#like personally I dearly wish both Hob and Dreams other lovers that werent Elanor Calliope or Nada (with very occasional Titania references

[looseinthecatroom]

One small addition to the meta, if I could OP? Show!Hob also has the fact that the sleeping sickness ended within days of his stranger returning.

Show!Hob has a much better chance then Comics!Hob of getting to learn about, or guessing at Dreams imprisonment given the missed 1989 meeting. Hob to might concede that one potential option was that Dream couldn’t make the date (or of course, Dream might actively sharing that fact as a courtesy/explanation. Though obviously, we can’t assume that, as we saw no part of their meeting past the very start).

Sandman Meta: Hob has exactly zero way of figuring out who Dream is (before they reunite)

More than once in a fic I've written from Hob's POV I've had readers note their astonishment that Hob has not yet figured out Dream's identity, even if Dream does not reveal it himself.

Even in fics of mine where Dream reveals his name, like in Giving Sanctuary, I have Hob be slow on the uptake when it comes to the extent of Dream's powers, even things like being able to enter and control dreams, and the reason I do this is carefully considered and based in the fact that Hob would have no way of knowing who Dream is or by extension what he can do.

So I kind of want to take a step back and address in detail just how actually impossible it would be, objectively, for Hob to figure out who Dream is in a world that doesn't have The Sandman comic for him to read to figure it out.

This is, of course, because, from a Doylist angle, Neil's "Dream of the Endless" is not based in any single mythology. Indeed, Dream as we know him is cobbled together from at least three or more different mythological figures, none of which combine to actually form the "Dream of the Endless" we see in the show or read in the comics. The Endless are completely made up for the comic and the Sandman, Morpheus, and Oneiros are all from wildly different mythologies and none of them actually overlap to form the complete picture of who Dream is as an entity in the Sandman show or comic.

So even if someone straight-up told Hob that the person he meets is the Sandman, Morpheus, or Oneiros (btw, there is no singular figure of "Oneiros" in Greek mythology) he would still not be able to put together the full picture of who Dream is. Even if he's given the name "Dream of the Endless" to work with, those words combined don't mean anything on their own if you don't have what an Endless is filled in, because it was made up entirely for the comic. (Of course, a fanfic author absolutely could make up such a book for their fic but it would be a creation for that fic, serving a purpose within that story like to tip Hob off, though I think it's entirely reasonable to make up a book in the Sandman world that goes into detail on who the Endless are. The Magdalene Grimoire, btw, is not that book. It only talks about Death. Death is a figure in many mythologies including the Christian one, but Dream is not. Even Burgess needs the Corinthian to tell him who Dream is in the show, and he's an occultist.)

Couple all of this with Hob's personal experience with Dream, encountering him as part of a wager with Dream's sister Death to see if Hob could bear a life of immortality, you get far more clues that would send him hurtling off into a totally incorrect direction before you'd get anything close to the truth, if we assume only the books available in our world are available to him.

So the reason this is a bit of an irritation for me that there's this idea that Hob has "all the clues" to figure out who Dream is because it smacks of a logical fallacy.

Basically, it's easy to see that the answer to a complicated math problem is "obvious" if someone just hands the answer to you. But challenging people to actually solve it themselves could be quite a bit more complicated. And in this complex formula solving for "Who the fuck is Hob's mysterious stranger?" there's actually so many blank X's of unanswered questions that I genuinely think there's no way for Hob to solve this equation without someone giving him the answer.

Let's go through this systematically, using just what Hob knows as observed on screen in the show.

1389 - a pale man in all black with a ruby at his throat approaches Hob's table and challenges Hob to meet him there in 100 years. He then smiles enigmatically and leaves.

That's it. That's all Hob has to go off of. He never sees Death, he has no idea about the wager. As far as he knows, Dream gave him immortality. It would be the most logical conclusion given that the day before Hob didn't have immortality and the day after, presumably, he does.

1489 - The only confirmation he has is actually seeing Dream there in 1489 and the first thing he asks is, "How did you know that I'd be here?"

Dream does not answer him. Hob takes a few stabs at guessing his identity which reveals his Christian European context: are you a wizard, or a saint -- to be clear, these are two types of human magic users that make sense to Hob for his context. The only other figure he can think of is The Devil. He doesn't ask if Dream is a pagan god or a faerie, he assumes a man with arcane or divine magic, or the Devil.

Dream says that he's not the Devil, much good that would do if he was a Devil who could just presumably lie to Hob, and says he's interested in Hob's experience and implies that he will grant him another 100 years of life. He is sarcastic and unimpressed about Hob's wonder at the world. He doesn't even actually show much interest in Hob being in the printing business. He only shows a spark of interest in Hob's continued desire to live, and then immediately takes off.

