Morpheus and Lucienne, discussing the Rose and Jed Walker situation, are surprised to be interrupted by Rose herself, who wants to know what's going on. Despite Lucienne's misgivings, Morpheus explains to Rose her nature as a Vortex and explains that the same aspect of her power which allowed her to overhear their conversation and follow it into a part of the Dreaming that's closed to mortals will also allow her to find Jed's dream. Morpheus agrees to help her search through the Dreaming the following night, and tells her in the meantime to keep looking in the waking world.
Having failed to get any information out of Miss Rubio, Jed's caseworker, Rose decides to distribute flyers with a photograph of Jed. Hal, the owner of the B&B, and most of the other occupants volunteer to help hand them out. While Rose and Hal are passing out flyers on the beachfront, the Corinthian takes a flyer from Hal but decides against approaching Rose when he realizes that she's being watched by Morpheus through Matthew.
Lyta goes to visit Miss Rubio again, and fails to get any information out of her but does persuade her to visit Jed's foster home to confirm that he's being treated well. His abusive foster father, after concluding that denying a visit would be too suspicious, pulls him out of the rat-infested basement where he's been locked up since his last escape attempt and threatens him to make him behave for Miss Rubio's visit. Jed still tries to slip Miss Rubio a note asking for help, which gets him locked in the cellar again.
Rose goes to sleep and finds herself wandering through the dreams of the B&B's other occupants before Morpheus arrives and guides her to find Jed's dream: a recreation of their childhood home where he is a brightly-colored superhero called The Sandman with the help of Gault. Jed tries to protect his friend, but Gault surrenders to make sure Jed doesn't get hurt. Morpheus summarily ends the dream, but not before Rose has talked to Jed and got enough information about his foster parents to find their address after she wakes up. When she reaches their house, however, his foster parents are dead and Jed is gone — the Corinthian found him first.
Meanwhile, Lyta has been having a recurring serial dream of being reunited with her late husband Hector, in the house they always dreamed of building. Dream-Hector tries to persuade her to stay in the dream where they can be together and start the family they always wanted. Lyta wakes from a dream of being pregnant with their first child to find that, due to the growing effect of the Vortex, she is now pregnant in real life as well.
This sode contains examples of:
- Actually Pretty Funny: Stoic as Dream is, he cracks a grin when he sees the 12-year-old Jed's dream of being a campy superhero version of the Sandman.
- Adaptational Attractiveness: The comic's Uncle Barnaby was a slovenly Fat Bastard and Aunt Clarice was a shriveled old crone with a twisted scowl. The show has them much more fit and attractive.
- Adaptational Backstory Change: The circumstances of Lyta's dream-husband and pregnancy are very different in the comic, and are tied into the nightmare-and-Jed dreamscape rather than being a consequence of her connection to Rose. (In the comic, she doesn't even meet Rose until several years after Jed's rescue.)
- Adaptational Heroism:
- Unlike the comic characters she replaces, Gault only wants to help and inspire Jed, giving him some respite from everything he suffers when he's awake.
- Clarice's comic counterpart was fully on board with Jed's treatment, while in the show she does care for him and tries to stop her husband's abuse, but is too terrified of Barnaby to really be effective.
- Adaptational Nice Guy: Morpheus, on being confronted with a mortal claiming to be the Sandman, has the decency not to break into hysterical laughter the way his comics counterpart did, probably because Jed is a kid who's very obviously being completely earnest. It probably also helps that he's less overtly ridiculous than Hector Hall was in the comics.
- Adaptational Villainy: In the original comics it's implied that Brute and Glob, who were the ones hiding out in Jed's mind, influenced Jed's guardians to treat him cruelly so that Jed would retreat into his dreams to escape. Here Barnaby is cruel entirely of his own volition, and Gault provides a refuge for Jed because she can't save him from his terrible waking life.
- Alien Sky: The sky in Barbie's heroic-fantasy dream has two moons.
- Animal Eye Spy: Morpheus dispatches Matthew, a talking dream raven, to travel with Rose Walker in the waking world as his eyes and ears. It's not specified whether he can do the same with other dream entities, or if it's a special Dream's Raven thing.Matthew: I can feel him in the back of my head... it's the weirdest feeling.
- Asshole Victim: While, unlike 'uncle' Barnaby, Clarice and Miss Rubio didn't deserve to be brutally killed and have their eyeballs eaten, all three adults who had a hand in Jed's suffering are victims of the Corinthian.
- Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: As far as the Corinthian's designs on Jed are from being benevolent in any way, he is the one to whisk him away from his abusive caretakers Barnaby and Clarice — while presumably killing and eating their eyes. He also kills social worker Miss Rubio in order to find them, after she repeatedly refused to tell Rose where Jed was or even permit the siblings to see each other.
- Bad Samaritan: Corinthian is easily able to persuade Jed to leave with him, by posing as someone his sister sent to rescue him.
- Blasphemous Boast: Perhaps due to his still-burgeoning Character Development and general haughtiness, this is probably how Dream interprets Jed's dream role as "The Sandman" (if not as a Pretender Diss) and Gault's enabling of the entire thing — accusing Gault of carving out a slice of the Dreaming for her to "rule". Of course, she was doing something else entirely, as shown below under What Measure Is a Mook?.
- Composite Character: In the comic, there were two rogue nightmares, Brute and Glob, hiding in Jed's superhero dream. In the series, their role is taken by a single rogue nightmare, Gault.
- Confronting Your Imposter: Subverted. When Morpheus runs into a costumed Jed who declares himself to be the Sandman, Morpheus is merely amused and doesn't get upset at the boy. Dream is, however, very angry at Gault for creating the encapsulated dream world in what appears to be an attempt to usurp Morpheus' rule over the Dreaming. He reveals her true identity to Rose and Jed and ends the dream.
- Crashing Dreams: Jed as The Sandman is attacked by a Swarm of Rats, then wakes up from a rat biting his hand.
- Crapsaccharine World: Jed's dreamscape is an idyllic suburb where he gets to be a powerful superhero protecting kids, with his mother as Mission Control... but it takes almost nothing to twist it into a nightmare, like Jed going to confront a rat-themed villain ending up with him being helplessly swarmed by rats. It's hinted that it's Gault's nature causing this; she genuinely wants to help Jed and turn his dreams into a positive and empowering experience, but since she is a nightmare she can only create a hollow and ultimately meaningless power fantasy that's little more than a facade for darker and scarier things.
- Cruel to Be Kind: Morpheus says that this is why there are nightmares; by forcing dreamers to face their fears, they're ultimately helping the dreamers develop. Gault says that it's still cruel and she doesn't want to do it any more.
- Department of Child Disservices: Although Ms. Rubio is at least actively trying to check on Jed this episode, she had to be guilted into it by Lyta and, for some reason, she never tries to speak to him in private, only Barnaby and Clarice. It apparently doesn't occur to her that Jed might be too scared to tell the truth in front of them, or that the two might straight-up lie to her.
- Dies Differently in Adaptation: In the original comic, Jed's abusive foster relatives are killed when Dream freeing Hector and Lyta from his (Jed's) mind accidentally causes their house to explode. Here, the Corinthian kills them offscreen.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Morpheus gives Gault a thousand years of darkness for her temerity in trying to be more than the nightmare she was created to be.
- Don't Make Me Take My Belt Off!: Barnaby intends to beat Jed with a belt when the latter wakes up calling Rose's name, but gets interrupted by a knock on the front door just after he has taken off said belt.
- Dramatic Irony: Hal flirts with the Corinthian, not realizing that he's a serial-killing nightmare.
- Dream Sue: In his dreams Jed is a superhero protecting children from evil, whereas in the real world he's living in a rat-infested basement at the mercy of his foster father.
- Dreamville: Jed's dream world is an idyllic suburban neighborhood; specifically, as Rose recognizes, it's a replica of the neighborhood where they were children together before their family split up.
- Dream Walker: One of Rose Walker's many powers as the vortex (appropriate to her name). She can see the dreams/internal monologues of her housemates, managing to interfere in Hal's private drag show and walk in on Lyta having sex. Dream, the one she has an appointment with to seek Jed, has to guide her through not being swallowed/distracted by these other peoples' understandably-private thoughts.
- Foreshadowing: When Rose starts entering the dreams of the other residents of the house, Gilbert is the only person we don't see. In the next episode, it's revealed that Gilbert is a dream.
- Fairytale Motifs: The Corinthian plays the rock song 'The Big Bad Wolf' by The Heavy after 'rescuing' Jed, suggesting a comparison between the Corinthian and The Big Bad Wolf.
- Fostering for Profit: Barnaby's only interest in Jed is the money he's being paid to look after him.
- Girls Stare at Scenery, Boys Stare at Girls: Inverted when Hector and Lyta have moved into their dream house. Hector stands and admires the landscape, while Lyta looks at him.
