Recap / The Sandman (1989) - "Dream Country" Arc

"Writers are liars, my dear, surely you have realized that by now?"

— Erasmus Fry

Dream Country is the third collection of The Sandman (1989), and features four unrelated one-shot comics (issues 17-20):

• "Calliope": Dream's ex-wife, the Greek muse Calliope, is being held captive by the author Richard Madoc, who seeks to use her for inspiration. She is eventually rescued by Dream.
• "A Dream of a Thousand Cats": Cats gather from near and far to hear the preachings of a cat prophet. The prophet says that cats used to rule the world, and that they can dream that world back into reality together.
• "A Midsummer Night's Dream": Dream has inspired William Shakespeare, who shows him a play he has written (A Midsummer Night's Dream) in return. To his surprise, his audience is The Fair Folk, who observe that belief in them will survive for the next centuries.
• "Facade": Urania Blackwell, the Silver Age Element Girl, has become suicidal after her metamorphosis. An interaction with Death leads her to seek the sun in her quest to die.

"Calliope" and "A Dream of a Thousand Cats" were adapted as part of a bonus eleventh episode of the first season of the Netflix series.

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Tropes in this collection:

Calliope

• Be Careful What You Wish For: Richard protests that he can't free Calliope because without her, he'll have no ideas. Dream responds by filling his head with an unceasing cascade of ideas, so many that he can't think straight, until he frees Calliope.
• Bookends: Richard begins the story with no ideas, and in the end he is once more without them... forever.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: Dream's punishment hits Richard while he's walking down the street, filling his head with ideas and nothing to write them down with. When Felix finds him, he's resorted to mangling his own fingers and daubing ideas on a wall.
• Creative Sterility: After Richard frees Calliope, she asks Dream to end his punishment of endless ideas. Dream does so by taking away his ability to have ideas at all.
• Death by Irony: Erasmus Fry collected bezoars which are said to have healing properties and in particular are supposed to help those who have been poisoned. He later killed himself via poisoning.
• Did You Actually Believe...?: Erasmus Fry mocks Calliope as naive when she reminds him that he promised to free her once his career was over.
• Fingore: When Richard gets so many ideas that he has to write to them down, he resorts to mangling his hands and writing on the wall in his own blood. He subsequently has to ask Felix to retrieve his house keys from his pocket because his own hands are too damaged to be able to do it himself.
• Hypocrite: At the release party for his latest novel, Richard says that he regards himself as a feminist writer, despite his success resting on his mistreatment of Calliope.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • Erasmus Fry, after enslaving the muse Calliope, raping her for inspiration for nearly sixty years, and then selling her into further slavery when he believed he didn't need her any longer, ends up committing suicide after begging his publishers to bring a book of his back into print.
  • The man who acquires Calliope from Fry, Richard Madoc, is cursed by Morpheus to receive an endless bombardment of story ideas.
• Might Makes Right: Fry's rationale for forcing Calliope to serve him. He did the research which let him locate and bind her, so rightfully, she and her gifts belong to him.
• The Muse: In this case, one of the actual Muses from Greek mythology becomes the source of a writer's inspiration. Specifically Calliope, the muse of epic poetry.
• Muse Abuse: Rendered literally in "Calliope". The muse Calliope is kidnapped and sexually abused by two successive human authors for decades.
• Not Helping Your Case: In "Calliope", Dream, once he's free, confronts Richard Madoc about keeping the muse prisoner and raping her. Madoc, who at this point has gotten years of success due to literal Muse Abuse, at first tries to deny that he's imprisoned Calliope. When Dream gives him a Death Glare, he claims that he needs her for the ideas. Unsurprisingly, Dream gives him a "The Reason You Suck" Speech and an abundance of ideas until Madoc's compelled to free her.
• Oh, Crap!: Richard Madoc when he arrives home and finds a strange man sitting on his couch. The man, who happens to be Dream, also knows that Madoc has Calliope held captive.
• Production Foreshadowing: One of the ideas that are inflicted on Richard near the end is "Vampires don't dance." In Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (which he had already made a start on writing, though it wasn't completed and published until later), there is a sequence in which it's significant that everyone is dancing except the vampire, who is not dancing because he's a vampire.
• Protective Charm: Erasmus Fry collects bezoars which are believed to have mystic, protective power. Probably for the best since he has imprisoned and sexually assaulted a goddess for over several decades.
• Radish Cure: Dream's punishment for an author who kept a Muse captive.
  Dream: And you will not free her because "you need the ideas?" ... Then ideas you will have. Ideas in abundance.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: The sketch notes at the back of Dream Country specifically state that the rape of Calliope was supposed to be creepy and horrible, which definitely comes across in that story. All things considered, Morpheus and Calliope let the man off extremely easy on this one.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Averted. Richard tries to invoke his fame and fortune to convince Morpheus to back off, but the Lord of Dreams is deeply unimpressed.
• Shout-Out:
  • Madoc's first novel, which he's seen signing near the beginning, is titled The Cabaret of Dr. Caligari.
  • The TV interviewer who connects Madoc's work with Erasmus Fry's resembles Gaiman's friend and fellow author Kim Newman.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: Calliope spends most of the naked or dressed in modern underwear, with her hair hanging freely. After she's freed, she's wearing a peplos (an Ancient greek gown) and her hair is formally styled.
• That Was Not a Dream: After his first encounter with Morpheus, Richard wakes up in his living room and initially assumes that he's just had a weird dream. Subsequent events convince him it wasn't just a dream.
• Time-Compression Montage: The upward progress of Richard's career is shown through a two-page montage in which each panel is a separate vignette taking place a few months after the preceding one.
• Trespassing to Talk: Richard is startled to arrive home and find Morpheus sitting in his living room. Richard initially threatens to call the police, then fears Morpheus will call the police, and then becomes frightened and desperate when he realizes that Morpheus is likely not human.
• Villain Protagonist: Richard Madoc, the focal character in "Calliope", who rapes Calliope repeatedly to tap her for inspiration for his stories.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Madoc justifies his mistreatment of Calliope by the fact that she's not human, tacitly admitting that it would be wrong to treat a human woman the same way. He's stunned when he learns that she was once married and had a son, because he's never thought of her as enough of a person to have a personal history.
• Writer's Block: Richard Madoc has written a book that was well received but is struggling with his sophomore effort. He's particularly stressed because he has already accepted and spent the book advance money, obligating him to provide a book or be sued by his publishers. He ends the story with the ultimate case of writer's block, Dream having taken away his ability to have ideas at all.
• You Have No Idea Who You're Dealing With: Invoked by Richard when he finds Morpheus waiting in his house. Averted by Morpheus who knows exactly who and what Richard Madoc is and exactly how to deal with him.

