Sandman; Dissecting The Dreaming’s Structure
You jumped out of bed and late for school. You see your mother walking not so far ahead but you cannot catch up with her. You never did. You wanted to yell but the sound won’t come out from your throat. You saw your loved one and then her face changes into a total stranger as soon as you blink, and you left with the sadness that you cannot bear. Everything happened within seconds. Then you wake up in cold sweat. You heard a familiar sound besides your room. You can talk again. Failed to comprehend the situation, you return to your sleep. Just to finish the torture.
If you happened to read classic Vertigo Comic such as V for Vendetta, Watchmen, while happened to like both, chances are you also read The Sandman. If not, let me tell you what you are missing. Sandman is a 70 issue graphic novel that runs from 1989 to 1997. It is written by Neil Gaiman, the same person who wrote Coraline and the well-known adopted TV series American Gods. It has been reprinted, abridged, unabridged, and re-reprinted with annotation, plus several spin-offs. Talking about some enthusiastic generation of fanboys.
The Sandman is a story about The personification of Dream, popularly called Morpheus. Neil Gaiman said that he always wanted to have a story that mixing up original deity and old folklore in the contemporary background. Then, he happened to find dreams as the right medium. Everybody dreams, even primates from the dawn of time. He has found something that encapsulated every time + everything, and he turns that thing into a graphic novel character.
Historically, Sandman came from Germanic folklore about a fairy that rewards behaved children with good dreams, and punish the rascal with a bad one. On darker fiction, In 1816 a German writer, E.T.A Hoffman creates a sinister figure called Der Sandmann, that stole children’s eyes to be fed on his children in the moon[1]. It was animated by Paul Berry in 1993, the same year that Metallica immortalize the same creature into a song.
Yet the idea of The Sandman graphic-novel came from 1973’s comic with the same title, about a hero who protects kids from the bad dream (obviously this Sandman did a poor job in my childhood). On his phone call with Alan Moore, the guru said to Gaiman “take the idea and make it your own.”
Thankfully, he ambitiously did. Gaiman’s Sandman is a lord of dream realm. Morpheus (the alias it popularly is known) could manipulate fabrics of the dream, populating its inhabitants, creating and destroying the whole collective dream at ease.
The Sandman grows larger and more popular by each publication. Gaiman himself even let the piece to be pirated because he understood how it helped his publication[2]. The only thing we have yet to see Sandman movie adaptation, is because Gaiman stated that he is better to see no adaptation instead of a bad one.
The first time I read The Sandman as a student, it grew on me as something architectural. The story was unique because it offers me an opportunity to perceive a clear dynamic space in a graphic novel. Sure, ALL work of fiction, especially, graphic-novel are spatially dynamic, which means its inconsistent, always changing, and we cannot exactly orienting ourselves in it. It is tied to the characters, revolves around them, and space serves as their stage. But what if the character itself… A self-changing stage? Now, that is new.
The Dream As We Don’t Know It
Morpheus is both the Architect and the Architecture. He creates and the created resides within him. The dream realm is called The Dreaming, where all the dream dwells and lives on. Mind you, the “places” in The Dreaming is not exactly a place in a traditional sense (collectively valued space), rather a symbol of a story. It is a footnote of a long everlasting dream, which can only be found by the faithful and seeker, that follows the Dreaming universe’s logic. A place/story itself, likewise its creator, is a character of its own. When you read The Sandman, you will see that both the character and the place is dependent on one another, even merged (see Gilbert).
And now, we are going to put some grounding framework into this mess. Kevin Lynch, an American author in his seminal works The Image of The City, elaborates 5 elements of a city that we understand as an urban situation. Those are Landmark, District, Edge, Node, and Path. Each element relates one another as systematic points that we use to imagine our environment. It is important to note that Lynch elaborates these elements as a mental map, that relevant to our observation of The Dreaming as a non-physical environment.
Most often our perception of the city is not sustained, but rather partial, fragmentary, mixed with other concerns. Nearly every sense is in operation, and the image is the composite of them all. (Lynch, 1960, p 2.)
As a sleeping creature, we are not foreign to dream, and we often to refer dream as a place. There are exist elements that construct the dream as a familiar environment. Spots in a dream are actually fragments of places from our memory, an actual representation of places.
Even Morpheus said so,
People think dreams aren’t real just because they aren’t made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.
Enough wishy-washy, we’ll dissect the dream based on Lynch’s element.
