WEBVTT - Where Do Sandman Myths Come From?

0:00:02.040 --> 0:00:07.120
<v Speaker 1>Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,

0:00:07.160 --> 0:00:09.920
<v Speaker 1>Lauren Vogel Bomb here. You know, when you wake up

0:00:09.920 --> 0:00:12.200
<v Speaker 1>in the morning and you have all that crusty stuff

0:00:12.240 --> 0:00:15.360
<v Speaker 1>in your eyes, that's called room And it's just the

0:00:15.360 --> 0:00:17.799
<v Speaker 1>remnants of a liquid coating that protects your eyes that

0:00:17.840 --> 0:00:20.360
<v Speaker 1>you blink away when you're awake, but that collects and

0:00:20.520 --> 0:00:24.240
<v Speaker 1>dries when you sleep. But if you were a child

0:00:24.320 --> 0:00:26.920
<v Speaker 1>living in central or northern Europe a couple of centuries ago,

0:00:27.200 --> 0:00:28.960
<v Speaker 1>ground ups would have probably told you that when you

0:00:29.000 --> 0:00:31.520
<v Speaker 1>woke up in the morning with crusty eyelashes, it was

0:00:31.560 --> 0:00:35.000
<v Speaker 1>because the Sandman had been to your bedside, sprinkling his

0:00:35.120 --> 0:00:38.000
<v Speaker 1>magical sleepy dust in your eyes, spinning the yarns of

0:00:38.040 --> 0:00:42.040
<v Speaker 1>your dreams. This might have caused you some alarm, because

0:00:42.080 --> 0:00:45.640
<v Speaker 1>the figure of the Sandman isn't all magical, benevolent snooze dust.

0:00:46.159 --> 0:00:48.479
<v Speaker 1>It turns out, as much as the Sandman is to

0:00:48.640 --> 0:00:52.000
<v Speaker 1>sleep as Santa is to gift, giving, a sandman's shadow

0:00:52.040 --> 0:00:55.200
<v Speaker 1>side is at least as conspicuous as Santa's penchant for

0:00:55.400 --> 0:00:58.680
<v Speaker 1>shady around the clock surveillance and distribution of switches and

0:00:58.720 --> 0:01:02.640
<v Speaker 1>coal to naughty kids. We spoke about how the Sandman

0:01:02.760 --> 0:01:06.000
<v Speaker 1>myths got their start with Dr Maria Tatar, a professor

0:01:06.040 --> 0:01:09.919
<v Speaker 1>of German studies, folklore, and children's literature at Harvard University.

0:01:10.200 --> 0:01:12.840
<v Speaker 1>She said, it's a bit difficult to trace his origins

0:01:12.880 --> 0:01:16.040
<v Speaker 1>because stories about the Sandman are part of an oral tradition.

0:01:16.440 --> 0:01:18.520
<v Speaker 1>I feel confident that there are similar figures in other

0:01:18.560 --> 0:01:21.720
<v Speaker 1>cultures because so many of the jolly, child friendly creatures

0:01:21.720 --> 0:01:25.880
<v Speaker 1>are shadowed by a disciplinary, evil person who invented the Sandman.

0:01:26.200 --> 0:01:30.120
<v Speaker 1>Who knows the Sandman's first parade onto the page was

0:01:30.160 --> 0:01:34.120
<v Speaker 1>an eighteenth century German dictionaries which briefly described the German

0:01:34.120 --> 0:01:38.040
<v Speaker 1>idiom der Zantman Comte Sandman is Coming, which was used

0:01:38.040 --> 0:01:41.720
<v Speaker 1>to tease children who were particularly sleepy looking. The first

0:01:41.760 --> 0:01:44.240
<v Speaker 1>story about the Sandman and his doings was published in

0:01:44.319 --> 0:01:48.480
<v Speaker 1>eighteen eighteen by German writer E. T. A. Hoffman. Der

0:01:48.560 --> 0:01:52.120
<v Speaker 1>Sandman begins with an exasperated nurse telling a story about

0:01:52.120 --> 0:01:54.560
<v Speaker 1>a mythical creature who throws sand in the eyes of

0:01:54.600 --> 0:01:57.520
<v Speaker 1>little children who won't go to sleep, causing their eyes

0:01:57.560 --> 0:02:00.480
<v Speaker 1>to fall out of their sockets. The sandman then collects

0:02:00.520 --> 0:02:02.360
<v Speaker 1>the eyeballs in a sack and carries them to his

0:02:02.400 --> 0:02:04.200
<v Speaker 1>home on the dark side of the moon, where he

0:02:04.240 --> 0:02:07.919
<v Speaker 1>feeds them to his children. Tatar said Dr Zentman became

0:02:07.960 --> 0:02:11.560
<v Speaker 1>an important story in psychoanalytic circles because Freud made so

0:02:11.639 --> 0:02:15.079
<v Speaker 1>much of it in his essay The Uncanny Hoffman's story

0:02:15.160 --> 0:02:17.880
<v Speaker 1>is a fairy tale for grown ups. Really, his sandman

0:02:18.080 --> 0:02:21.720
<v Speaker 1>is this dark, predatory monster. It definitely wasn't written for children.