A Dream of a Thousand Cats

• Appearance Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Cats believe that Dream is a cat, and he appears to them as a large black-furred feline.
• Cats Are Magic:
  • A cat prophet claims giant cats once ruled the world in an alternate timeline.
  • Cat Dream is quite mystical and magical, obeying no one's orders but his own.
• Cats Are Mean: In the supposed old world where cats were the dominant species, humans were their servants and would often be hunted by their masters.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: What the Prophet is requesting of her audiences - if enough cats dream at the same time then they shall be able to create a world where they are no longer subordinate to humans and can be free from the cruelty and abuse. One of the cats in the audience thinks this will never happen since cats are too contrarian. Even a god couldn't get a thousand cats to agree on anything.
• Cosmic Retcon: This is what happened to the world ruled by cats: The humans' dreams didn't just change things so that humans now held power over cats; it changed things so that humans had always held power over cats.
• Creepy Crows: In her dream, the Prophet meets a crow that is still animate although its entire head, upper neck and parts of its rib-cage are devoid of flesh, leaving only exposed bone. It offers her directions to the King of Cats (aka Dream) but warns about the lethal dangers that bar her path.
• Death of a Child: The Prophet was spurred into turning against humans after her previous owner found out that she had given birth to a litter. Paul, the owner, was disappointed to find she had birthed half-breed kittens and, finding no use for them, tied the kittens in a bag and drowned them. This was what caused the Prophet to realize humans were the superior species, not cats.
• Determinator: The Prophet will continue to preach her message to every cat until the day she dies, as long as any are willing to listen to her message. During her dream quest, too, she continued on her path despite every temptation to turn aside and even when she no longer remembered why the quest was so important.
• Drowning Unwanted Pets: After the Prophet had moggie kittens with a stray cat, her owner, furious that he couldn't sell them for much, drowned them.
• Earth Is Young: "A Dream of a Thousand Cats", the universe-as-we-know-it has always existed — but there used to be another universe where Earth was ruled by giant cats that used humans as slaves and toys to hunt. At some point (when doesn't matter), humans managed to share a dream that wrote the old reality out of existence as if it had never been and created the world as we know it.
• Elephant Graveyard: The Prophet awakens in the Dreaming on a plain completely covered by the skeletons of numerous animals and humans.
• Environmental Symbolism: The Prophet holds the meeting, in which she preaches the overthrow of humanity's dominance, in a human graveyard.
• The Faceless: All the human characters in the present are depicted as either featureless silhouettes or with their heads out of view beyond the top of the frame. (In the Prophet's vision of the former world, the humans who serve the Cat Lords have visible faces in the usual way, but when they succeed in changing the world to make humans the dominant species, the panel showing the result depicts a cat looking at humans that are only visible from the waist down.)
• Heartbroken Badass: The Prophet lost her mixed-breed kittens because of a callous owner, then embarked on a quest through The Dreaming which took so long (subjectively) she lost and then regained her sense of self. After learning the truth of how things used to be and waking, she leaves her home and travels the world to tell other cats about it, trying to get them to change things back.
• Mega Neko: According to the Prophet's vision, there was once a primordial time long ago where cats were much larger than humans, towering over them and treating the tinier people as playthings and prey. The cats in the vision are depicted as equivalent to the size of elephants compared to humans.
• Panthera Awesome: Dream appears to The Prophet as a gigantic, black feline similar to a panther or jaguar but with glowing yellow eyes.
• Reality Warper: According to both the Golden-Haired Man in the old world and The Prophet, as few as a thousand individuals dreaming the same dream would be enough to literally change the way the world always was.
• Retconjuration:
  • The world as we know it was created from another one that was ruled by cats: when enough humans dreamed of a new world at the same time, the old one was gone as though it had never existed. Or else It Was All A Dream. Or both.
  • Dream suggests to a cat that it could get enough beings to share its dream of a world ruled by giant cats that hunt humans for fun, which would in turn make it reality. The implication is that the above example only existed because of Dream's suggestion. Yes, this is as paradoxical as it sounds.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

