The Screaming and The Dreaming

(Written Friday afternoon - while offline.)

I’m sitting 30,000 ft over New York City and we’ve just been told we’ll be circling for another 45 minutes due to congestion at JFK. And, this is after taking off about an hour late for the same reason. And, I’m sitting right behind an infant who has been screaming her lungs out for most of the trip, and my iPod ran out of juice about an hour into the flight. So, life could be better at the moment. But, she seems to have calmed down now so I’m hoping for the best.

On the brighter side, I’m in the middle or re-reading Neil Gaiman’s brilliant Sandman graphic novels. I just finished the eighth book out of ten, World’s End, and I’m reminded of what an incredibly rich world he has created, with complex, mysterious, appealing characters, many based on existing mythologies, but he’s made them entirely his own.

Sandman goes under many names, the most common being Dream and Morpheus. His charge is to rule the dream world, and his realm, The Dreaming, is inhabited by an interesting cast: Lucius, the librarian, tending to countless books filled with our dreams; Abel and Cain in the Houses of Secrets and Mysteries (Cain maintains the nasty habit of killing his brother, over and over again), to mention a few. Dream, along with his six siblings, is one of the Endless, each with a different responsibility: Destiny, Destruction, Desire and Despair (the twins), Delirium (formerly Delight), and Death. Besides Morpheus himself, Death is the most commonly recurring character, and what a character! Instead of the old man with the scythe, she is a goth-looking, but very attractive, woman. My personal favorite is Delirium. She is a young girl with several-colored eyes and hair, her body sprouts butterflies, frogs and flowers, and her speech is mostly seemingly incoherent nonsense, and she provides the stories with much of the subtext.

Argh, the child in front of me has started screaming again, and I’m finding it hard to concentrate. I’m done, for now…