There are numbers of places in the Dreaming according to this wiki. Even with these naming as a place marker, there are contradictory attributes that Gaiman kept to obscure its nature. It never geographically established, always moving, and constantly changing its exterior and programs. However, its architectural style relatively constant, and each place provide particular functions. It is enough, to be observed.
Let us use Lynch’s element as global categorization. Because at first I did it backward and it took an eternity. I was blind but now I see, even though I am still partially colorblind.
Imagine the Dreaming as an independent region, a city, if you will. It is separated from another realm, and it has its own rules of conduct.
The Dreamworld is infinite, although it is bounded on every side, there are two gates in the Dreaming: the gates of Horn and the gates of Ivory, those gates were carved by Morpheus himself when the world was young to set some order. The dreams that pass through the gates of ivory are lies, figments, and deceptions. The other admits the truth.
This quote tells us all we need to know about this region. That it is poorly surveyed (someone so lazy just put “infinite” in his report), yet its limited by a gate. It settles the edges criteria, as the limit of the city.
Edge
Lynch wrote that edge is a physical mark of the city outskirt. You know that you’re in the edge of a city when you saw some marking, such as a signage of “now you are living…”. While in my personal parameter, I know that I’ve left my city when I smell rotten garbage no more.
Edges are the linear elements not used or considered as paths by the observer. They are the boundaries between two phases, linear breaks in continuity: shores, railroad cuts, edges of development, walls. They are lateral references rather than coordinate axes. Such edges may be barriers, more or less penetrable, which close one region off from another; or they may be seams, lines along which two regions are related and joined together. These edge elements, although probably not as dominant as paths, are for many people important organizing features, particularly in the role of holding together generalized areas, as in the outline of a city by water or wall.
In the Dreaming, the gates of Horn and the gates of Ivory is one fixed entrance to the Dreaming. This one originates from Homer’s classic Oddysey. Other entrances came from a place called The Soft Place and World’s End. Both are malleable space, where character strayed between dreams and reality.
The Soft Place is one of the best piece, it is naturally the pure dreaming illustration. Not only it is more random in characterization but also transcends time and memories.
The Landmark
The boundary has been set, now let’s move into the heart of the city. According to Lynch, Landmark is as simple as the inaccessible point of reference.
Landmarks are another type of point-reference, but in this case the observer does not enter within them, they are external. They are usually a rather simply defined physical object: building, sign, store, or mountain. Their use involves the singling our of one element from a host of possibilities.
For the most part, The Castle fits these criteria. The Castle is where Morpheus lives. It cannot be accessed by everyone and serves as focal point whenever someone is in The Dreaming.
The District
Districts are the relatively large city areas which the observer can mentally go inside of, and which have some common character. They can be recognized internally, and occasionally can be used as external reference as a person goes by or toward them.
The District is an area in the resident mental map, where people can remember and have access into. In this story, a district is a unique place where a story=character located. For the fact that each resident is a story of its own, each character is thus an independent district.
For example, Eve is one of the oldest stories that ever recorded, she settles in a cave inside the dreaming, isolated with a raven as news bringer. Sometimes, another character would appear to visit this place and interact with her, or she will assert herself to another Node that would be written after.
This one is a tribute to the original Sandman series. The arc tells about Morpheus regaining his power by saving a traumatized kid, by venturing unto his nightmare. This district is temporal, and can only be accessed by a more powerful figure such as Morpheus himself.
Gilbert or Fiddler’s Green is a character in The Sandman series. It is based on a myth about a place where old sailor return after death. Apart from Morpheus, Fiddler’s Green is the only embodiment of a place in this series.
Node
Nodes are points, the strategic spots in a city into which an observer can enter, and which are the intensive foci to and from which he is traveling. They may be primarily junctions, places of a break in transportation, a crossing or convergence of paths, moments of shift from one structure to another. Or the nodes may be simply concentrations, which gain their importance from being the condensation of some use or physical character, as a street-corner hangout or an enclosed square.
Story-wise, Node is a point where the character continually gathers for an event. Intensive activities place such as in the Parliament of Rooks or even the-so-called-secretly Batcave.
This where the place overlaps. For the sake of the story, The Castle is also a Node on some point of the arc. Even when it jumps over its function, The Castle as we see is still prior usage as a pivotal preference.
