The True Story Of The Sandman's Sleeping Sickness Of 1916
Warning: SPOILERS for The Sandman
In the premiere episode of The Sandman, the capture of Dream of the Endless (Tom Sturridge) causes a global sleeping sickness, which is based on an event that happened in real life. Executive producer Neil Gaiman's long-awaited adaptation of his beloved DC Comics graphic novels adapts the first two collected volumes, Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll's House. The sleepy sickness happens in the first chapter, which introduces Dream as well as his captor, Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance).
Burgess, the self-styled Magus, is a British warlock who intended to apprehend Dream's sister, Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), and force her to restore his dead son to life as well as grant Roderick immortality. Instead, Burgess' ritual inadvertently captured Dream in 1916. Robbed of his symbols of office, his ruby, his helmet, and his bag of sand, Dream is imprisoned by the Magus for over a century. However, the disappearance of the lord of dreams wreaked havoc on the waking world and Morpheus' realm, the Dreaming, which began to collapse as several dreams and nightmares abandoned the dimensional plane. Beyond the Dreaming, in the waking world, a sleeping sickness spread and affected millions of people, who simply fell asleep and didn't wake up. One of them, Unity Kincaid (Sandra James-Young), was a pivotal victim who was supposed to become the Dream Vortex of her era. Instead, that power passed to her granddaughter, Rose Walker (Vanesu Samunyai).
Related: Every Name & Title Dream Has Had In The Sandman
Neil Gaiman must have based The Sandman season 1's sleeping sickness on a real epidemic that occurred from 1916 (the year Dream was captured by Roderick Burgess) to 1927. Known as lethargic
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