The Sandman/Fridge

Fridge Logic

• In Calliope, Ric Madoc buys the eponymous muse from Erasmus Fry for the price of a bezoar, a magical...thingie that is generated in something's digestive system. It's most famous property is the ability to remedy poison effects. Erasmus says he'll put this new one with the rest of them, implying that he has several. Years later, Ric finds out that Erasmus died last summer by poisoning himself. That could mean a lot of things.

Fridge Brilliance

• In A Game of You, Thessaly apparently drinks soy milk. She's thousands of years old. She was probably born before the people in her part of the world developed the ability to digest lactose as adults.
• In Dream of a Thousand Cats, Dream tells a cat that the universe can be changed when many beings fall asleep and have the same dream. The cat wants vengeance for it's kittens that were killed by humans and attempts to convince others to dream of a world where cats are larger than humans, rule the world, and hunt them for sport. Just more crazy rules of the dream world? No. Why the hell would many people dreaming the same thing make it true? Morpheus can force them to dream whatever he wants, and a world in which cats eat those that serve them couldn't be sustainable. He lied. He gave the cat just like Joshua Norton a goal that wouldn't really be achieved, but their dreams gave them both power, a reason to live, and perhaps joy.
• The second play that Morpheus requests from Shakespeare? The Tempest. The plot? A sorceror, through convoluted schemes and plots, conspires to end his life of isolation and entrapment, in the process destroying his magical gifts and ensuring himself an heir..... Does this sound... familiar? Which means that Morpheus is really playing the long game when it comes to his suicide.
• Hob Gadling seems to suffer centuries of prosperity and failure designed deliberately to teach him valuable lessons about the nature of immortality. It seems awfully coincidental until you realize it's entirely possible Morpheus is arranging these streaks of bad and good luck.
  • I dunno, that doesn't actually seem all that likely.
• I always kinda wondered why Wesley Dodds would fight crime if he's an avatar of Dream, since he never seemed to care much about human morality. Then The Corinthian makes a brief cameo in the Phantom Of The Fair arc & it all begins to make sense. The Corinthian tends to turn the people he doesn't simply kill into Serial Killers, which is the main sort of crime Wes fights. His true purpose is cleaning up the mess The Corinthian's been making since he escaped -- biznizz
• I'm a little ashamed for not realizing this sooner, but as John Dee's final fight with Morpheus goes on, he slowly decomposes, eventually revealing an entirely skeletal face. See also his original costume
• One of the the running gags in the Brief Lives story arc was Destruction being a terrible artist. Well of course! he's Destruction. One thing he would be bad at is creating.
  • This extends beyond his art. Note that just about everything he tries to create is either unappreciated or is terrible, like the meal he cooked that no one eats.
• In Endless Nights, Despair convinces Rao to create the planet Krypton inherently unstable, and to manipulate events so that there will be only one survivor who will carry the despair of the entire world's death. Instead, that survivor turns out to be Superman, who is practically the anthropomorphic personification of hope in the DC Universe. Why? Because despair, by its very nature, always fails.
  • Also, it is stated that the Endless, by their nature, also define and embody their opposite, like how Death is also the one who bestows life upon newborns, or how Desire can inspire love or hatred.

Fridge Horror

• In 'Tales in the Sand', the narrator says, about Morpheus's and Nada's lovemaking: "All that night they stayed together, and every living thing that dreamed, dreamed that night of her face, and of her body, and of the warm salt taste of her sweat and her skin." It sounds romantic before you realize just what it means. And you thought naked pictures of yourself on the internet was bad...
• After Lucifer turfs everyone out of hell in Season of Mists, a lot of the dead end up walking around on Earth as, well, zombies, basically. Among the dead shown to return are two babies- one just a few months old at most, the other a severely premature miscarriage. Yep. In this universe, babies too young to understand the concepts of right and wrong, let alone make any moral choices, can get condemned to eternal torture.
  • To be fair, it seems that there's some level of self-perception involved.
  • Even better: Remember that Luci turfs everyone out? Who's to say that those two "babies" aren't shapeshifting demons, tormenting the mother?
• Remember how Delirium cursed the innocent policeman to experience imaginary bugs crawling on his skin FOREVER? Since she's an Endless, this may mean that the curse will linger even through his death into every reincarnation and afterlife that he'll ever have, unless Delirium some day changes her mind.
  • Or, once he belongs to Death, the other Endless (including Delirium) will have no power over him. They seem to have some power in each other's realms, maybe they just don't use it on each other out of politeness. Except Desire, who is a bitch like that.
• There is one in perhaps one of the most harmless of books. In Delirium's Party every one of the Endless gives a present to Despair, everything is good and dandy until Desire gives her twin a locket that would make her the object of all hearts' longing, all they crave for. Imagine an entire universe craving for hopelessness!
  • Thankfully she never wore it.