The other day, I was watching a movie when the song Mr. Sandman, by the Chordettes, started playing. I had never heard of this character and was quite puzzled by the lyrics, as I couldn't see the relation between sand and sleep. I decided to quickly research him and was surprised to discover that not only I had already seen - blindly - multiple pop-culture references to him, but that he also had a fascinating, centuries-old, development story. As a mythology and fairy tales fanatic, I felt pretty ashamed for never having read anything about Sandman before, and thought that to write an article about him was the best way to compensate for this lapse.
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Sandman, generally, is an entity responsible for putting people to sleep and bringing them good dreams, which he does by throwing magical sand in their eyes. The explanation for the use of sand is that, when we wake up, there's always some residue in the corner of our eyes. It's a combination of mucus, skin cells, and other sciencey things, but it isn't hard to understand why people would describe it as sand. The only mystery is why did they think that sand in our eyes was a healthy combination for a good night's sleep. The answer lies in Sandman's dark origins.
In greek mythology, Nyx ("Night") and Erebus ("Darkness") were married and had two kids, Thanatos ("Death") and Hypnos ("Sleep"). The latter had three children, the gods of dream: Morpheus ("Shape"), Phobetor ("Fear") and Phantasos ("Imagination"). Sandman is an amalgam of this entire pantheon, and time and history made his appearance in Northern European folklore inevitably demoniac. His name was used to send children to bed early, and in 1816, the German writer E. T. A. Hoffman wrote a description of him that's probably the closest one to the original folktales:
"'Eh, Natty,' said she, 'don't you know that yet? He is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won't go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.'"
This idea, though, didn't survive long in the 19th century. Soon after Hoffman's Der Sandman, Hans Christian Andersen wrote a lighter version of it, where Sandman allows good children to "dream the most beautiful stories the whole night" using, beyond sand, an umbrella with photographs, and condemns the naughty ones to "sleep heavily, and wake up in the morning without having dreamed at all". People were, by this time, more sensitive over the children's feelings, and so Andersen's story prevailed. Oh, bother.
Sandman is still seen nowadays mostly as a friendly figure, appearing in songs such as the one by the Chordettes, and in children movies, like Rise of the Guardians. His dark side, though, hasn't been completely forgotten and was brought back specifically by comic books. He's a villain in the Marvel universe, and even has his own series written by Neil Gaiman in the DC one. After considering all this, the only thing I can conclude is that sleep and dreams are phenomena that still fascinate us. They're mysterious states of half-death, half-delirium, and yet so essential for our well-being, that Sandman, its personification, couldn't be anything but just as ambiguous. I'm glad I finally woke up to this character and will examine curiously all other references to him that I seem to find.
