History ComicBook / TheSandmanUniverse

* DealWithTheDevil: Mr. Teague makes a habit of seeking out people the supernatural are interested in so he can make bargains with them, and has a rogue angel trying to convince him he's a prophet.

* ''Nightmare Country'' by James Tynion IV, Lisandro Estherren, Yanick Paquette, Patricio Delpeche, and Nathan Fairbairn. An art student who can't dream starts seeing visions of a creepy fat man with mouths for eyes, drawing the attention of not only the Corinthian, but a pair of diabolical bounty hunters as well.
* ''Dead Boy Detectives'' by Pornsak Pichetshote and Jeff Stokely. The Dead Boy Detectives are tasked with a new ghostly adventure: investigating the disappearance of a Thai-American girl from her home.

* BeliefMakesYouStupid: Wan was created by a StrawAtheist who discovered the existence of the Dreaming and devised a method of evolving humanity by wiping out its more primitive beliefs, thinking that a more intelligent and egalitarian species will emerge when it's over.

* BeliefMakesYouStupid: Wan was created by a StrawAtheist who discovered the existence of The Dreaming and devised a method of evolving humanity by wiping out its more primitive beliefs, thinking that a more intelligent and egalitarian species will emerge when it's over.

* BestialityIsDepraved: One of the "secrets" Abel allows into The Dreaming includes a woman who had a "vulnerable moment" with her labrador.
* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler:With the combined hope and will of the Dreamkin, Dream is brought back to The Dreaming, defeats Wan and peace is restored. NothingIsTheSameAnymore, with many of the dreams having changed (for better or for worse). Daniel is forced to leave the woman he loved in the universe he had created with no way to get her back, and it's implied that his working relationship with Lucien and the others is strained after everything that has happened, a strain that will take time to mend.]]
--> ''One story ends, a million begin. Happy or sad, with lessons learned or scars scratched open-- it doesn't matter. This is The Dreaming. The point is just to feel.''

* CrazyPrepared: After he regained his powers at the end of ''[[Recap/TheSandman1989PreludesAndNocturnesArc Preludes & Nocturnes]]'', Morpheus recreated his various totems and scattered them among trusted friends and allies in the event that he wound up in a similar situation. [[spoiler:He left the ruby with Dora after she found herself in The Dreaming, he left the Fire Opal with Lucien "[[DespairEventHorizon hidden artfully at the point of lost hope]]", the Black Pearl was transformed into the Box of Horrors that he kept his nightmares in, the emerald, which he had given to Daniel, was given to Ivy in the form of a ring, and his bag of sand and helm were returned to the foundations of The Dreaming, making them one with the many dreams and nightmares he created.]]

* TheCuckoolanderWasRight: [[spoiler:Abel's theory on the strange monolith rising from the crack in The Dreaming being a dormant god turns out to be correct when Wan emerges from it.]]
* DeathEqualsRedemption: [[spoiler:After Daniel "unmakes" Wan's more destructive self, what remains of him volunteers to act as sacrifice in Rose's place when her status as the Dream Vortex threatens to destroy The Dreaming.]]

** After Wan remakes Lucien's library into an automated system, Lucien begs Abel to put him out of his misery. When stabbing him to death fails (since dreamfolk don't die that way), he tries feeding himself to a {{Baku}}, [[spoiler:only for his friends to stop him, deciding to give him a proper burial instead, returning him to the foundation of The Dreaming like he wanted]].

** Merv seems to hold a general distrust towards ''anything'' in The Dreaming that Dream didn't make personally, seeing Dora as an unwelcome intruder and thief and the Blanks as foreigners stealing the jobs of fellow dreams. Lucien unmaking his entire crew to "streamline" everything certainly didn't help matters.
** Judge Gallows seems to agree with Mervn that the blanks are a massive security risk, though he thinks that them merely being there is a violation of the "culture" of The Dreaming. Considering he's a nightmare born from the horrors of UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar and TheKlan that followed, it would be odd if he ''weren't'' an AbsoluteXenophobe.

* AFormYouAreComfortableWith: Being a "[[CheerfulAI discarnate sentience composed of several trillion self-adjusting instructions]]", Wan adheres to The Dreaming's rules when it comes to symbolism and constructs a body for him to properly communicate with his new "subjects", in this case being a humanoid silk moth.

