Warning: Article May Contain Spoilers

In the premiere episode of The Sandman, the capture of Dream of the Endless causes a global sleeping sickness from 1916, the year Dream (Tom Sturridge) was captured by Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance) to 1927. Ironically, this is the same timeframe when a sleeping sickness known as lethargic encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, struck between 5 and 10 million people worldwide, killing half of them almost immediately. However, in Netflix’s storyline regarding the sickness, there is a twist:

Neil Gaiman cleverly tied the real epidemic to The Sandman and blamed the sleeping sickness on the imprisonment of Dream of the Endless.

Burgess, the self-styled Magus, is a British warlock who intended to apprehend Dream’s sister, Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), and force her to restore his dead son to life as well as grant Roderick immortality. Instead, Burgess’ ritual inadvertently captured Dream in 1916. Robbed of his symbols of office, his ruby, his helmet, and his bag of sand, Dream is imprisoned by the Magus for over a century. However, the disappearance of the lord of dreams wreaked havoc on the waking world and Morpheus’ realm, the Dreaming, which began to collapse as several dreams and nightmares abandoned the dimensional plane. Beyond the Dreaming, in the waking world, a sleeping sickness spread and affected millions of people, who simply fell asleep and didn’t wake up. One of them, Unity Kincaid (Sandra James-Young), was a pivotal victim who was supposed to become the Dream Vortex of her era. Instead, that power passed to her granddaughter, Rose Walker (Vanesu Samunyai).

The Mysterious 1916 Sleeping Sickness Was Actually a Thing

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The virus that caused lethargic encephalitis was never definitively identified and while many of the survivors seemed to have recovered, they were incapacitated years later by a paralyzing Parkinson’s-like syndrome. This real-life event has been memorialized on film before. In 1990, the late Robin Williams starred in the movie Awakenings, which was based on Dr. Oliver Sacks’ book about the sleeping sickness and the beneficial effects of the drug L-Dopa that was administered to catatonic patients who survived the 1917–1928 epidemic. For no apparent reason, the sleeping sickness epidemic suddenly ended in 1927.

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In The Sandman, Morpheus’ return to the Dreaming ended the sleeping sickness, making everything right with the world again until John Dee (David Thewlis) threatened it all by corrupting Dream’s ruby and Morpheus put a stop to him.

The Sandman Season 1 is available for streaming on Netflix.