Sandman and Dream as Perpetual -  Damasian Consciousness and the Integration of Zones

I have felt that my dreams were older than myself.
As if something sustained them beyond my story, something that organizes entire worlds.
In Sandman, that something has a name: Dream of the Endless, Morpheus. He is not a god, but a principle — the personification of dreaming that moves through humans, animals, cultures, and time.

The Original Paradigm: Dreaming as Cosmic Force

For Indigenous peoples, dreaming was not just a biological function but a cosmic force of connection.
To dream was to be in contact with other worlds, with ancestors, with invisible territories shaping the visible.
The dream was never “mine” but ours, sustaining myths, rituals, and belonging.

Dream, in Sandman, embodies this paradigm: he is perpetual because dreaming has always been there, since before the human.

The avatar Olmeca reminds us: “Dreaming is foundation, not invention. It is the territory where all meets.”

The Old World’s Domestication

The Old World fractured dreaming into several forms of capture:

• Religion subjected it to dogma, as exclusive prophecy or revelation.
  
  

• Cartesian philosophy reduced it to sensory error.
  
  

• Reductionist science dismissed it as meaningless noise.
  
  

• The market commodified it, turning dreams into slogans and consumer desire.
  
  

In Sandman, Morpheus’s imprisonment reflects this domestication: when humans capture Dream, his realm decays — a metaphor for how collective dreaming has been impoverished.

Sleep Science and Evidence

Neuroscience reveals that dreaming is not illusion but an integrative function of the mind:

• In N1, fragmented images appear, transition from wakefulness to sleep.
  
  

• In N2, memories and learning are consolidated.
  
  

• In N3, the body is restored and energy sustained.
  
  

• In phasic REM, vivid, emotional narratives emerge.
  
  

• In tonic REM, the brain processes identity and self-image.
  
  

Together, these phases sustain what Antonio Damasio calls core consciousness: the body narrating itself in flow.

Dream, in Sandman, is precisely this perpetual — the continuity of consciousness, renewed each night.

Zone 1, Zone 2, and Zone 3

• Zone 1: dreaming reduced to instinct, private impulse.
  
  

• Zone 2: dreaming shared, weaving belonging and collective creativity.
  
  

• Zone 3: dreaming domesticated into dogma or product.
  
  

The challenge is to move out of Zone 1’s prison and Zone 3’s capture, to live fully in Zone 2, where dreaming becomes practice of freedom and belonging.

Final Synthesis

Sandman is more than dark fantasy: it is an allegory of dreaming as foundation of existence.

• In original paradigms, dreaming was cosmic and collective force.
  
  

• In the Old World, it was domesticated and reduced.
  
  

• In science, each stage of sleep shows how body, memory, and identity are integrated.
  
  

• In our framework, dreaming is a perpetual dimension of Damasian Consciousness, sustained in the zones of being.
  
  

Or, as the avatar Olmeca concludes:
“Dream is perpetual because it is not property. It is common territory, where life reinvents itself each night.”

Suggested References:

• Graeber, D. & Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
  
  

• Damasio, A. (2010). Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain.
  
  

• Hobson, J. A. (2009). REM sleep and dreaming: Towards a theory of protoconsciousness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.