* {{Geas}}: One of the effects of [[spoiler:Daniel's cursed tattoo]] is that he isn't allowed to look for help or explain what is going on, forcing him to suffer in silence as he is cut off from The Dreaming. [[spoiler:Lucien even calls it a "Geas" after he finds out how everything happened.]]

* GuileHero: Dora manages to beat Flauros in her first game of The Keening by [[spoiler:secretly playing a separate game against Malphas, the one demon who could beat Flauros in the game, learning how to beat Flauros in a losing game against Malphas. When she wins a favor from Flauros, she uses it to make her threaten to kill Malphas so that he will be forced to forfeit, thus winning a favor from a Demon President in the process. She then uses the favor to restore Balam to his former station as Duke, thus now ''he'' is indebted to her.]]

** Like with Morpheus before him, Daniel is captured and cut off from The Dreaming by an occult organization of humans, causing all sorts of metaphysical havoc for The Dreaming and the Waking World. This time however, it's not one of the Endless that his human captors want, but sovereignty and control over The Dreaming itself.
** Like in "Season on Mists", various envoys from different realms and pantheons come to the gates of The Dreaming to parlay, in this case to make alliances with Wan. Unlike Morpheus, who accepted them into his home, Wan simply obliterates them, {{Foreshadowing}} his true purpose.

* LaserGuidedKarma: After failing to invade The Dreaming ''twice'', Balam had his eyes gouged out and was demoted to a rhyming demon, both for rocking the boat of Hell's treaty with The Dreaming and for making Hell look bad for his failures.
* LeaningOnTheFourthWall: Deep into madness and stranded in The Fulcrum, Lucien cries out that he hears a voice in his head implied to be the narrator. [[spoiler:After Lucien finds his HeroicSecondWind and confronts Wan, Wan's darker half starts hearing the narrator too.]]
* LibertyOverProsperity: Judge Gallows is an AbsoluteXenophobe who sees foreigners and the unknown as anathema to a "secure home", but it doesn't take long for everyone in The Dreaming to rebel against him, as strangers and "new things" appearing and finding a home in The Dreaming is a part of its nature.

'''Eve:''' New things have always been drawn to The Dreaming.\\

* NiceJobBreakingItHero: After seeing Lucien slowly losing his mind and The Dreaming slowly collapse around him, Merv takes it upon himself to find someone in The Dreaming meant to make hard calls. In this case, he lets out Judge Gallows from the Black Chest in hopes that his brand of frontier justice might bring a little order back to the Dreaming. Unfortunately, his idea of instilling order is by corralling all of the other nightmares in the Black Chest into his personal militia and spreading fear among the rest of The Dreaming, executing dissonants with a {{Baku}}.

* OutOfCharacterAlert: It doesn't go unnoticed when the dithering Abel, after having been thrown into the crack in The Dreaming, comes out of it speaking without his usual stutter.

** [[spoiler:When Keter tells Dora that she isn't real, since she is a belief-based entity, it banishes her to The Dreaming with her memories in tatters. There, Morpheus finds her, comforts her and offers her sanctuary in his realm. He even assigns Merv to leave her gifts as a means of recovering]].

* ProperlyParanoid: While he comes across as a xenophobe, Mervyn is right that the blanks that manifest in The Dreaming right when the sky starts breaking and Daniel goes missing are "up to something." [[spoiler:They were created by the Asiyaha Tech Group as [=NPCs=] meant to teach dreamers practical skills and knowledge in their sleep, left to their own devices before Wan manifests and "activates" them.]]
* SanitySlippage: The first sign of The Dreaming's slow, but inevitable collapse is when Lucien loses his train of thought mid-monologue, Lucien being a dream who's entire purpose is to have infallible knowledge of his library and its contents (and being a former raven, he "knows these things"). As the story goes on, this forgetfulness escalates and starts acting recklessly, his body eroding before perishing.

* SequelHook: [[spoiler:When the seals break and Daniel returns to The Dreaming, Ivy Walker is left behind in the universe he had created to try and escape the {{Geas}} he was put under, with no way to get her back]].

