Recap / The Sandman (1989) - "The Doll's House" Arc

"The walls come tumbling down."

"If my dream was true, then everything we know, everything we think we know is a lie."

— Rose Walker

The Doll's House is the second story arc of The Sandman (1989), covering issues 9-16.

An old man in the desert tells a younger man the story of an ancient African Queen, Nada, who spurned Dream, fearing the consequences of loving an Endless. In revenge, Dream banished her to Hell, where she remains to this day ("Tales in the Sand").

Dream's sibling Desire informs their twin Despair that a new 'dream vortex' is forming. Dream reviews the residents of the Dreaming and learns that some of his more powerful creations — Brute, Glob, the Corinthian, and Fiddler's Green — are still missing. Meanwhile, on Earth, young human Rose Walker meets her wealthy grandmother Unity Kinkaid, a victim of the sleeping sickness that had ensued when Dream was captive, for the first time ("The Doll's House"). With Unity's support, Rose moves into a bed-and-breakfast in Florida, hoping to find her younger brother Jed, and meets its colorful host of residents ("Moving In").

Jed, meanwhile, is being abused by his foster parents, while two of Dream's missing creations, Brute and Glob, have started residing in his mind. Dream captures Brute and Glob, but Jed is instead captured by the Corinthian ("Playing House"). In between, Dream meets up with Hob Gadling, an immortal human and subject of a bet made with Death centuries ago ("Men of Good Fortune"). The Corinthian brings Jed to a serial killer convention at a hotel. Rose, accompanied by one of her new housemates Gilbert, arrives at the same hotel. Gilbert recognizes the Corinthian and flees, but not before advising Rose to summon Dream if in trouble. When she is attacked, she calls on him, and he arrives. He destroys the Corinthian and makes the killers feel shame for their actions ("Collectors").

Meanwhile, Gilbert and Matthew have ensured Jed's safety. Rose begins to have dream powers of her own. Gilbert tells Matthew that Rose is the dream vortex and must be killed to maintain the stability of reality ("Into the Night"). Dream tells Rose this. Gilbert, who reveals himself as the missing creation Fiddler's Green, offers himself in place of Rose, but Dream declines. Her grandmother Unity reveals that she was intended to be the dream vortex, but was unable to fulfill it due to Dream's imprisonment, and dies in Rose's place.

In the aftermath, the Walkers inherited Unity's estate and now live together, while most of Rose's housemates have upended their lives. Dream visits Desire and accuses them of scheming to destroy Dream by siring a child by Unity, which would have forced Dream to spill family blood. Dream leaves and threatens Desire to not meddle in his affairs further ("Lost Hearts").

Adapted into the second half of the first season of the Netflix series.

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Tropes:

• Actually Pretty Funny: Morpheus laughs out loud at Hector Hall's attempt to embody the Sandman, remarking that humanity will never cease to amaze him.
• Adoption Angst: Miranda Walker is at first in denial after being told that she was adopted and her benefactor Unity Kinkaid is her biological mother.
• Affectionate Parody: Hector Hall, the third Sandman, is used here to spoof the older Sandman comics. He acts like a typical Silver Age superhero, but he's revealed to be a mere pawn of Brute and Glob, the dream creatures who assisted him in the old comics, who are actually rogue servants of Dream. Lyta notices the narrative inconsistency of the fact that, despite Hector supposedly being the guardian of dreams for all children, only Jed ever comes to visit them in the Dreaming (which wasn't strictly true in the original comics, as at least one story did feature another dreamer, but Jed's dreams were generally the focus).
• All There in the Manual:
  • The guy in charge of the Cereal Convention spends some time fretting over the fact that the Family Man has not showed. John Constantine killed him.
  • The whole deal with Hector and Hippolyta Hall. Their backstory is tied in with Infinity, Inc. — a decent seller in its day, but an obscurity to most modern audiences, and plagued by all manner of confusing Retcons after Crisis on Infinite Earths wiped all of DC's Golden Age heroes from existence.
