He’s gotta be the tragic figure standing out in the rain, mournin’ the loss of his beloved, so down comes the rain, right on cue. Now, guys like me, ordinary Joes, we just shrug our shoulders, say, hey, that’s life, flick it if you can’t take a joke. Then one day the magic’s worn off, and he goes back to work, and she takes a hike. Y’know? He spends a coupla months hanging out with a new broad. Several of the inhabitants of the Dreamworld discuss how his mood affects their manifestation of reality: Then she asks Dream, who, surprisingly, consents - though his reasons have little to do with helping Delirium or finding Destruction, and far more to do with having an excuse to walk in the mortal world.ĭream, we learn, has just been dumped by his latest girlfriend, the witch Thessaly (from A Game of You), and he’s gone into quite the existential funk over it. She first asks the twins, the siblings nearest to her in age, Desire and Despair both refuse.

But she doesn’t want to go it alone (and is vaguely aware that she can’t, fractured and unstable as she is). In this collection, Delirium, youngest of the Endless, has conceived a fierce need to go in search of “the Prodigal”, Destruction, the middle of the siblings, who has abandoned his realm and who has not been seen in some 300 years.

Brief Lives probably has the most cohesive plot of any of the Sandman collections, excepting maybe Volume 9, The Kindly Ones.

The sandman volume 7