1589 - The only new information Hob gets this year is 1) Dream is supremely uninterested in food or the wealth Hob has earned, or his family, and 2) puny little Will Shaxberd, a crap playwright with no shot at becoming anything more, suddenly becomes a famous playwright. He would eventually become a renowned playwright in his day but keep in mind, Shakespeare didn't actually become mega famous centuries after his death. In his day, many people thought other playwrights like Marlowe were better.

My point is, from this Hob doesn't necessarily get even the pieces to determine that Dream likes art. It might seem obvious to us because Dream is Prince of Stories, but that's not the offer Dream gives Shaxberd. He just asks if it is Will's will to create dreams to spur the minds of men. Yes, we know that Dream wants Will to make dreams for him, but in Hob's context, Dream is just asking what Will would sell his soul for, just like he overheard Hob saying he had no intention of dying. From this perspective the only strong conclusion Hob can draw is that Dream grants wishes.

From this, Hob could conclude that Dream is a djinn/genie, or perhaps a faerie, but there is absolutely nothing to indicate he's associated with dreams or literature directly besides a mention of creating dreams nested in the context of asking Shaxberd what he wants, giving him a supernatural gift much like the one Hob believes Dream gave him.

At this point, the domains of Dream's power are very muddled for Hob because he doesn't know Death gave him immortality. So as far as he knows, Dream can give immortality AND make an amateur playwright into the greatest writer who ever lived. Putting these two things together does not bring you naturally to the domain of dreams by any stretch.

(I will note here, that in Giving Sanctuary, I had Hob learn that "Death" is Dream's sister before he learns Dream's name. There, his initial conclusion is that Dream must therefore be Famine, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the one known for wearing black (and not eating seems like a clue with Dream too) my point being that having another, small piece of the whole puzzle still would probably send him flying off in the wrong direction given his cultural context.)

1789: The next time Hob gets any hint that Dream has powers is with Lady Johanna. He uses his sand to show her her, "old ghosts". Note, she does not fall asleep but rather begins to hallucinate.

The Sandman myth has its origins of Scandinavia and it is first written down in in "Der Sandmann" a context that Hob might have access to, if he's very well read, in the early 1800s. By the way, the description of the Sandman in that book bears a striking resemblance to the Corinthian, because he eats the eyes of naughty children, and very little to Dream beyond the use of sand in his magic.

There is absolutely nothing to link the Sandman to Morpheus the Roman God of Dreams, who was made up entirely by Ovid in the Metamorphoses and never mentioned anywhere before that. That's because Neil Gaiman was the first to link those two mythological figures.

And on that note, there is no Oneiros attested to in Hesiod. The mention of Oneiros is actually to the "Oneiroi" an entire tribe of dreams and nightmares who are the children of Night (Nix). There's Hypnos (Sleep) who is the brother of Thanatos (Death) but that is about as close as we get to the Endless in any other mythological source besides the comics. And again, Dream does not put Johanna to sleep, he makes her hallucinate.

1889- Again, there is precious little to go off of. Dream is tight-lipped as ever. The only thing he gives away is that Lady Johanna later helped him with a task, a fact Hob is visibly annoyed and I daresay jealous about, and when he lashes out he refers to himself as, "One such as I."

But "One such as I," only reveals something Hob already knew: that Dream thinks highly of himself. That doesn't actually reveal that Dream is even magical, he could just be nobility or a powerful immortal magic user and refer to himself that way. Hob already knows that Dream is magical, and immortal, and probably some sort of high born or aristocrat. He's probably known that since 1389 given how Dream was dressed and given that giant fuck-off ruby (which actually might make Hob, in that day, wonder if Dream was a relation to the Black Prince)

That's it. That is the grand total of everything Hob has seen of Dream.

Hob in the comic will eventually admit, in The Wake, that he figured out who Dream was on his own. But this is after Seasons of Mist when Dream toasts him in Hob's dream and Hob wakes up with the impossible bottle of wine on his bedside. He has another encounter too with Dream where Dream eventually accedes to Hob's request to make the men who killed Audrey, his dead girlfriend, know who she was. Presumably, Dream makes them dream of her.

So Hob in the comics by the time we get to The Wake has more to go off of to make the link to the Lord of Dreams. Hob as we see him in the show, has had much less to go off of.

Even if you give Hob one piece of the puzzle, like one of the names like Morpheus, or The Sandman, or Oneiros, that still doesn't help give him the whole picture. The word "Endless" would be meaningless. He would have to have read at least three pretty obscure books that span a period of 2,000 years (between Hesiod and Der Sandmann) to get the three books that Neil primarily drew from to combine these figures into the Dream of the comic.

Look, my point is, unless someone gives the answer to Hob, and explains the full extent of what the Endless are, he's got little to go off of. Arguably, not enough at all to solve for "X" as to who Dream is, even if he's given more pieces. This would be a tough problem to solve.