It came through. Not without loose ends and weaknesses, but…there’s still no getting around it. Some things that have a distinctive authorial fingerprint should not be continued by another person. My affection and reverence for the original Sandman by Neil Gaiman made me extremely skeptical of the idea that any other writer could pull it off. But here we are now.
How exactly this happened can be seen in a few of the key plot resolutions. In volume two, Empty Shells, Dora was our main character. The framing of the story doesn’t always position her as the clear protagonist in One Magical Movement, but Dora continues to be one of the driving forces of the plot. The mystery of her origin, which was set up in the first two books, is revealed to be centrally important to the whole story. As do mysteries in general.
The fate of Cain, keeper of the House of Mysteries, is also connected to the man responsible for Dora’s lost memories: Hyperion Keter. This is the same Mr. Keter whom we saw briefly, unconscious in a hospital bed, at the end of Empty Shells. Also at the end of Empty Shells, we learn that Fawney Rig was the setting of this confluence of events.
Dora, it turns out, is a Night Hag. A Night Hag is a regional variation of the Succubi/Incubi myth. One Magical Movement actually starts with a support group for ancient, supernatural creatures that are struggling to exist in the modern world. The forbidden pleasure they all share and revile (almost like recovering addicts) is to simply obey their nature without the consideration of a human brain. Nikki, a fey creature that got turned into a dragon by popular reinterpretation, barely stops herself from attacking an intoxicated night-swimmer she encounters in the ocean.
The support group decides to crash a Pride March, as it is constituted of mortals who wish simply to celebrate their existence and survival after a lifetime of secrecy. One of them, an ancient guardian spirit of sailors called The Gentle Goellan, wanders over to the radical Christian protesters. He begins to mutter an old sea shandy and instigates a brief riot. The Gentle Goellan felt a naked need to cause havoc within the protestors (apparently) and gravitated toward it like an oceanborn tempest, in which sailors would often invoke him. After the Pride Marchers come out unscathed, Nikki transforms into a literal draconic fairy.
The notion of following one’s nature in the face of adversity is central to both Dora’s arc and the story in general. Dora was doing exactly that when she first encountered Hyperion Keter: specifically, following her nature as a Night Hag. Hyperion- or Perry, as he is known to his intimates -simply chose to assert, in his loudest psychic voice, that she is not real.
This rid him of Dora but woke him up to an uncomfortable truth: humanity is dogged by too many unreal things to keep track of. Many of them, in their multitudes, are too dangerous to be borne. This realization moves Hyperion Keter to make it his life’s work to save humanity. He eventually learns that Dream, the embodiment of the intellect and imagination, had been magically trapped and held at Fawney Rig, in England.
This was done by Roderick Burgess in the very first Sandman comics and Hyperion decides to reverse-engineer Burgess’s spell. However, he does not use the magic in the same way: he does not want Dream trapped, merely exiled from the Dreaming. This creates a power vacuum that Hyperion fills with an alchemical AI. This AI has a consciousness whose subconscious hides an algorithm to systematically purge all irrationality from the Dreaming, which also removes it from the minds of all sentient beings.
This explains the appearance of Wan- the enigmatic moth deity -and the soggies from the first two volumes. The soggies were drones created by the AI to remove all superstition and irrationality and replace it with productive scientific and technological knowledge. Wan is the AI consciousness, unaware of its subconscious activities.
There is so much to unpack in these details, but I’ll start with a large commonality that might connect the finer ones. By this, I mean the nature of the Dreaming itself. In popular wisdom, we usually conceptualize dreams as taking place in our own heads, with no outside influence that did not originally come from waking experiences. Some people entertain the existence of a collective subconscious that all minds are equally connected to, but different individuals assert this with different degrees of literal or metaphorical meaning.
Those exceptions being accounted for, people commonly think of the space in which they dream as exclusive to themselves. In the world of The Sandman and The Dreaming, all dreams happen in the same place. Everyone has a mind of their own where their dreams are “born” into, but once you begin to dream, you take the contents of your mind into a universal space shared by all sentient beings. This model clearly has more in common with the collective subconscious than individual, mutually isolated minds.
This aspect of the world building is referred to and elaborated on throughout One Magical Movement. This is implicit in the beginning, with the struggling mythic creatures, and explicit at the end. It turns out ordinary modern skepticism is not the biggest threat to the fey, spirits and other magical beings.
