Dream (Daniel Hall)

We jump directly to the tenth episode of The Sandman for another couple of characters from the comics, both big additions also in the wider DC Universe. First of all, after getting impregnated by her deceased husband in the Dreaming, Lyta finally gives birth to a baby boy. In Lost Hearts, we make the acquaintance of Daniel, a beautiful baby destined for enormous things. In the comics, Daniel is an infant for most of the story, until magic and necessity makes him become suddenly adult and fill in a role in a game-changing twist. If the show will ever be renewed for other seasons, watch out for major spoilers ahead.

The conception and birth of Daniel Hall were anything but ordinary: his father, Hector Hall, died shortly after he conceived him, but this didn’t prevent him from visiting his mother Lyta in her dreams. As Hector became the new Sandman, he invited Lyta to the Dream Stream with him, and she followed him: for the two years that the superhero couple spent in the Dreaming, Daniel’s growth was somehow put in stasis, but he was formed of energies from both the Dreaming and the Waking World. When finally Dream of the Endless intervened to put an end to the pocket dimension Brute and Globe had built, releasing everyone imprisoned in it, Lyta and her unborn son were returned to the Waking World, where she could complete her pregnancy. Dream, however, had told Lyta that he laid claims on the unborn child, as he had spent most of his gestation in his realm; he also called the baby Daniel, as if it was a name the fetus himself had revealed to him, and against all odds Lyta felt it was the right one. When Daniel was born, Lyta tried to forget the prophecies and the threats, and to put some order into her life… but every time Daniel fell asleep, he physically traveled into the Dreaming, enjoying the stories Abel, Cain and Eve had to tell him in the House of Secrets, and sometimes coming back to the Waking World with some “souvenir”, such as a feather from Matthew who usually kept an eye on him to keep him safe. Lyta didn’t like it at all, and was always afraid of losing her son. One night, her greatest fear came true: she left for a job interview, and when she came back Daniel was missing. While she was sure Dream had taken him, the culprits were actually the Norse god Loki and the fairy Puck, who sought revenge against Dream and targeted the boy under his protection. Dream sent Matthew and the Corinthian to free the boy, but in the meanwhile Lyta had gone mad, and had allied herself with the Furies, laying waste upon the Dreaming, madly furious with the Endless for taking both her husband and her son.

Quite ironically, while Lyta wanted to prevent Dream from taking her son away from her, her actions sealed the baby’s cosmic role, and took him afar from her for all eternity. As the Furies were approaching his castle, Dream knew that confronting them would have meant his destruction: he had, after all, euthanized his own son Orpheus, thus committing the one crime the Furies were allowed to kill him for. Just before going to greet the three attackers, though, Dream had a brief conversation with Daniel, during which he made gift of his Eagles Stone, in which he had poured his own essence. As Dream left to be killed, Daniel started playing with the Eagles Stone: as the old Dream died, his essence moved into him, and he became the new Dream, not exactly a new incarnation, but rather another “point of view”. As a first act as the old/new Dream, Daniel recreated all the dreams and nightmares who had been killed by the Furies, restoring the Dreaming to its former glory. The only one he didn’t create himself was the Griffin meant to replace the one destroyed by the trio of vengeful goddesses: he asked for a real one to be sent to the Dreaming from Mount Olympus, sure that the surviving Guardians would have appreciated the fact that he considered their fallen comrade irreplaceable. The new Dream’s situation was quite a difficult one for him, and since the moment he attended his predecessor’s (his own?) funeral it looked like two natures inhabited him. The other Endless greeted him as their brother, and he even spoke like him, but he wasn’t him, and needed guidance on many daily tasks that pertained his role… luckily enough, Matthew was a good advisor in this sense. First of all, Dream visited his heartbroken mother Lyta: he told her that everything human about Daniel Hall had burnt in the ritual, but that he offered her his protection, promising that nothing would have ever hurt her again. He was of his word: when Lyta and Hector were banished to Hell during The Spectre‘s attack on the magic world, Dream reached for them, and offered them asylum into the Dreaming. Maybe there was something of Daniel into Dream still…

Daniel Hall is a pure and innocent soul, a human kid who only knows love, wonder and tenderness: even as an Endless, he retains some of these characteristics, and he appears to be much kinder and gentler than his predecessor. As the new Dream, he possesses all the powers of the original: he’s now an immortal and virtually invulnerable being who can shape reality by defining and managing what is fantasy, he can create dreams and nightmares, he can appear in many places at once, he knows everything going on in his domain, he can manipulate sleep and dreams, he can foresee the future, he can change his appearance into anything he likes, and much more. Named after a prophet capable of interpreting dreams, now Daniel is Dream incarnate, a founding principle of reality, an immortal force of the universe: he’s an Endless, now and forever.