• And I'm the Queen of Sheba: In "Men of Good Fortune", when Dream tells Hob he'll meet him again in one hundred years, one of Hob's drinking buddies snarks, "Yes, and I'm Pope Urban."
• Apologetic Attacker: Dream to Rose Walker as he prepares to kill her and stop the Vortex from emerging. He apologizes so much she eventually snaps at him to stop apologizing and get on with it.
• Asshole Victim: Barnaby and Clarice, Jed's abusive foster parents, are killed by the fallout of Dream's showdown with Brute and Glob inside Jed's mind.
• Attempted Rape: Rose is almost raped twice: once in Florida, and another at the serial killer convention. She is rescued both times.
• Bad Samaritan: After Jed flees Barnaby and Clarice's house, he is offered a lift by a friendly stranger in a passing car. Unfortunately for him, the stranger is the Corinthian, who plans to keep him as a snack for later.
• Been There, Shaped History: Dream is revealed to have made a deal with William Shakespeare to help him reach his potential and "give men dreams that would live on long after I am dead".
• Berserk Button: Nathan Diskin's serial killer sobriquet is Fun Land. Do not shorten it to "Fun".
• Big Sister Instinct: Rose's motivation is to find her brother Jed Walker during Doll's House. She's horrified on learning how he was abused by relatives, and is relieved when Gilbert finds her brother alive but unconscious in the Corinthian's trunk.
• Bittersweet Ending: The ending features Unity Kinkaid giving up her life to save her granddaughter, Rose, by taking her place as the vortex. She dies shortly after reuniting with her daughter and granddaughter, but never meets her grandson Jed. Gilbert also returns to the Dreaming and resumes his place when Dream forgives him, promising Rose that he loves her and that whenever she likes, she can visit him in life or in death. Rose wakes up with a niggling sense that she broke up Barbie and Ken's marriage by interfering with their dreams, and mourns losing her friend Gilbert, who has since given up his human form to become Fiddler's Green again. She knows now that there's magic in this world, or "weird shit" as she puts it, and that makes human lives meaningless. To cope, Rose insists to herself that her dream was just a dream because Gilbert wasn't meaningless and her little brother is safe now. On the other hand, Gilbert rescued Jed and restored him to his sister and mother, ensuring the kid has an undoubted happy ending. Dream also saves the world by undoing a generation of serial killers that the Corinthian inspired, allowing their would-be victims to sleep more easily at night.
• Blessed with Suck: Hob points out that you can get very hungry when you can't die of starvation.
• Bound and Gagged: The Corinthian's first on-page victim is introduced bound and gagged in the Corinthian's hotel room. Unfortunately for him, it's not the kind of bound-and-gagged situation that ends in a last-minute rescue.
• Break the Cutie:
  • Jed Walker. He was separated from his mum and sister at a very young age, lost his grandfather to illness and then was stuck with abusive relatives who locked him in the basement and regularly beat him, with Brute and Glob occupying his head and offering comfort only through dreams. Then, when he finally escapes, he encounters the Corinthian, who locks him in a car trunk, saving him for later. Thanks to Gilbert and Rose, however, Earn Your Happy Ending finally comes into effect.
  • Rose Walker, in the meantime, spends most of A Doll's House looking for her brother Jed, tracking him down with Gilbert's help. Then she finds out his relatives abused him after he goes missing, nearly gets raped by one of the convention attendees, and finds her comatose brother thanks to Gilbert. After a night of worrying about Jed's health, she then uses her power as the Vortex unwittingly and nearly kills everyone, including her friends and housemates. To survive, she sacrifices her heart to her grandmother and watches the latter die. Like Jed, she eventually recovers, but it takes her a good while longer.
• Breather Episode: "Men of Good Fortune" is a relatively light-hearted story in the middle of an arc where it's preceded by child abuse and followed by serial killers.
• Bread Milk Eggs Squick: We see some of the inner monologue of the director of the Cereal Convention as he's psyching himself up for opening ceremonies. Most of it is fairly standard confidence-building self-talk, but then it goes into "you have a cabin in upstate Vermont with three freezers full of dismembered corpses..."