• All There in the Script: Of the three minor fay shown reacting to the play, two are identified in dialogue as Peaseblossom and Skarrow, but the big blue-skinned one's name appears nowhere in the final version of the issue. In the script, his name is given as Bevis.
• Brick Joke: At the beginning, Will Kemp tries to sell Shakespeare on adding a bit of physical comedy involving a pork pie to his first scene in the play, but Shakespeare isn't interested and tells him to stick to the script. Later, after the performance begins, the panel depicting the start of the scene in question shows Kemp holding a pork pie.
• By the Lights of Their Eyes: As the play progresses, the day fades into night, and the fae audience become indistinct dark shapes visible only by their glowing red eyes — and mouths.
• Faerie Court: King Auberon and Queen Titania rule over the fairies. They are the in-universe inspirations for the Oberon and Titania from A Midsummer Night's Dream.
• The Fair Folk: The fairies are at best tricksters who don't care about the effect their actions will have on the humans they encounter. One of them casually reminisces about having eaten humans in the past.
• Fairy Trickster: Puck is depicted this way in Shakespeare's play, and the real Puck is in the audience; it turns out that the version in the play is, if anything, toned down compared to the real thing.
• Fluffy the Terrible: The real Fairy Peaseblossom is a monstrous creature resembling a walking thorn bush, with a spiky temper to match. Puck's nickname "Robin Goodfellow" is likewise ironic, and the audience mocks his facile description in the play as a "Merry wanderer of the night", earning a warning from one of their number to beware in case the real Puck is eavesdropping.
• Food Chains: When Queen Titania speaks to Hamnet and tempts him to join her entourage, she gives him an apple and he eats it, with the implication that by accepting it he's given her power over him.
• Garden Garment: In Shakespeare's play, the fairy Peaseblossom is depicted by a human actor bedecked with flowers. (The real Peaseblossom — who looks something like a walking thorn bush — is in the audience, and is not impressed when he realizes who it's meant to be.)
• Hidden Depths: During the performance of the play, the story occasionally cuts away to the reactions of a trio of faeries in the audience. One of them, a hulking blue-skinned monstrosity who speaks with a lower-class accent, demonstrates a genuine appreciation of the play that's not shared by his two compatriots.
• Horned Humanoid:
  • The real Auberon has a pair of long curling goat-like horns.^note This has traditionally been a sign that his wife is being unfaithful, Cuckold Horns.
  • The fictional Puck in the play has a pair of small imp's horns as part of his costume.
• Magical Counterfeiting: Richard Burbage, the lead actor of Shakespeare's troupe, has the effrontery to hit up King Auberon for a performance fee. After lampshading Burbage's lack of Genre Savvy, Auberon gives him a bag full of gold coins which have all turned into yellow leaves when Burbage opens it again the next day.
• Other Me Annoys Me: The faeries in the audience for the first performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream include the originals of Oberon, Titania, Puck, and Peaseblossom. Auberon and Titania appear to be mainly flattered at being represented, and Puck is amused, but Peaseblossom is enraged by being depicted as a cheerful fairy helper and has to be physically restrained from attacking the actors.
• Shakespeare in Fiction: Dream inspires William Shakespeare, and asks for two plays (A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest) to be written in return.