0:02:22.560 --> 0:02:24.880
<v Speaker 1>Keep in mind many of the things we consider kids

0:02:24.880 --> 0:02:28.480
<v Speaker 1>stories today of snow white sleeping beauty were originally told

0:02:28.520 --> 0:02:32.560
<v Speaker 1>by and two adults, though of course not all fairy

0:02:32.560 --> 0:02:35.440
<v Speaker 1>tales were for grown ups. In eighteen forty one, Hans

0:02:35.480 --> 0:02:37.960
<v Speaker 1>Christian Andersen published a fairy tale meant for a young

0:02:38.000 --> 0:02:42.160
<v Speaker 1>audience called Old locai Ole, being a Danish first name

0:02:42.400 --> 0:02:47.000
<v Speaker 1>and Loca translating to shut your eye. The eponymous character,

0:02:47.120 --> 0:02:50.280
<v Speaker 1>always dressed in silk pajamas and carrying a colorful umbrella,

0:02:50.639 --> 0:02:53.640
<v Speaker 1>is never referred to by Anderson as the Sandman, but

0:02:53.840 --> 0:02:57.080
<v Speaker 1>the Sandman is the title most English translations assigned to

0:02:57.120 --> 0:03:01.120
<v Speaker 1>the fairy tale. Old doesn't throws and into children's eyes,

0:03:01.280 --> 0:03:04.240
<v Speaker 1>he squirts milk into them. The story is a sequence

0:03:04.280 --> 0:03:06.520
<v Speaker 1>of dream like tableaus, and all seems to be a

0:03:06.520 --> 0:03:09.960
<v Speaker 1>benevolent figure in them, but he does introduce the main character,

0:03:10.160 --> 0:03:13.959
<v Speaker 1>a young boy, too, concepts of sexuality and death, and

0:03:14.120 --> 0:03:16.200
<v Speaker 1>at the end of the story, the boy discovers that

0:03:16.240 --> 0:03:19.480
<v Speaker 1>Old Locai has a brother who, instead of coming night

0:03:19.480 --> 0:03:22.600
<v Speaker 1>after night to our bedsides bringing dreams, only visits each

0:03:22.639 --> 0:03:26.960
<v Speaker 1>person once, bringing death. His name is also all Loci

0:03:28.320 --> 0:03:31.600
<v Speaker 1>Tatar said, what's interesting about the Sandman's stories is they

0:03:31.639 --> 0:03:34.040
<v Speaker 1>remind me a bit of the children's verses and lullabies.

0:03:34.080 --> 0:03:36.720
<v Speaker 1>We sing to children, which are soothing and gentle, but

0:03:36.800 --> 0:03:40.200
<v Speaker 1>there's a stark, violent side to them too. Somehow it

0:03:40.280 --> 0:03:43.840
<v Speaker 1>seems to mirror our ambivalence towards children. We adore them

0:03:43.880 --> 0:03:46.440
<v Speaker 1>and want to tell them gentle, lovely stories, but they

0:03:46.560 --> 0:03:50.320
<v Speaker 1>drive us crazy. At times, We and especially our ancestors,

0:03:50.560 --> 0:03:54.120
<v Speaker 1>resorted to cautionary and disciplinary tales like Little Red Riding Hood,

0:03:54.320 --> 0:03:55.800
<v Speaker 1>in which the wolf will eat you up if you

0:03:55.840 --> 0:03:58.440
<v Speaker 1>stray from the path. In the Hoffman story, if you

0:03:58.440 --> 0:04:00.400
<v Speaker 1>don't go to sleep, the Sandman's squ to come and

0:04:00.440 --> 0:04:04.200
<v Speaker 1>scratch out your eyes. And if strong arming children and

0:04:04.280 --> 0:04:07.080
<v Speaker 1>too settling down to sleep is not why the European

0:04:07.160 --> 0:04:11.000
<v Speaker 1>parents and nurses of old told cautionary bedtime stories. Maybe

0:04:11.000 --> 0:04:13.320
<v Speaker 1>it's because they wanted to prepare their little ones for

0:04:13.400 --> 0:04:17.520
<v Speaker 1>life's hardships. Tatar said, the unusual thing about the Sandman

0:04:17.720 --> 0:04:19.919
<v Speaker 1>is he's a lot bigger than you are. There's no

0:04:20.040 --> 0:04:22.520
<v Speaker 1>defeating him. You can't face him down like you can

0:04:22.560 --> 0:04:25.400
<v Speaker 1>the villains in fairy tales. There's no happily ever after

0:04:25.480 --> 0:04:29.200
<v Speaker 1>except falling asleep giving in. He can't be beheaded or

0:04:29.240 --> 0:04:32.200
<v Speaker 1>trapped or tricked like other villains. It's hard to distinguish

0:04:32.240 --> 0:04:34.880
<v Speaker 1>fairy tale, myth, legend and all of that, but in

0:04:34.920 --> 0:04:37.120
<v Speaker 1>a way, he belongs more to the realm of myth

0:04:37.360 --> 0:04:45.480
<v Speaker 1>than fairy tales. Today's episode was written by Jescelin Shields

0:04:45.480 --> 0:04:47.680
<v Speaker 1>and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeart Media and How

0:04:47.800 --> 0:04:50.560
<v Speaker 1>To Works. For more on this and lots of other topics,

0:04:50.680 --> 0:05:04.160
<v Speaker 1>visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.