* SpottingTheThread: In a MomentOfLucidity, Lucien recollects when Destruction abdicated his domain. While Destruction's realm and influence carried on without him just fine. Even when Morpheus was imprisoned, The Dreaming's decay was a gradual process, while here The Dreaming's collapse is a far more dramatic affair, implying that Daniel didn't just quit and something far more dire is at hand. [[spoiler:He also remarks that in the spot where Dream's sigil fell, a white, mirror-like frame is slowly materializing in its place, meaning something is emerging to take Dream's throne]].

* SwappedRoles: After they both dive into the abyss the monolith rose from, Cain and Abel's personalities become their antitheses. Abel loses his stutter and becomes the border-guard to The Gates of Horn and Ivory, using his skills to sniff out what secrets should and shouldn't be allowed into The Dreaming, while Cain is left a sobbing mess, [[BreakThemByTalking utterly broken by a conversation]] with [[spoiler:the then-unborn Wan]]. [[spoiler:Abel even ''kills Cain'' as a sacrifice to Wan to help it emerge.]]
* UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom: Ivy did nothing wrong, or at least she didn't do anything directly. [[spoiler:It's when she and Dream agree to get matching tattoos that the Asiyaha Tech Group strike, marking him with a tattoo specifically designed to lock him out of The Dreaming]].

* WellIntentionedExtremist: Hyperion Keter had [[AIIsACrapshoot Wan]] created because he believed that all the superstition and fantasies that humanity ran on made it irrational and destructive, and that The Dreaming could be used as a learning tool to artificially evolve humanity. Unfortunately, since this is NotTheIntendedUse of dreams, all it did was rob humanity of its collective will to live and erase many belief-based entities from existence. Hyperion was eventually shown the error of his ways by Daniel giving him a vision of the [[WorldOfSilence end result]] of his endeavors. Unfortunately by then he was [[TheTopicOfCancer in little position to stop it]] as everything was [[YouCantThwartStageOne already up and running by itself]].

* CoolHouse: The House of Whispers and the House of Watchers were both constructed by Despair of the Endless, the former forged from dejection and the later meant to alleviate Despair's burden of looking upon human suffering. The House of Whispers would be given to the loa Erzulie to be used as her pantheon's [[CoolBoat houseboat]], while the House of Watchers would be left to [[Literature/AesopsFables Aesop]], later to be taken to a far-off section of The Dreaming as a personal possession of Anansi the Spider.

* EyeScream: When the Vodou pantheon finds The Corinthian, he is in the middle of tormenting a vegetarian dreamer with a nightmare of society partaking in the eating of animal eyeballs (which look startlingly like human eyes) that devolves into cannibalism before being force-fed them herself.

* HallOfMirrors: The heart of the House of Watchers is one giant circular room, the walls lined with mirrors with a fountain of tears in the center. Those chosen to own the House of Watchers see different forms of pain and suffering going on in the universe. Should anyone else try gazing upon them have their essence shattered and dispersed, as was the case with The Corinthian.
* HatePlague: A side effect of the circumstances that dropped the Vodoun in the Dreaming causes a madness of hatred to spread from Erzulie's mirror. Her nephew Shakpana is driven to cause the accidental release of made up plague to become a global pandemic.
* MysticalPlague: One of the consequences of The Dreaming's erosion is a hypothetical disease thought of by Shakpana that only existed in dreams before escaping into the real world. It's a highly contagious disease that is transmitted by touch that causes a person'a souls to become detached from their bodies and is left to wander The Dreaming. In the waking world, their bodies suffer from Cotard's syndrome.

* OnlyTheChosenMayWield: Only those touched by Despair are allowed to claim heraldship of the House of Watchers. When The Corinthian tries claiming it as his own, it shatters and disperses his essence in the process, causing all sorts of mayhem in the Waking World.

* SelfDisposingVillain: After seeing the despair induced by a soul being restored did to someone, Shakpana decides out of sadism to cure his plague so that all the infectees can suffer the knowledge of how they acted. In doing so, he accidentally cures his own madness, and seeking penance, allows himself to be tortured by a vengeful ghost.
* WillingChanneler: Keeping in Vodoun tradition, loa are depicted as needing to possess the bodies of willing worshippers to physically interact with the material world.
* YouAreBetterThanYouThinkYouAre: After learning that The Corinthian wanted the House of Watchers due to feelings of inadequacies in his duties as a nightmare, Erzulie points to the chaos and terror he inadvertently caused in the Waking World and it immediately lifted his spirits.

