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“Was he really there at all? When you try to remember him he fades and shimmers until he seems little more than the echo of a dream.” – Rose Walker, “Into the Night”

The tremendous amount of continuously intersecting story lines within “The Sandman” was on full display in the first issue in the “Doll’s House” collection, “Tales in the Sand,” which serves as prelude to the “Doll’s House” narrative proper. The frame story shows an old man in an African culture taking a younger man into the desert to tell him a story as part of a manhood ritual. The tale the old man tells is of “a pair of star-cross’d lovers,” Nada and Dream (Gaiman gets his Shakespeare references in, so I figure I’ll get mine).

The woman fears the ramifications of engaging in a relationship with an immortal and spurns Dream. In his subsequent Anger, Dream sends Nada to Hell, where she remains to this day. How do we know this? We saw him walk by her cell in issue #4, “A Hope in Hell.” At the time, it seemed like a bit of a random exchange, but it turned out Gaiman had Tarantino’d us, showing the end of the story ten thousand years after it began. Although saying he Tarantino’d it isn’t really fair, as these issues came out years before “Reservoir Dogs” or “Pulp Fiction.”

Of course, the intersections and criss-crossing don’t end there. One of the things that sets “The Doll’s House” apart from the series’ first collection is that while Dream is still the focal point, he’s “off-camera” more often than not while the story focuses on another character, Rose Walker. Who is Rose Walker? Well, all the way back in the very first issue, a woman named Unity Kinkaid fell victim to the sleeping sickness that occurred while Dream was imprisoned. While she was asleep, Unity was raped and gave birth. The baby, named Miranda, was adopted, and when she grew up she gave birth to one Rose Walker.

As if that wasn’t enough explanation of the intersections, I’ll continue. While the previous two examples were callbacks to events and characters from the first collection, the entire “Doll’s House” plot line is actually three intersecting stories that come together at the end, as intersecting stories tend to do.

The first story line is that surrounding Unity, Miranda, and Rose. Having awoken, Unity uses her fortune to hire a private detective to bring her long-lost daughter and granddaughter to England. Meanwhile, Dream takes a census of his realm and discovers four of his creations are missing, so he embarks on a quest to find them. Two of those creatures, Brute and Glob make up the third story line. The two have escaped the Dreaming and taken residence in the mind of a boy named Jed. Jed who? Why, Jed Walker of course, who had been in the care of Rose’s deceased father. Upon their father’s death, Jed was sent to live with some abusive relatives, who lock him the basement and basically only want him around for the $800 government check they get each month. While Miranda stays in England to care for London, Rose returns to America to search for her brother.

Perhaps my favorite issue in the collection was one that wasn’t even related to the main story arc. In issue number 13, “Men of Good Fortune,” we see Dream grant a man named Hob Gadling immortality and subsequently meet him in an East London inn once every century.

In most immortality stories, the recipient soon recognizes the folly of his ways and starts begging for death’s embrace. This is not so for Hob Gadling. Through Dream’s eyes, we see Gadling rise and fall as the centuries pass by. He becomes wealthy, gets married and earns a knighthood. His wife dies, he picks the wrong side in a war, and becomes a penniless disgrace. He gets rich a second time when he enters the slave trade, but leaves it once Dream shows him its immorality.

As we watch Gadling and Dream interact throughout the centuries, we see that there’s an awful lot that never really changes. We see conversations in which the bar’s patrons argue whether or not AIDS (in 1989) or the bubonic plague (in 1389) are punishments from God, and discuss poll taxes instituted by both King Richard II and Margaret Thatcher. But we also see how things change. For example, Hob points out that although she was Queen consort of England, Catherine of Aragon was technically black. As such, Hob notes “if Catherine of Aragon had lived in Alabama in 1950, she would have been at the back of the bus.”

The thing that struck me most about this collection (besides all the wonderful intersections of course) is the way it humanizes Dream. While he may be a member of the Endless, who are the only immortal beings in the galaxy (that’s right, even gods dies when people stop believing in them), he feels emotions like love, remorse, loneliness, and betrayal, just like the rest of us. He meets Hob Gadling once a century for a chat, at first under the auspices that granting the man immortality will “amuse” him. But in 1889, Hob call Dream out, saying they only meet because Dream is lonely, because Hob is his only friend. Dream walks out in disgust, but a century later he returns to say, “I have always heard it was impolite to keep one’s friends waiting.”