• Bullying a Dragon: Lady Johanna Constantine hears rumors that the Devil and the Wandering Jew meet at the White Horse Tavern every hundred years, so she crashes their party with two street toughs in an attempt to beat their arcane secrets out of them. Trying to mug two immortal beings proves to be a poor choice.
• Busman's Vocabulary: The crowd chatter at the Cereal Convention is full of death- and murder-related figures of speech, like one attendee remarking that he wouldn't normally be seen dead at a place like this.
• …But He Sounds Handsome: One of the attendees at the Cereal Convention tells another he should try a magazine called Chaste, saying "It's really terrific." It turns out he is the editor and main writer of the magazine.
• Cerebus Retcon: Hector Hall, DC's last, more conventionally superhero-y Sandman, is revealed to be the Dead All Along fantasy of the horrifically-abused Jed Walker (himself a remnant of an even earlier, even more lighthearted Sandman series).
• Continuity Nod:
  • The serial killer the Bogeyman, who appears in The Doll's House and is revealed to be an impersonator who's a writer for a magazine, originally appeared in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run. If you read that, it won't come as a surprise that the man appearing in The Sandman is an impostor, since we see the original drowning at the end of his debut.
  • Rose mentions the death of her best friend Judy, which was depicted in the previous story arc.
• Crashing Dreams: Jed dreams of having a fun adventure that ends in a comic mishap in which he's buried under a pile of cartoony rodents — then wakes to find he's being nibbled by a real rat.
• Criminal Convention: In issue #14, a convention of serial killers and mass murders congregate to share stories and conversation. Here, rogue nightmare and serial killer the Corinthian is found attending the convention, having been an inspiration to many of the serial killers attending. The various attendants go by code-names, and the convention is called a "Cereal Convention" so as to not draw attention to themselves. The convention comes to an end when Dream is called there to help one of their would-be victims, and then proceeds to destroy the Corinthian and show the conventioners how petty and meaningless they truly are.
• Damsel out of Distress: Subverted. Rose tries, but to be fair she's usually out of her weight class. She takes on muggers that try to rob her at knifepoint, only for Gilbert to mount a rescue and introduce himself to her. Later on, Fun Land catches her in an ambush, and the only thing she can do is weakly recite Morpheus's name.
• Dead Person Impersonation:
  • Discussed. When Brute and Glob are brainstorming ways they might hide from Dream's vengeance, one of the options they consider is murdering Barnaby and Clarice and occupying their corpses.
  • Philip Sitz impersonates a dead serial killer to attend the Cereal Convention. Unfortunately for him, the Corinthian knows that the person he's impersonating is dead, and violent exception is taken to the intrusion.
• Deliberate Injury Gambit: When Morpheus confronts the Corinthian at the convention, the Corinthian comes at him with a knife. Morpheus allows the Corinthian to stab him, demonstrating by his lack of reaction that the Corinthian has no power to really harm him, and then takes hold of the Corinthian's knife hand to unmake him.
• Description Cut: Rose writes a letter to Miranda and Unity describing the weird people living in Hal's boarding house. "At least Hal, our landlord, is normal," she writes — moments before Hal slams into the room in full drag, delivers a rant about one of people he has to work with in the drag show complete with dramatic poses, and then slams out again without waiting for a reaction. "Well, relatively normal, anyway."
• Disposable Sex Worker: The Corinthian's conversation in Atlanta implies that his recent victims have been sex workers. Notably for the trope, all of his victims we see are male.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Dream storms off in a huff when Hob implies that he visits him out of loneliness.
• Double-Meaning Title: The Doll's House. It can be seen as an allusion to Jed Walker's mind, which is used as a metaphorical "playground" for Hector and Lyta Hall, who are being manipulated like "dolls" by Brute and Glob. The plot also features Rose staying at a boarding house owned by a cross-dresser (who goes by "Dolly" in a drag show) and where two of her housemates are named Ken and Barbie. An actual physical doll's house appears as a minor prop in some scenes.