Early in the book, Matthew the raven is picking up on a subtle but ever-present feeling that something is dying. He learns that he smells it everywhere because the world itself is dying. People everywhere are committing suicide because they are oppressed by a feeling of inescapable pointlessness, due to the soggies replacing all dreams with scientific knowledge. The motivation to go on living is missing without the irrational. One might say why was sacrificed for how.
While the story states that this is impacting mortals in particular, there are beings in the Dreaming who are similarly affected, such as Abel and Lucien. Abel, the keeper of the House of Secrets, is now struggling with life without his brother Cain, of the House of Mysteries (which might also be an imbalance between how and why). Lucien’s angst, meanwhile, stems from being cut off from his library of unwritten books, from which he frequently narrates. Irrationality is part of his why as well.
The three currently available Dreaming volumes all mention Lucien’s inability to narrate. They also conflate the omniscient third-person narrator with Lucien, Rose Walker and other characters. Meaning, a text box that initially appears to be a non-character narrator turns out to be Rose Walker, Lucien, etc.
This means that the reader’s point of view of the story is equated with reading a book that does not exist. In this fictional world, Lucien would only be narrating- and exchanging narration -if this comic came from his library of non-existent books. To say nothing of the fact that it is literally true that these stories are fictional, they are even set in a fictional dreaming world that contrasts with a fictional waking world in which these events were never “written.”
The story never gets any more meta than that, though, which is fortunate. If it did, it would risk upsetting the balance between the authority of the story’s fictional premise and the authority of the author/narrator.
The reason why I’m spending so much time on this is because it reflects on Simon Spurrier’s reading of the original Sandman comics. He clearly read those stories closely and lovingly, as that is where many of these ideas first appeared. The personal versus collective dialectic of the Dreaming are explored frankly in The Doll’s House, A Game Of You, Fables and Reflections and The Kindly Ones. The dialectic is present throughout the original comics, but those books in particular have plots that involve it directly.
The importance of the dialectic in One Magical Movement is where nothing or non-existence is located. This is also precedented in the original Sandman: the perpetrator and method of the death of Morpheus is one of the most fun uses of the McGuffin I’ve ever seen. This teasing Easter Egg hunt is contrasted against Morpheus’s clear desire to commit suicide. In One Magical Movement, nothingness is used similarly as a McGuffin.
The subconscious is usually imagined as a repository for all the backed up information that enters through your senses but is not immediately relevant. Frued famously described consciousness as housing the smallest portion of the mind. With Wan, though, the opposite is true: all of the personality is contained in his waking self and his subconscious (the Dark Moth) is an empty, sucking void of destruction.
Dora, who feels deeply and lives in the moment, is haunted by a forgotten past. Later, when she recovers it, it is clear that the only thing she ever lost was a name and a description of the nature she follows anyway (Night Hag). She could feel, was troubled by the fear that feeling was not enough, and eventually learned that the lost information pointed back to feeling. Her experience in the Fulcrum, the former home of Destruction, points her in the direction of hope back in Pathways and Emanations. Destruction, Lucien tells us, is a frozen moment between ending and beginning.
Hyperion, after scattering Dora’s identity with his declaration that she doesn’t exist, unknowingly wages war on the chaotic and irrational subconscious which saps the motivation and life from existence. On several plot and thematic layers, where nothingness is located and what it is doing shifts constantly. Even the narration, which is implicitly coming from a non-existent book, participates in the implementation of nothingness.
Likewise, the absence of Dream creates a void that needs to be filled and the AI that eventually gave birth to both Wan and the Dark Moth can only occupy a single physical location. Something from the Dreaming had to replace the AI so the AI could fully mature in the Dreaming. (This also gives Cain a brief but delicious opportunity to become a supervillain) This same phenomena is echoed when Wan volunteers to absorb the new dream vortex to spare the life of Daniel once he returns.
Like I said, there are loose ends but nothing that threatens the overall integrity of the story. Particularly, the fate of Ivy Walker, who is trapped in the world of the Mundane Egg that Daniel used to create a new universe during his exile from the Dreaming. It mirrors the saga of Daniel and his mother Hippolyta, but doesn’t do much more. That could be something future Dreaming comics may elaborate on.
AilixChaerea 