'Sandman': What if dreams weren't just dreams?

It's a February day, and Neil Gaiman (Portchester, UK, 61) is remembering how, when he started writing

, he stopped having nightmares.

What's even worse, he says.

“I stopped dreaming.

It was as if whoever was sending me the dreams decided that he was not going to send me any more because he was not giving them the use they should, ”he assures, mysteriously.

There's a storm outside, the trees moving from one side of the window behind her to the other.

He is somewhere in the United Kingdom, advancing the promotion of the long-awaited adaptation for Netflix - which opens on August 5 - of the comic series that he wrote between 1989 and 1993 for DC, and whose central character, the King of Dreams,

, was, in fact, an update of the one created by, among others, the legendary Jack Kirby.

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Three Fantastic Tales by Neil Gaiman

“Since I was a child I had not stopped having nightmares, but at that time, when I started writing them down, they stopped.

I suppose there was something too conscious there, and the unconscious was forced to act, ”he says, and takes it and does not take it seriously.

“The world of dreams has always fascinated me because, think about it, we spend a third of our lives dreaming.

In the time that we are awake the world seems real and consistent to us.

But every night, when we close our eyes, we move into a world where anything can happen.

What if what we lived there was not just a dream?

What if it had a meaning?

After all, dreams influence our decisions,” he says, and he is literally quoting himself, or quoting his character, Morpheus, the King of Dreams, when he does so.

The narrator of the imperial television adaptation of

it is Morpheus himself, also known as Sandbox, and he warns the human spectator of it that what he calls the Real World is nothing more than the Awakened World.

He tells her that there is another, who "waits for you every night when you close your eyes and enter my Kingdom."

In that Kingdom everything has been created by him, and he must keep it under control, because it can happen that a nightmare escapes and settles in the Real World, feeds on it —kills and destroys— and it is impossible to return it to the place it came from. .

That has happened when the story starts, and the King of Dreams has personified himself in the Awakened World to find her, and there he has been summoned by the wrong person and has ended up locked in a glass cage that will take more than a century. in going out

“My stories tend to start with an image.

Here, the image was that of a naked man locked in a glass cage in the basement of a house.

Who is he, I wondered.

What is he doing there?

What will happen when he gets out?

What will have become of his world? ”, Gaiman asks himself again, as he asked himself then, convinced that, if something has dealt with

it has been “digging into the heart of the human”.

"What are we and what do dreams do to us, why do we have hope, why do we aspire to certain things," he adds.

Then he says that what he has enjoyed the most has been "reconnecting with the characters, 30 years later".

“I have been very lonely during the pandemic.

I spent six months 4,000 miles from my wife and son, locked up at home, seeing no one, and the only thing that comforted me was visiting characters.

I reread all of PG Wodehouse to be able to do it,” she says.

Illustration from 'The Sandman'.

Neil Gaman

He believes that it is not that fantasy is today more appealing to the reader for the fact that it offers an alternative to the real world, which during those years became hostile and unpredictable, but rather that “the reader seeks to feel at home”.

“What we have missed during those years has been the contact with others.

And, at the same time, feel safe.

What stories like

do is give the reader, or the viewer now, people he's going to want to stay with, and a world where he feels like nothing bad can happen to him,” he says.

Amusingly, he adds,

, at times, "looks like

with a lot of magic."

He also says that he always believed that when talking about the human being,

it would, in some sense, always be contemporary.

Today she says something else: “The fragility of the world is the fragility of the protagonist”.

“When the pandemic broke out, we understood that the world is fragile.

That everything we thought would last forever could end in days because of microscopic beings.

If the virus had been a bit more deadly, or more contagious, we would be in a very different world, in which almost all of us would have lost a good part of our family and friends.

We would be in the ruins of civilization”, sentence.

And what about terror?

Does it warn of the consequences of our actions?

“In a horror story, everyone gets what they deserve.

In the real world it doesn't often happen that someone gets what they deserve and that frustrates and pisses us off.

I find it touching that terror tries to calm our anger by invoking a more just world,” she says.

And, with a smile, before hanging up the video call, he adds: “Although that is not what happens in

”.

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