• Dramatic Unmask:
  • In Hal's dream, he's visited by Judy Garland, dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, who promises to reveal a Big Secret before pulling her face off like a latex mask to reveal the Wicked Witch, and then pulls that face off to reveal the face of the Wizard.
    "Hal. You'll have to help me. I'm running out of hands."
  • In Zelda's dream, she meets a veiled figure, which removes the veil to reveal that it has the head of a giant spider. Zelda is relieved; she'd been terrified it was going to be her mother.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: At the beginning of "The Doll's House", Rose has a dream that foreshadows later events in the arc.
• Dreams of Flying: After she manifests as the Vortex, Rose dreams that she's flying with Morpheus over the landscape of the Dreaming. She remarks to Morpheus that Sigmund Freud said that when you dream about flying, it really means you're dreaming about having sex; Morpheus' response is to wonder what it really means when you dream about having sex.
• Dream Spying: Several times during the arc, Rose has dreams in which she witnesses current events in the Dreaming.
• Dreams vs. Nightmares: Dream chases down a bunch of sentient dreams and nightmares that got loose during his confinement. On the one hand, his capture of Brute, Glob, and the Corinthian are unambiguously good things, as they are nightmares who have created terrible problems in the waking world. On the other hand, Fiddler's Green is a perfectly harmless dream who just wanted to experience the physical world, and didn't see the harm in doing so while his master was away. Dream decides not to punish him, but does demand his return.
• Eye Remember: The Corinthian can read memories by putting eyes into his toothed eyesockets.
• Eye Scream: The Corinthian likes to eat eyes, especially those of young boys.
• Fairytale Motifs: Several to 'Red Riding Hood':
  • Gilbert tells Rose the original, dark version of 'Red Riding Hood' at one point, in which the wolf eats the girl and her grandmother and gets away with it.
  • The whole arc is an allegory for the fairytale. 'Red Riding Hood' is the tale of a girl and her grandmother, like how Rose and her grandmother Unity are main characters in the arc. There is also a man-eating monster like the Big Bad Wolf on the loose: the Corinthian. Right after Gilbert finishes the story and tells Rose to beware what might be out in the world, like the wolf was, the story cuts to the Corinthian.
  • Fun Land, one of the collectors, wears a wolf cap and wolf shirt, and is silhouetted as a wolf with his curly hair as fur when he comes across Rose. When trying to break into Rose's room and rape her, he pretends that Rose's grandmother wants her, just like how the Big Bad Wolf pretends to be Red Riding Hood's grandmother to eat her.
• Fat Bastard: One of the serial killers is a massively overweight pedophile who abducts children from amusement parks and is shown to be an extreme Psychopathic Manchild. He later attempts to rape Rose, seeing her as a little girl.
• Finishing Each Other's Sentences: Barbie and Ken keep passing sentences back and forth, giving a disconcerting impression of being a single mind in two bodies (or two minds so similar as to make no difference).
  Ken: Gee, that must be—
  Barbie: —rough. Ken and I really—
  Ken: —don't like hospitals, do we, Barbie?
  Barbie: No, indeedy.
• Foreshadowing:
  • As a gift to mark their family connection, Unity gives Rose an old ring, which Rose connects to the "annulet" from her dream in the car, in which she dream-eavesdropped on Lucien and Morpheus talking about the Dream Vortex. The coincidence foreshadows the subsequent revelation that Rose's role as the Vortex is a consequence of her family connection to Unity.
  • The story that Zelda begins to tell Chantal in the shared dream is "Lost Hearts" by Montague Rhodes James, in which the villain plans to consume his young cousin's heart — prefiguring the transfer of the vortex from Rose to Unity in the following issue (which is also titled "Lost Hearts").
• Fostering for Profit: Barnaby and Clarice's only interest in Jed is the money they're being paid to look after him.
• Framing Device: "Tales in the Sand" has the framing device of an old man telling his grandson a legend about the First People, which takes up most of the issue. At the end, the narrator notes that this is just the way the men of this tribe tell the story, and it may not be what actually happened.