Path
Paths are the channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves. They may be streets, walkways, transit lines, canals, railroads. For many people, these are the predominant elements in their image. People observe the city while moving through it, and along these paths the other environmental elements are arranged and related
Let me break it to you, there is no clear physical significance path in Sandman [3], or many works of fiction, except maybe in Dora the Explorer. Apart from saving paperwork, it establishes the story to be focused on the character. No one genuinely wanted to read about a hero experiencing his walk/fly from point a to b, except in self-conscious literature and architectural narratives.
Placemaking
We have succeeded dissecting the anatomy of The Dreaming (hooray?), and now we could see how the whole body works. i.e The placemaking or how a place being functioned accordingly for its user. There are plenty, of how each organ comes into being, and it might need another article to describe them all. The relationship within each element, while centralized to Morpheus, is growing independently on various method.
One story such as “City in a Bottle”, illustrates how a story is being crystallized by using a bottle compartment as a literal act of “creating myth”. I have not read much fiction that treats the mystical topic as bold as that.
Dream as a fragmental space is a subjective phenomenon. This attribute is being kept all over the story. As if the architect, while having full control of the overall structure of the building, would allow its user to act freely within their own capacity. Below we see the various type of dream manipulation based on certain character’s intention.
Even cat has its own dream’s preference.
We only brush over the general Dream realm, not even touching another realm of the Endless. Each Endless has its own theme, a “keyword” in their own space. Like Derillium, while also being fragmental, is inherently chaotic in its spatial portrayal. But we won’t talk about it more, yet.
Sandman: More than meets the (closed) eye
Neil Gaiman reminds me of an Argentinian writer named Jorge Luis Borges, that famously called as the funambulist. Borges used to tell a story, — intentionally or not, very much descriptive in the spatial sense. Rather as a stage, his space is more akin to an organic character. In Library of Babel, my personal favorite, he displays what one can do with a story. Babel in his story is an infinite library that filled with the blind librarian, seeking for an answer from one book. The parable has been overused by now, but “Boundlessness” is very much a fundamental device in a fantasy theme. Similarly, Gaiman would stretch a story, disassemble them, then place the traditional into the contemporary background. In short, he treats the story like dough to create something new.
Assuming places in The Dreaming as the fragment of memory, we also need to give tribute to another Latin-American writer [5] , Italo Calvino, for his stories of Invisible Cities. He came up with a pleasant conversation between Marcopolo and Kublai Khan on a hammock, in which Marco retells the story of imagined cities that actually his own Vienna, only being fragmented. It is also a common theme for how a writer and architect could develop a topic based on an architepal idea.
Sandman is beyond a story, but how story being told and toyed with. If we could pick a story from random sources, we might understand it as an independent fiction with open-interpretation meanings. But in The Sandman, a story works as a module or parti, in a big region called the Dreaming. It could be tweaked, recycled, corrupted, even destroyed. But the Dream itself, both as the generator and space, lives on.
Happy new year, and sleep tight.
Notes
[1] See https://germanstories.vcu.edu/hoffmann/sand.html
[3] It is a personal opinion not based on any evidence. I compare several graphic novels to see if the path could be observed and mapped, but alas it does not yet to be proven.
[4] See https://libraryofbabel.info/libraryofbabel.html
[5] As suggested by
Reference:
Calvino, Italo. (1978). Invisible Cities. California: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Gaiman, Neil and Hy Bender. (1999), The Sandman Companion. California: DC Comics.
Gaiman, Neil (author) and Dave McKean, Leigh Baulch, Sam Keith, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III, Chris Bachalo, Michael Zulli, Steve Parkhouse, Kelley Jones, Charles Vess, Colleen Doran, George Pratt, P. Craig Russell, Matt Wagner, Dick Giordano, Stan Woch, Bryan Talbot, Mark Buckingham, Shawn McManus, Duncan Eagleson, Vince Locke, John Watkiss, Jill Thompson, Alec Stevens, Mike Allred, Shea Anton Pensa, Gary Amaro, Kevin Nowlan, Kent Williams, Tony Harris, Marc Hempel, Richard Case, Dean Ormston, Glyn Dillon, Teddy Kristiansen, Jon J. Muth and John Ridgway (artists); Robbie Busch, Steve Oliff, Lovern Kindzierski, Danny Vozzo (colourists) Todd Klein, John Costanza Kevin Nowlan (letterers). Sandman. New York: DC Publishing, 1989–1996. [The order in which the artist’s appear is as Gaiman credits them in Sandman #75].
Lynch, Kevin. (1960). The Image of The City. New York: MIT Press.
Tuan, Yi-fu. (first published 1977). Space And Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press.