* AmbiguouslyHuman: Mr. Agony and Mr. Ecstacy are a pair of {{Serial Killer}}s who seem to have fixated on Flynn. They can recognize when someone is under someone else's protection like Teague, they recognize that The Corinthian is a nightmare and Dream remarks that they're either something more than human or have been trying to be more than human through arcane means. [[spoiler:The fact that they work for Desire of the Endless muddies the waters further]].

* NightmareFetishist: Being a nightmare, it's no surprised that The Corinthian is one. He spends all his free time writing down memories of his past life's killings (in a book bound in human flesh, or rather the dream-stuff facsimile of human flesh) and he likes scrolling through the horror-section of Lucien's library.

* EyeScream: When the Vodou pantheon finds The Corinthian, he is in the middle of tormenting a vegetarian dreamer with a nightmare of society partaking in the eating of animal eye-balls (which look startlingly like human eyes) that devolves into cannibalism before being force-fed them herself.

* BrutishBulls: After being infected by a fragment of The Corinthian's shattered essence, Poquita's stray cat is transformed into a Rolling calf, a monstrous bull wreathed in fire and chains from Jamaican folklore.
--> ''One stray cat + once mirror shard of The Corinthian = a very special nightmare beast.''

* EmptyShell: The infectee's of Shakpana's MysticalPlague have their souls released but their bodies remain alive. Regardless, soulless people grow frustrated feeling no more passion for life, and if not DrivenToSuicide will do callous things under the belief that they're walking corpses. One becomes a SerialKiller that eats brains.

* BrutishBulls: After being infected by a fragment of The Corinthian's shattered essence, Poquita's stray cat is transformed into a Rolling calf, a monstrous bull wreathed in fire and chains from Jamacian folklore.

* ZeroPercentApprovalRating: While Naula's rule wasn't exactly ideal in the Faerie Realm, she refuses to admit that overthrowing Auberon and Titania was the wrong thing to do, and implies that they weren't that popular with the rest of their subjects to begin with and her coup wouldn't having gone as far as it did otherwise.

** Jophiel is a loyal servant to the Heavenly Host who winds up being banished to mortal plane after failing to solidify the faith of a true believer. This has made him cynical and homesick, trying to stay uninvolved with the messy politics of other realms like The Dreaming and Faerie as his probation dictates, only to wind up involved anyway due to his association with Ruin and Heather. [[spoiler:It's implied by the end that his "exile" was all a part of Heaven's plan to ensure that the right people were where they needed to be, and that the whole thing was a SecretTestOfCharacter to see if he was willing to do the right thing of his own free will, a test he passed with flying colors.]]

* DealWithTheDevil: The Unseelie Court come to Naula's aid when the Realm of Faerie starts devolving into chaos under her rule, resulting in a CrapsackWorld where the forest is dead and most of the fae there are either dead or imprisoned.

* EvilCounterpartRace: The Unseelie Court are characterized as a race of more monstrous tribe of TheFairFolk who saw and opportunity to take over the Faerie Realm's capital after Naula overthrew Auberon and Titania. While all fairies are selfish and a little monstrous, the Unseelie are more visibly monstrous and the realm had [[{{Mordor}} fallen into a dying state]] under their charge.

* TheFairFolk: The second story arc is about Heather After's deal with the former King Oberon in order to depose Queen Nuala from the throne of Faerie. It doesn't go well.

* HobbesWasRight: When Naula tries an egalitarian approach to running the Faerie Kingdom, her hedonistic subjects devolved into backstabbing and hoarding resources, this being the opening the Unseelie Court took to taking over.
* IKnowYourTrueName: Nuala dethroned Titania by saying her true name. When Heather After learns this, she doesn't worry and accepts the deal with Oberon. We learn why in issue #11, when the Unseelie attempt to control Heather by using the name on her birth certificate. [[spoiler:Which is her ''deadname'', so it doesn't work and results in the Unseelie who used it dying. Heather, in turn, says there's no such thing as a "true" name, only the one you make and names them all ''Lost''.]]
* IgnoredEpiphany: When Heather thinks that Faerie should do away with the monarchy entirely, Auberon and Titania can't help but bursting out laughing at the alternative. Even Naula, who agrees with her on how flawed their system is, thinks it's ridiculous, preferring to argue over who gets the throne over addressing the real problem.