• Friendship Denial: When Hob suggests that Dream is just looking for a friend, Dream is furious and walks out on him, promising never to return to prove him wrong.
• Friendship Moment: When Dream and Hob meet up again, Dream makes a point of calling him a friend.
• Genius Loci: Fiddler's Green is a dream but not a person, he is a place, a living Arcadia.
• Genuine Human Hide: One of the serial killers has the idiosyncracy of wearing leather neckties. "He makes them himself." It's implied that they're made from the skins of his victims.
• A God Am I: One of the speakers on the "Religion" panel at the Cereal Convention proclaims that he is a just God who frees people from the miseries of the material world and sends them to his Heaven.
• Godzilla Threshold: When a fugitive Dreaming denizen orders a human to summon Morpheus by calling his name, then you know the stakes are really high, because Morpheus is really powerful and doesn't tolerate rule-breakers. Gilbert does this in A Doll's House when he spots the Corinthian in the hotel where he and Rose are staying, ordering her to call the Lord of Dreams if she's in danger while he goes to rescue her brother. He's resigned but accepting when he finds out that she followed his instructions after Fun Land nearly strangled and raped her.
• Goth: Zelda and Chantal, who wear only antique wedding dresses with veils that hide their faces, collect stuffed spiders and skulls, and generally lurk around being as weird as possible.
• Heel Realization: Dream punishes the serial killers by stripping them of any delusions they might have about themselves and making them realize just how evil they really are.
• Historical Domain Character: "Men of Good Fortune" includes cameo appearances by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Christopher Marlowe.
• Human Traffickers: Hob Gadling was involved in the slave trade for several years. On boasting about his success to Dream, he was told to knock it off (and he still feels guilty for it a few centuries later).
• I'll Kill You!: At the end, Dream threatens to kill Desire if the latter interferes with his affairs again.
• Immortality Hurts: Hob Gadling, who's been immortal ever since Death, in 1389, promised Dream not to take him until Hob was ready, spends the seventeenth century impoverished, sick, and starving.
  Hob: Do you know [...] how hungry a man can get if he doesn't die? But doesn't eat?
• Immortality Seeker: Hob Gadling, who becomes immortal by just refusing to die. It helps that Morpheus talks Death into humoring him.
• Impaled Palm: When Morpheus confronts the Corinthian at the convention, the Corinthian challenges him to a fight and goes at him with a knife. Morpheus deliberately blocks the knife with his hand, showing no reaction to having his palm impaled, and demonstrating that even if he agreed to a fight there is no way the Corinthian would win.
• In the Dreaming Stage of Grief: In the end, Rose chooses to believe that her experiences as the Vortex were only a weird dream, because it's the only way she can get on with her life; the implications if she accepted that it was all real would make her Go Mad from the Revelation.
• It Will Never Catch On: The historical scenes in "Men of Good Fortune" contain several examples. Geoffrey Chaucer is told by a friend that nobody's ever going to want to read "The Canterbury Tales", and a young William Shakespeare is told that he should give up because he's never going to be a good writer. In between, Hob Gadling tells Dream about an invention called printing that's newly arrived in England, and states confidently that there will never be any real demand for it.
• "Just So" Story: In "Tales in the Sand", part of the story of Dream and Nada's affair includes an explanation of why weaver birds are brown: a weaver bird got burned by the sun while retrieving a fiery berry for Nada that would allow a person who consumed it to instantly be brought to the side of their true love.
• Literal Maneater: The Corinthian is a male example; his first on-page victim is a young man he lures in to what the young man thinks is going to be kinky sexytimes.
• Living Forever Is Awesome: Hob Gadling has some ups and downs over the centuries, but every time they meet he tells Dream that he wants to keep on living. Even at his lowest, he's keen to see what comes next.
• Longest Pregnancy Ever: Lyta Hall is six months pregnant, and has been six months pregnant for two years; the pregnancy has not progressed during the time she and Hector have been living in the Dreaming.