Facade

• Ambiguous Situation: It's never unambiguously clear how much objective basis there is for Rainie's fears of rejection. When Della sees Rainie's real face, Rainie immediately flees before Della has time to muster a coherent reaction, so we never see whether she would have been as unsympathetic as her earlier Insult Friendly Fire suggested. As Rainie flees, she's surrounded by passers-by looking shocked, but there's no way of knowing how much of that reaction is to her face and how much is to a distressed woman running through a public place covered with something that might be bloodstains. Moments after Rainie dies, the phone rings; it's Mulligan, responding to her earlier call for help, which implies that somebody cared enough to pass on her message despite her being officially stonewalled and that Mulligan cared enough to reach out to Rainie despite her no longer being his responsibility. Does that mean Rainie's life would have improved if she'd held on a little longer, or would that just have led to more disappointments and rejections? There's no way to know.
• A Bloody Mess: At one point, Rainie is forced to flee through a public place with her true face revealed, and the shocked reactions of the passers-by are at least partly due to her being streaked with red stains (which the reader knows, but the passers-by don't know, is just spattered bolognese sauce).
• Death Seeker: Rainie.
• Divine Conflict: The metamorphae like Element Man and Element Girl were given their powers by the sun god Ra to aid in his never-ending battle against Apep. However, Death reveals to Rainie that Apep's been dead for thousands of years, and all the metamorphae currently in existence were created for no purpose just because Ra refuses to admit that the never-ending battle has ended.
• Driven to Suicide: Rainie seeks the help of the sun to kill herself, and gets her wish. She's happy she gets to die, although it's implied that she could have turned her life around if she wanted to.
• Gender Flip: Death refers to the Egyptian deity Apep, who is traditionally regarded as masculine, with female pronouns.
• Immortality Hurts: Retired superhero Rainie longs for death because her freakish appearance leaves her socially isolated and agoraphobic. However, because her body can automatically transmute itself into most any element, she's effectively immortal, and unable to commit suicide without the intervention of the god who bestowed her powers in the first place.
• Insult Friendly Fire: Rainie makes an effort to reconnect with an old friend, which ends up making her feel worse because the friend, unaware of Rainie's condition, spends much of their meeting being casually bigoted about disabled people and people whose appearance doesn't fit conventional norms.
• Internalized Categorism: A particularly disturbing case of Normopathy. Rainie (Element Girl) of the metamorphae is a woman who has several superpowers including immortality, invulnerability and shapeshifting. She spends her days locked in her home, feeling sorry for herself for not being normal. As she claims that life is hell, Death tells her that she's actually making her own hell. Of course, in this universe that's all anyone does.
• Newhart Phonecall:
  • Rainie's conversation with Ra is a non-telephonic example: the reader can see what Rainie says, but Ra's side of the conversation is indicated only by her responses.
  • Death's telephone conversation with Mulligan at the end is a more traditional example.
• Repeating So the Audience Can Hear: Both Rainie's conversation with Ra and Death's conversation with Mulligan involve some of this.
  • Rainie: Look at you? You want me to look at you?
  • Death: Where is she now? I wouldn't like to say for certain.
• Taken for Granite: When Rainie dies, her body transmutes into stone (or something else solid and white) which then disintegrates into a pile of sand over the course of the following page.
• The Voice: Rainie's only point of social contact is Mr Mulligan, who she phones once a week on the pretext of checking when her next pension check is due. She's never met him, and knows him only as a voice on the phone, and that's the only way he appears in the story.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Element Girl is practically invulnerable, and is expected to live for thousands of years. She hates her life and wants to kill herself but literally cannot conceive of a method that would work.

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