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.

Speech

Morpheus' speech is usually portrayed as white text in black wavy edged speech bubbles bordered in white: the text is capitalized normally (sentence case) in stark contrast to other characters' speech generally in block caps text.

Personality

Although he is ultimately a heroic character, Dream has many negative aspects to his personality. He is sometimes slow when dealing with humor, occasionally insensitive, often self-obsessed, and is very slow to forgive or forget a slight. He has a long history of failed romances, and is both directly shown and implied to have reacted very harshly to some of his breakups. As Mervyn Pumpkinhead remarks, after the end of one of Morpheus' 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." There is a long-standing enmity between Morpheus and Desire, stemming from Desire's involvement in the breakup of one of Dream's romantic relationships (seen in Endless Nights). It is implied that before his imprisonment he was in some ways crueler and more blind to his flaws, and much of The Sandman is focused on Morpheus' desire to atone for his past behavior, e.g. helping past lovers Calliope and Nada.

Morpheus is constantly aware of his responsibilities, both to other people and to his territory, and is detailed and exacting in their fulfillment, as noted in Season of Mists, where Morpheus is described as "Of all the Endless, save perhaps Destiny, he is most conscious of his responsibilities, the most meticulous in their execution." He 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."

Morpheus is noted in Season of Mists as "accumulating names to himself as others make friends, but he permits himself few friends." He is given more names in The Sandman than any of the other Endless, far beyond the many translations of Dream.

The Dreaming

Morpheus lives in a castle at the heart of his realm, the Dreaming. Both the castle and the rest of his realm are mutable and change often, often at Morpheus' will, although the realm is itself an aspect of Morpheus, whose resistance to change (and difficulty changing) is a theme throughout the series. Morpheus maintains both the castle and the realm, as with all aspects of his appearance, in a half-accommodating, half-terrifying state, simultaneously acknowledging both the courtesy due to others and the attention due him as the realm's master, and indeed the pleasantness and terror of dreams themselves.

Morpheus is the only one of the Endless known to populate his realm with speaking characters - a multitude of beings, dreams and nightmares he has created as well as entities from other realms, live in the Dreaming. These include the narrators from older DC horror comics including Cain and Abel, and Fiddler's Green, a sailor's dream of paradise who emulates G. K. Chesterton when in human form. He recruits or creates (or re-creates) servants to perform roles he could easily carry out himself, including the reorganization of the castle and the guarding of its entrance. Although this is not explicitly stated in the series, Gaiman has said that he "always assumed" Morpheus had once been alone in the Dreaming and that he populated it because he wanted company.

Other than Morpheus himself, the most important inhabitant of the Dreaming is Lucien, who was the first of Dream's ravens and is now the Librarian of the Dreaming. Dream gives Lucien the authority to manage affairs in the Dreaming on several occasions when Dream must travel outside to the waking world. The character originally appeared in the 1970s DC comic Tales of Ghost Castle which lasted for only three issues (and was apparently killed off in Secrets of Haunted House #44). Lucien and Cain have a similar appearance as both were originally created by the same artist.

Other notable inhabitants include:

* A pumpkin-headed scarecrow named Mervyn who carries out errands around the castle and helps with the physical maintenance of the Dreaming.
* A Faery named Nuala who has affections for Morpheus which are not returned, and who plays an unwitting part in his downfall.
* A raven named Matthew, who travels through the waking world on errands for Morpheus, usually as a scout or spy. Matthew was formerly a mortal man, Matthew Cable, and character in DC Comics' Swamp Thing, who died in the Dreaming. As a new inhabitant of the Dreaming, Gaiman used Matthew as a way to explain some background information to the audience.

Morpheus' realm at any moment is also full of all creatures who are dreaming at that moment, although these seldom appear in the comics panel. Several comics in DC's Vertigo line have been set in the Dreaming, most notably a series (chief author Alisa Kwitney) of that name.

Aspects of Dream

The events of The Kindly Ones and The Wake reveal that Morpheus is only one aspect of Dream of the Endless. After his death, the human child Daniel Hall is transfigured into a new aspect of Dream, physically resembling Morpheus but with white hair and predominantly white clothing. Such a passing and rebirth is not new to the Endless; Despair is also a second aspect. One character at Morpheus' wake, perplexed by the question of who exactly has died, is told by Abel that the purpose of the wake is to mourn "a p-p-point of view".

Dream and mythology

The Sandman Special #1 implies that Morpheus is one and the same as the Greek deity of that name (In DC comics continuity, another version of this god, clearly not Dream, appears in George Pérez' Wonder Woman #11 (December 1987) - what relation this figure, an old man dressed in purple vaguely resembling Agatha Harkness, has to this aspect of Dream is unclear). Morpheus is the father of Greek hero Orpheus by the muse Calliope, and once-patron of Aristeas of Marmora, taking the role given in legend to Apollo, with whom he is often confused.

In DC Continuity

Since the creation of the Vertigo imprint (itself largely inspired by the success of DC Comics' increasingly mature titles such as Swamp Thing, Watchmen, Hellblazer and Sandman), DC's horror/occult characters such as Morpheus have drifted progressively further away both from DC continuity and from each other. Dream originally began as a mainstream DC character able to interact with DC superheroes, and Gaiman's versions of Dream have appeared in DC superhero titles written by Keith Giffen and by Grant Morrison, as well as in Gaiman's own Books of Magic series and in a Rick Veitch-authored issue of Swamp Thing (where he meets Matthew Cable). Morpheus also appears briefly during Kevin Smith's run on Green Arrow in a flashback showing him in Alexander Burgess' basement, still imprisoned in Roderick Burgess' glass globe prison.