Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogel Bomb here. You know, when you wake up
Speaker 1: in the morning and you have all that crusty stuff
Speaker 1: in your eyes, that's called room And it's just the
Speaker 1: remnants of a liquid coating that protects your eyes that
Speaker 1: you blink away when you're awake, but that collects and
Speaker 1: dries when you sleep. But if you were a child
Speaker 1: living in central or northern Europe a couple of centuries ago,
Speaker 1: ground ups would have probably told you that when you
Speaker 1: woke up in the morning with crusty eyelashes, it was
Speaker 1: because the Sandman had been to your bedside, sprinkling his
Speaker 1: magical sleepy dust in your eyes, spinning the yarns of
Speaker 1: your dreams. This might have caused you some alarm, because
Speaker 1: the figure of the Sandman isn't all magical, benevolent snooze dust.
Speaker 1: It turns out, as much as the Sandman is to
Speaker 1: sleep as Santa is to gift, giving, a sandman's shadow
Speaker 1: side is at least as conspicuous as Santa's penchant for
Speaker 1: shady around the clock surveillance and distribution of switches and
Speaker 1: coal to naughty kids. We spoke about how the Sandman
Speaker 1: myths got their start with Dr Maria Tatar, a professor
Speaker 1: of German studies, folklore, and children's literature at Harvard University.
Speaker 1: She said, it's a bit difficult to trace his origins
Speaker 1: because stories about the Sandman are part of an oral tradition.
Speaker 1: I feel confident that there are similar figures in other
Speaker 1: cultures because so many of the jolly, child friendly creatures
Speaker 1: are shadowed by a disciplinary, evil person who invented the Sandman.
Speaker 1: Who knows the Sandman's first parade onto the page was
Speaker 1: an eighteenth century German dictionaries which briefly described the German
Speaker 1: idiom der Zantman Comte Sandman is Coming, which was used
Speaker 1: to tease children who were particularly sleepy looking. The first
Speaker 1: story about the Sandman and his doings was published in
Speaker 1: eighteen eighteen by German writer E. T. A. Hoffman. Der
Speaker 1: Sandman begins with an exasperated nurse telling a story about
Speaker 1: a mythical creature who throws sand in the eyes of
Speaker 1: little children who won't go to sleep, causing their eyes
Speaker 1: to fall out of their sockets. The sandman then collects
Speaker 1: the eyeballs in a sack and carries them to his
Speaker 1: home on the dark side of the moon, where he
Speaker 1: feeds them to his children. Tatar said Dr Zentman became
Speaker 1: an important story in psychoanalytic circles because Freud made so
Speaker 1: much of it in his essay The Uncanny Hoffman's story
Speaker 1: is a fairy tale for grown ups. Really, his sandman
Speaker 1: is this dark, predatory monster. It definitely wasn't written for children.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind many of the things we consider kids
Speaker 1: stories today of snow white sleeping beauty were originally told
Speaker 1: by and two adults, though of course not all fairy
Speaker 1: tales were for grown ups. In eighteen forty one, Hans
Speaker 1: Christian Andersen published a fairy tale meant for a young
Speaker 1: audience called Old locai Ole, being a Danish first name
Speaker 1: and Loca translating to shut your eye. The eponymous character,
Speaker 1: always dressed in silk pajamas and carrying a colorful umbrella,
Speaker 1: is never referred to by Anderson as the Sandman, but
Speaker 1: the Sandman is the title most English translations assigned to
Speaker 1: the fairy tale. Old doesn't throws and into children's eyes,
Speaker 1: he squirts milk into them. The story is a sequence
Speaker 1: of dream like tableaus, and all seems to be a
Speaker 1: benevolent figure in them, but he does introduce the main character,
Speaker 1: a young boy, too, concepts of sexuality and death, and
Speaker 1: at the end of the story, the boy discovers that
Speaker 1: Old Locai has a brother who, instead of coming night
Speaker 1: after night to our bedsides bringing dreams, only visits each
Speaker 1: person once, bringing death. His name is also all Loci
Speaker 1: Tatar said, what's interesting about the Sandman's stories is they
Speaker 1: remind me a bit of the children's verses and lullabies.
Speaker 1: We sing to children, which are soothing and gentle, but
Speaker 1: there's a stark, violent side to them too. Somehow it
Speaker 1: seems to mirror our ambivalence towards children. We adore them
Speaker 1: and want to tell them gentle, lovely stories, but they
Speaker 1: drive us crazy. At times, We and especially our ancestors,
Speaker 1: resorted to cautionary and disciplinary tales like Little Red Riding Hood,
Speaker 1: in which the wolf will eat you up if you
Speaker 1: stray from the path. In the Hoffman story, if you
Speaker 1: don't go to sleep, the Sandman's squ to come and
Speaker 1: scratch out your eyes. And if strong arming children and
Speaker 1: too settling down to sleep is not why the European
Speaker 1: parents and nurses of old told cautionary bedtime stories. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's because they wanted to prepare their little ones for
Speaker 1: life's hardships. Tatar said, the unusual thing about the Sandman
Speaker 1: is he's a lot bigger than you are. There's no
Speaker 1: defeating him. You can't face him down like you can
Speaker 1: the villains in fairy tales. There's no happily ever after
Speaker 1: except falling asleep giving in. He can't be beheaded or
Speaker 1: trapped or tricked like other villains. It's hard to distinguish
Speaker 1: fairy tale, myth, legend and all of that, but in
Speaker 1: a way, he belongs more to the realm of myth
Speaker 1: than fairy tales. Today's episode was written by Jescelin Shields
Speaker 1: and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeart Media and How
Speaker 1: To Works. For more on this and lots of other topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.