• Meaningful Echo: "Men of Good Fortune" is set in the same pub over the course of six hundred years. Every bit of background chatter appears at least twice, showing that even as the world changes people stay much the same.
• The Mirror Shows Your True Self: In one scene, Lyta sits in front of a vanity mirror in the Dreaming and reflects back on her life, and in each panel the mirror's reflection shows her at the age she's remembering. At the end of the scene, she gets up and walks away, but her reflection remains seated with tears streaming down its face while her internal monologue insists that she's "very happy".
• Missing Child: Rose's quest to find her kid brother Jed. She lost track of him and their grandfather, his legal guardian, years ago, and tries to find them. Then, she learns that Jed was abused by their aunt and uncle for the money after their grandfather died, and he disappears after they die thanks to Dream. All Rose can do is wait in a motel per the police's orders and hope that someone can find her brother. Thankfully, Gilbert manages to rescue Jed from the Corinthian's trunk and reunite them.
• Monster and the Maiden: Rose Walker goes traveling to find her long-lost little brother, and is accompanied by Gilbert, a heavyset, eccentric older man who promises to protect her. This trope comes into play when Gilbert is revealed to be Fiddler's Green, an escaped dream Morpheus has been seeking since the beginning of the story arc.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: The Corinthian, since he has mouths in his eyesockets instead of actual eyes.
• Motor Mouth: Though Zelda is The Voiceless in waking life, in her dream she narrates in a continual stream of CamelCase.
  MommyAndDaddyToldMeToGoAwaySoHereIAmInTheOldBoneOrchardNobodyUnderstandsMe...
• Murderer P.O.V.: The Corinthian's first scene is shown from his point of view. The first few panels are tinted, which is revealed to be because he's wearing dark glasses when he takes them off — and his victim gets a good look at what's hidden behind them...
• My Grandson, Myself: Hob fakes his death and passes himself off as his own son multiple times. The one time he gets overconfident and lives in one village for 40 years without doing this, he ends up getting (unsuccessfully of course) drowned as a witch.
• Mystical Pregnancy: Lyta Hall is six months pregnant, and has been six months pregnant for two years; the pregnancy has not progressed during the time she and Hector have been living in the Dreaming. Morpheus tells her that having been gestated in the Dreaming for so long will have significant implications for the child's future, which are elaborated on in later story arcs.
• Non-Answer: When Hob tries getting any specific details from Dream about himself (his name, what he is, etc), Dream either gives him a Mathematician's Answer or no answer at all.
• No-Sell: Dream doesn't react at all to being stabbed by the Corinthian, demonstrating that the Corinthian has no power to harm him.
• Nostalgia Filter: "Men of Good Fortune" demonstrates that even in the good old days people hankered for the good old days; a scene in the 15th century has an elderly man complaining that chimneys are a bad idea, and it was much healthier when houses were full of smoke.
• Nothing Personal: Dream tells Rose that there is nothing personal in his intention to kill her, just a regrettable necessity.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Gilbert is visibly terrified when he recognizes the Corinthian at the hotel.
  • Philip Sitz when the Corinthian and the Doctor corner him at the convention. They know he's impersonating the Boogeyman and plan to kill him slowly.
  • Gilbert also has this when Matthew tells him Rose is the Vortex, since it means "Dream will have to kill her". He immediately goes to the Dreaming, turns himself in to Morpheus, and tries to bargain for Rose's life.
• Orphaned Punchline: A man in the tavern in 1389 tells a joke that ends with the punchline, "Hunting for rabbits again, friar?", and a man in the wine bar in 1989 tells what sounds like the same joke only with a vicar. In both cases most of the set-up is not heard.
• Pals with Jesus: Good old Hob Gadling, a Londonite bandit from the 14th century who maintains his friendship with the King of Dreams for centuries.