- Hope Spot:
- It seems like Jed manages to slip a note into the social worker's bag, but Corinthian turns up to murder her before she has a chance to look in her bag. A scene later, it turns out Barnaby noticed and stole the note before she left.
- Rose and Jed manage to reunite in the Dreaming just long enough for him to tell her how to find his foster home. Unfortunately, the Corinthian finds him just as he wakes up, and Rose arrives at the address in time to see his foster parents' corpses being carried away.
- Mission Control: In Jed's superhero dream, his mother (actually Gault playing the role) has a station in his headquarters with many computer screens and controls, and advises him over an earpiece.
- Mystical Pregnancy: After dreaming of having sex with her dead husband, Lyta dreams that she became pregnant, and due to the influence of Rose as the dream vortex, she wakes up to find herself several months pregnant in the waking world as well.
- Mythology Gag: Jed's dream of being a superhero is a nod to the comic being part of the DC Universe. All the supervillains whose names are mentioned or whose faces are shown in Jed's personal dream world are actual DC universe characters, as is the superhero named Sandman, whose costume Jed adopts.
- "Not Wearing Pants" Dream: Ken dreams of Barbie locking him outside naked while she sits there in the car watching impassively, which is implied to be a result of a misdemeanour on his part. This mundane dream serves as a contrast to those of his wife, who dreams of being the heroine of a epic fantasy world.
- Oh, Crap!: The Corinthian finds Rose in the middle of a conversation with Matthew, just as he's telling her that Morpheus is observing through his eyes. He mutters "fuck" and backs away slowly.
- Pet the Dog: Double Subverted with Dream and Rose's dream walk. As promised, Morpheus guides Rose to control her dream vortex abilities so that she can find her brother's dream... before he takes Gault from it and rather callously bids Jed to wake up. However, Rose's reunion with her brother was just long enough for Jed to pass along the names she needed to find his foster parents' home address.
- Reveal Shot: When Rose is on the phone to Unity, updating her on the progress of her search, Unity mentions that she's being visited by a journalist who wants to know about her experiences. The camera then pans around to show that it's the Corinthian, who's come to find out from her where Rose is now.
- Shout-Out:
- In his "heroic" persona, Jed mentions some classic Golden Age DC Villains like Johnny Sorrow, the Phantom of the Fair, and Doctor Death. The scanners also show DC foes like Captain Cold, the Psycho Pirate, and the Pied Piper.
- Jed and Gault's "home base" also has a few figurines of the Justice League of America strewn around, particularly The Flash and Wonder Woman.
- In Zelda's dream she says that no one understands her except Chantal, and that together they are "secret brides to faceless slaves of the nameless night of the Castle of Dread Desire", a reference to Neil Gaiman's short story "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire".
- Swarm of Rats: Jed's superhero dream starts going wrong when a huge number of rats bursts out of a sewer manhole and swarms over him, reflecting the fact that in the real world he's locked in a rat-infested cellar.
- Taken from a Dream: Towards the end of the episode, Lyta finds herself getting pregnant in a dream... and when she finally awakens from the happy dream, she finds that the pregnancy has somehow carried over into the real world and she's now sporting a very noticeable baby bump.
- Tear Off Your Face: In Hal's dream, the On-Stage Hal peels off his Latex Perfection drag queen face to reveal his normal face beneath. He then peels off that face to reveal a gruesome slime-dropping skull. (He would have kept going, but he ran out of hands to pull his faces off with.)
- That Was Not a Dream: Played for Laughs the day after Rose meets Morpheus and the talking raven Matthew in the Dreaming. She sees a similar-looking bird, tries to talk to it, and has just enough time to feel foolish before the real Matthew pipes up from nearby.
- Theme Naming: Ken and Barbie, whom we met in the last episode are all too aware that their names make everyone think of the dolls. In this episode they mention planning to meet a friend called Sindy, who also shares her name with a doll
. - What Measure Is a Mook?: Gault's existential dilemma, in essence, is this. Despite being a nightmare, she has grown tired of sticking to that role, and would rather help to inspire/enable someone (especially Jed, who uses his dream role of being "The Sandman" to escape his abuse).
- What the Hell, Hero?: Attempted by Lucienne who tries to gently argue with Morpheus when he banishes Gault, pointing out that she changed from her original function. This backfires badly and gets her demoted back to being a librarian.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Rose finally discovers where Jed is - only to arrive to find his foster parents dead and Jed missing again.
