Enter Sandman

Trevor Hogg learns about the power of dreaming from Neil Gaiman and the creative team behind Netflix’s fantasy drama series

- Trevor Hogg

On a daily basis humans come in contact with the fantastical when they dream, which is something that author Neil Gaiman finds to be wondrous. “We wake up, live sensible lives, and then for six or seven or eight hours a night we go quietly stark scary mad. With Sandman, when I was writing the comic, I got to essentially take dreams and stories as my lens to look at and inspect the world.” The Lord of Dreams, Morpheus, attempts to restore his kingdom after being held captive by an occult in the Netflix adaptation developed by Gaiman, David Goyer and Allan Heinberg. “This isn’t the comics. This is television. There is an incredibly fine line between maintaining the heart of something and being precious about it.”

It was important to have Gaiman as a producer on the Netflix production. “One of the things that gives it a coherent whole, a narrative feeling is the voice of Neil himself, which is very specific,” notes executive producer David Goyer. “Wherever possible we wanted a fidelity to the source material so that characters in the TV show felt like they’ve sprung from off the page. We want Morpheus to look like Morpheus. We want the Helm to look like the Helm. We want Matthew the Raven to behave like Matthew the Raven. Most people would have said that there is no way that we’re going to do Mervyn Pumpkinhead outside of a $250 million movie but we said, ‘No. We’re going to do that character and he is going to look like he does in the comic book’.”