• Platonic Declaration of Love: When he realizes that he can't save Rose from dying, Gilbert apologizes to her and says he wasn't that good of a person. Rose hugs him and tells him not to say such a thing. He then says he loves her and that she can stay in his realm after she dies.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Nimrod emphasizes in the opening address of the Cereal Convention that it's important that everybody refrain from "collecting" until well after they've left the hotel, as none of them can afford for their gathering to attract police attention.
• Production Foreshadowing: In Zelda's dream she says that no one understands her except Chantal, and that together they are "Secret Brides Of The Faceless Slaves Of The Forbidden House Of The Nameless Night Of The Castle Of Dread Desire", a reference to Neil Gaiman's short story "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire", which he began writing before that issue of The Sandman, although it wasn't completed and published until after.
• Psychopathic Manchild: The serial killer Fun Land has a childlike personality that contrasts with his horrific actions. References in dialogue suggest that he still lives with his mother.
• Punk in the Trunk: Played with. When the Corinthian, Nimrod and the Doctor abduct Philip Sitz and smuggle him out of the convention in the Corinthian's car, they have to lie him on the passenger seat because the Corinthian won't let them open the trunk, saying he already has something in there that he doesn't want disturbed. It turns out that what he has in there is his intended next victim, Jed.
• Reality Warper: We learn about the nature of the "Dream Vortex", a person who, for reasons unknown, disrupts the nature of the Dreaming, and can easily destroy it and the waking world. This happened once before, and destroyed an entire world when Dream didn't stop it in time; he's thus committed himself to never letting it happen again. (The full story of the previous Vortex is told in Overture.)
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Morpheus gives one to the Corinthian:
    Morpheus: You disappoint me, Corinthian. You and these humans you inspired and created disappoint me. YOU were my masterpiece, or so I thought. A nightmare created to be the darkness, and the fear of darkness in every human heart. A black mirror made to reflect everything about itself that humanity will not confront. But look at you. Forty years walking the earth, honing yourself, infecting others with your joy of death, and what have you given them? What have you wrought, Corinthian? NOTHING. Just something else for people to be scared of, that's all. You've told them that there are bad people out there. And they've known that all along.
  • Dream delivers one to Desire regarding their manipulations. Desire is briefly cowed but brushes it off, true to their nature as a creature of the moment.
• Refuge in Audacity: A serial killer convention masquerades in plain sight as a "cereal convention".
• Rite of Passage: In "Tales in the Sand", the Framing Device is a young man being told a legend as part of the ritual marking his initiation into manhood.
• Roaring Rampage of Romance: Morpheus and Nada make love once. Her home city is reduced to glass shards. It's suggested that had they remained together, the entire world would have been destroyed.
• Samus Is a Girl: In-universe, the Bogeyman (actually a fan impersonating him) goes Oh, Crap! when he learns the serial killer Dog Soup is a woman at the "cereal" convention.
• Serial Killer: A whole convention full of them, most memorably the Corinthian.
• Shared Dream: When Rose starts manifesting as the Vortex, the dreams of the people in the house with her start blending together. If she were to fully manifest, everybody everywhere would be sucked into a single enormous shared dream.
• Shout-Out:
  • The title is reminiscent of the play A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen. Both works are about people who are being manipulated by other people without realizing it, like dolls.
  • The characters of Barbie and Ken are a reference to Barbie. In A Game of You, it's mentioned that Ken left Barbie for a girl called Sindy. Sindy was a UK-specific girls' fashion doll, like Barbie.
  • The Cool Old Guy who befriends Rose shares an appearance, personality, and first name with G. K. Chesterton (one of Gaiman's favorite writers from childhood). That's because he's a dream.
  • Just in case it's not crystal clear that Gilbert is Chesterton, the character is introduced with a line from one of Chesterton's famous essays, On Lying in Bed. Why else mention a pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling?
  • At one point, a poster for The Cure can be seen on the wall.
  • Jed's dreams are in the style and format of Winsor McCay's comic strip Little Nemo, about the surreal dreams of a young boy.
  • In her letter to Miranda and Unity, Rose compares Hal's boarding house to The Addams Family, and refers to Ken and Barbie as "the Stepford Yuppies".
  • Hal's dream has a The Wizard of Oz theme.
  • In Zelda's dream, she looks like Alice in the original illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
  • The story in which Hob Gadling is introduced is called "Men of Good Fortune", which is also the name of a song by Lou Reed from the album Berlin.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: After 400 years of acquaintance, it is the news that Hob has gotten into the transatlantic slavery business that prompts Dream to give him advice on what he should do with his life, as he finds it particularly distasteful. On their next meeting, Hob says he's realized it's something he "can never make restitution for".
• Solomon Divorce: Rose and Jed's parents split them up when they divorced. Rose seems to have had a fairly decent life with her mother, while Jed... did not.
• Sunglasses at Night: The Corinthian. This is because he has tiny mouths with razor-sharp teeth where his eyes should be.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Nimrod's mental insistence, while nerving himself up before speaking before his fellow serial killers at the convention, that he's a hunter who isn't afraid of anyone and certainly not of women.
• Sword Cane: Gilbert's cane has a sword concealed in it.
• Take Me Instead: Gilbert offers to die in Rose's place. Dream tells him that it's not happening since Gilbert, aka Fiddler's Green, isn't the Vortex and thus can't fulfill the requirements. Rose's grandmother, Unity Kinkaid, ends up taking Rose's place, since she was meant to be the original Vortex before falling victim to the sleeping sickness.
• Take That!: This being a Neil Gaiman series, a jab at Freud is pretty much inevitable. In Volume 2, when Rose and Morpheus are flying together through the Dreaming:
  Rose: Do you know what Freud said about dreams of flying? It means you're really dreaming about having sex.
  Morpheus: Indeed? Tell me, then, what does it mean when you dream about having sex?
• Tempting Fate: The scene in 1589 ends with Hob saying that he has everything to live for and nowhere to go but up. The next time Dream sees him, he's lost everything.
• Too Dumb to Live: Philip Sitz, the fanboy posing as the Boogieman, thinks it's a great idea to bluff his way into the "Cereal Convention" and act like a fanboy towards his idols, rather than keeping his head down and not bringing any attention to himself.
• Trouble Entendre: In issue #14, the members in the cereal convention are having normal discussions until you noticed that they're using phrases that uses words such as "die" or "murder" or "butcher", hinting that most, if not all of these visitors are serial killers.
• Verbal Tic: Gilbert's "HOOM!"
• The Voiceless: Zelda never speaks when anyone other than Chantal is around, although Chantal occasionally refers to something she apparently said when they were in private.
• Wasteful Wishing: When Rose encounters the Fates, she's entirely unprepared and doesn't know the rule that each supplicant gets only answer from each, so she misses out on her chance to learn anything useful by asking unfocussed questions like "Who are you?" and "Protect me from what?", which the Fates cheerfully give cryptic non-answers to before telling her she's asked the wrong questions and disappearing.
• What You Are in the Dark:
  • Gilbert has been living a quiet life for years, posing as an eccentric but ultimately Cool Old Guy who is loyal to his friends. Dream would most likely punish him severely for escaping from the Dreaming and selfishly pursuing his life. Gilbert orders Rose to summon Morpheus in the case of emergency when he recognizes the Corinthian at their motel, runs off to rescue Jed from being trapped inside the Corinthian's car, and turns himself in to his Lord to save Rose's life from Dream.
  • In contrast, the Corinthian fails this. Given he is the personification of all of humanity's darkness brought to life, he instead inspires a generation of human monsters and serial killers, because he cannot deny his sadistic side. Dream, when confronting the Corinthian, makes no bare bones of his disappointment, even refusing to fight the Corinthian on his terms.
• Would Hurt a Child: Fun Land is a serial killer who specifically targets children.
• You Are Not Alone: Rose is fretting as her little brother lies unconscious in a hospital room, with Gilbert watching over him. The residents of the apartment house gather to cheer her up; Hal makes tea, while Barbie and Ken offer platitudes, and Chantal and Zelda offer to tell her a comforting story.

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