THE SANDMAN

Keeper of eternal sleep

He is not a kindly dream‑bringer. In The Sandman: Keeper of Eternal Sleep, JD Arden follows the Sandman’s darker trail — from Hoffmann’s eye‑stealer and Andersen’s Ole Lukøje to modern sleep paralysis, medicine, and marketable slumber. This is a forensic, mythic tour of lullabies as threat: sand and sacks, masks and mornings, the tiny grit that marks a stolen waking.

Through close readings, folklore, case vignettes, and conversations with sleep researchers, Arden shows how a bedside figure became a mechanism of control — punishing wakefulness, monetizing surrender, and normalizing nocturnal vulnerability.
Witty, sharp, and quietly horrific, the book gives you tools to recognize the Keeper’s work and leaves you with a single practical, unsettling question: when you wipe the sleep from your eyes, whose hands have been at work?