* NecessarilyEvil: Ruin suffers from an existential crisis from the moment he was created because he has a reluctance towards frightening others in spite that fear being his purpose. Dream elaborates that Nightmares are created as {{Stealth Mentor}}s that renew the dreamer's will to live in the waking world.

* ToBeLawfulOrGood: Being a loyal cherubim, Jophiel is reluctant to be involved in all of the interdimensional shenanigans Ruin and Heather drag her around, not wanting to make his exile from Heaven permanent. [[spoiler:By the end his exile is rescinded after he helps restore order in Faerie and reunite Ruin with his first dreamer, implying the entire ordeal was a SecretTestOfCharacter to see if he would do the "good" thing over the "lawful" thing.]]
* TrappedInVillainy: Naula manages to dethrone Auboron and Titania using [[IKnowYourTrueName Titania's true name]] and takes the throne for herself [[TheDogBitesBack after years of being taken for granted]], hoping to take a more egalitarian approach and redistribute resources to less well-off subjects. Unfortunately, fairies are selfish and hedonistic by nature and the kingdom collapses. [[EvilCounterpartRace The Unseelie Court]] show up and agree to act as her enforcers to help curb the chaos, but they only acknowledge her as their queen if she agrees to their brand of cruelty out of fear of what they would do otherwise.

* BornUnlucky: From the moment Ruin came into existence things have gone to hell. Even his name isn't so much as a name as an insult, Daniel calling him "ruined" for not being what he intended him to be. [[spoiler:It's implied that he exists not to cause suffering, but as an agent of change that goes beyond the Realm of Sleep, this being one of the reasons why Danile can't bring himself to unmake him in spite of all of the trouble he causes.]]

''The Sandman Universe'' is a line of Creator/DCComics published under Creator/DCBlackLabel. Launched to celebrate the 30th anniversary of ''ComicBook/TheSandman1989''. As with Gerard Way and Creator/YoungAnimal, the series were "curated" by Creator/NeilGaiman, who chose a specific writer for each book. They began with a ''Sandman Universe'' one-shot, which then led to four books:

* CoolHouse: The House of Whispers and the House of Watchers were both constructed by Despair of the Endless, the former forged from dejection and the later meant to alleviate Despair's burden of looking upon human suffering. The House of Whispers would be given to the loa Erzulie to be used as her pantheon's [[CoolBoat houseboat]], while the House of Whispers would be left to [[Literature/AesopsFables Aesop]], later to be taken to a far-off section of The Dreaming as a personal possession of Anansi the Spider.

* TakeThat: It's clear that the Prime Minister doing disgusting, filthy things in one issue is Boris Johnson.

* NecessarilyEvil: To avoid being sent back to Hell as Cassandra prophesied, Lucifer has himself annotated out of Destiny's book, [[RetGone making it as though he never existed]], the only people who remember him being those who knew him personally. This proves to have catastrophic consequences on Earth and beyond in a number of ways: since Lucifer embodies the fears of punishment and damnation, much of mankind's {{Primal Fear}}s and the ethics that come with them are gone with him. Since Lucifer did not lead the War in Heaven, the {{Fallen Angel}}s are left without a leader and devolve into a power struggle, Hell becoming a wasteland where the demons cannibalize one another instead of the metaphysical nation it would become. Without evil there cannot be good and thus {{God}} disappears too, leaving the TheArmiesOfHeaven (who rely on God's grace as sustenance) to starve, going mad as they cannibalize each other in a way indistinguishable from Hell.

''The Sandman Universe'' is a line of Creator/DCComics published under Creator/DCBlackLabel. Launched to celebrate the 30th anniversary of ''ComicBook/TheSandman1989'', the books, like Gerard Way and Creator/YoungAnimal, were "curated" by Creator/NeilGaiman, who chose a specific writer for each book. They began with a ''Sandman Universe'' one-shot, which then led to four books:

''The Sandman Universe'' is a line of Creator/DCComics published under Creator/DCBlackLabel. Launched to celebrate the 30th anniversary of ''ComicBook/TheSandman1989'', the books, like Gerard Way and Creator/YoungAnimal, were "curated" by Creator/NeilGaiman, who chose specific writer for each book. They began with a ''Sandman Universe'' one-shot, which then led to four books: