Sandman and the Captivity of Morpheus - The Hijacking of Consciousness in Zone 3

I know what it feels like to be trapped.
Not behind iron bars, but inside my own mind — when my thoughts no longer belong to me, when every dream feels borrowed or censored. In those moments, I feel like Morpheus in Sandman, imprisoned not by choice but by a world that fears the freedom of dreams.

A century of captivity in the series mirrors the times when I too have been bound by ideology, fear, or routine. My consciousness waits, quietly, for the moment of release.

The Original Paradigm: Dreams as Collective Belonging

In Sandman, Morpheus’s captivity begins with an occult ritual in 1916. Instead of capturing Death, the magicians trap Dream himself.
If we look at the original paradigms of human history, captivity of dreams was unthinkable. For Amerindian peoples, dreaming was not a private act but a shared belonging — visions that guided the group, balanced fears, and reconnected individuals with the whole.

The avatar Iam reminds us: “When dreams are shared, they are never chained. It is the isolation of dreams that breeds captivity.”

The Old World’s Domestication

Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything shows how societies in the Old World began to domesticate imagination:

• Dreams were reinterpreted only by priests.
  
  

• Night visions were turned into rules, judgments, or prophecies.
  
  

• Collective creativity became centralized power.
  
  

Morpheus’s century-long imprisonment is an allegory of this domestication: the hijacking of the human capacity to imagine freely. When rulers own the narrative, dreams turn into prisons.

This is precisely what defines Zone 3: a state where consciousness is dominated by external ideologies and loses its original plasticity.

Sleep Science and Evidence

The captivity of Dream reflects a physiological truth: the brain itself can be “trapped” under external or internal tension.

• In N2 sleep, the brain consolidates memories through sleep spindles and K-complexes. When this stage is disrupted (chronic stress, trauma), memory consolidation fails.
  
  

• Neuroimaging (EEG + NIRS) shows heightened sympathetic activity in prolonged stress — a form of biological captivity where the body “forgets” how to release tension.
  
  

• Epigenetic evidence indicates that chronic captivity of mind and body (e.g., trauma, social oppression) leaves methylation marks on stress-related genes like NR3C1.
  
  

Thus, captivity in Sandman is not only a mythological metaphor — it resonates with real neurobiological scars of confinement.

Zone 1, Zone 2, and Zone 3

• Zone 1: daily responsibilities, where interoceptive and postural tensions are imposed but can still be released after action.
  
  

• Zone 2: a zone of fruition and metacognition, where plasticity and belonging are restored.
  
  

• Zone 3: the hijacked state, where external ideologies (like the magicians in Sandman) capture our attentional and emotional systems, blocking access to creativity and free belonging.
  
  

When Morpheus escapes after a century, he must first rebuild his kingdom — a metaphor for the long process of restoring consciousness after captivity.

Synthesis

The captivity of Morpheus in Sandman is more than a narrative device: it is a mirror of how our own consciousness can be hijacked by fear, ideology, and systemic control.

• In history, this happened through religious dogma and hierarchical domestication.
  
  

• In neuroscience, we see it in disrupted sleep cycles, trauma, and epigenetic scars.
  
  

• In our framework, it is Zone 3 — the captivity of the Damasian Mind, cut off from fruition.
  
  

Or, as the avatar Iam concludes:
“Freedom begins when we reclaim the dream. To break Zone 3 is to awaken the original right to belong.”

Suggested References:

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

• Iber, C. et al. (2007). The AASM Manual for the Scoring of Sleep and Associated Events.
  
  

• McEwen, B. S. (2017). Neurobiological and systemic effects of chronic stress. Nature Neuroscience.