There is something very fun about writing child Dream in that you can see all his older qualities in him but they’re all unrefined and rough around the edges. Instead of going from, I don’t know “childlike wonder to gritty ptsd riddled seriousness,” Dream in present day still has all of those happy personality traits still in tact even after everything he goes through. He’s just learned more about himself since then.
i don’t know how to draw a distinct child Dream because I already draw his eyes take up 50% of his head in present day, so like, big clothes tiny nose I guess.
Okay Dreamtale lore dump time.
there’s not really anything in this comic I would consider a divergence from canon or even much of a headcanon beyond just writing things that were said to be, into an actual story. Dream helps the villagers, the villagers are overly reliant on him, no it’s not his aura he doesn’t have that yet. There is something wrong about the village, Neil is mentioned to know about it: it’s like you grow angrier than you should around there. Something subtle. You know what it is I’m sure…. This is actually why the villagers act so uniformly cruel.
Neil meets Dream two years after his house burned down, so we’re looking at some time 3-5 years after Nim’s death. There was an old image I can’t seem to find of Dream lifting a heavy brick and Neil commenting on it which is what this scene was based on. Neil’s character may be a bit off what was intended, since, well, there’s really just not many examples of how he acted.
I have pretty significant proof Dreamtale does not take place on Earth, or at least not anything akin to our Earth. It also doesn’t actually take place in the 1500s either. Based on the description in the original comics, the universe was pretty newly created, likely due to Nim hiding alongside the tree. The villages also are consistently shown to live in rounded thatched huts, the comic explicitly describes no technology, and even geographical location details are mixed around in ways that couldn’t ever occur on a historical Earth. Ergo, Dream is not from the 1500s lol. People who say this make me go a little crazy. Think, chat, think.
why is Neil Dream’s second friend? Well because Nightmare’s his first of course.
Also Dream can read a bit, just you know, not English. Imagine this entire comic is in Spanish. They’re all speaking Spanish. When does Dream learn English? I don’t know, maybe Lanny goes ‘most of the multiverse speaks English, Dream, why? I don’t know, but you better learn a new language fast because I sure as hell am not teaching you that shit, I got enough to teach your sorry ass’
Or something like that. There, that’s my one headcanon for the day lmao