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“Soft Places”: When Time Comes Unstuck & Ripples…

About a Weakened Dream King Who Will Always Be the Prince of Stories First

Marco Polo is 19 and completely lost. He’s separated from his father and uncle in the Taklamakan Desert, whose name, if we’re to trust Fiddler’s Green, means “If you go in, you won’t come out again.”

Marco is dying of thirst, completely disoriented by a raging sandstorm, and he hears voices he can’t quite place. He ultimately collapses, but when he wakes again (does he?), he meets Rustichello da Pisa, who immediately starts reciting Marco’s future adventures back to him. We learn this particular Rustichello is from thirty years in Marco’s future, where they share a prison cell and Rustichello chronicles Marco’s travels. They’re having this conversation in the middle of the desert in 1273. Or 1300. Or 1992. Or all three at once.

Or 1989, when Marco meets Dream.

Welcome to the soft places, where time ripples and reality and dreams don’t stay separate...

What Soft Places Are

Gilbert/Fiddler’s Green explains it best: Soft Places are locations where the barrier between dreams and reality is permeable. “Time loops and whorls”, and past, present, and future can sort of happen at once.

And the Taklamakan Desert is one of those soft places, together with the few remaining others (like “parts of central Australia, a couple of Pacific Islands, a field in Ireland and the occasional mountain in Arizona”).

These places exist because the world basically doesn’t know enough about them, so they’re not quite “solid” yet. But most soft places are disappearing and soon, there won’t be anywhere left where you can get truly lost. Everything will be mapped and measured and known 🥺

And we know that Marco Polo (the man who will bring the Silk Road back to Europe in stories) will ultimately contribute to that process. Because while it seems adventurous on the one hand, the explorers also made the world a little harder, a little more real, a little less dreamlike. The irony hurts…

Three Timelines, One Desert

Marco and Rustichello both assume they are part of each other’s dreams. But they’re really caught in a liminal space, and Rustichello starts to recite Marco’s descriptions of the desert back to Marco himself. Which means Marco hears his own future words, which Rustichello learned from Marco, which Marco heard from Rustichello, which Rustichello learned from Marco... It’s basically a causal loop with no real origin point, so the story somewhat created itself. The words about the journey exist because the journey happened, and the journey was possible because the words were remembered. Mind-bending stuff…

Did it happen? Will it happen? Is it happening?

Yes 🤣

Dream at His Weakest

The story’s emotional core is Marco meeting a completely exhausted Dream. This is Morpheus immediately after escaping captivity, directly after the events of issue #1. He has no tools and barely any power.

Marco offers Dream his last water despite also dying of thirst. And yet he shares the only resource that matters in this desert with a stranger who seems to need it more.

Dream is moved, although he doesn’t say so (of course he doesn’t 🙄) and mutters a simple “thank you”. But a mortal who is lost and terrified extends him grace without bargaining or expecting anything in return. So Dream uses what little power he has left (power he desperately needs to get home) to return Marco to the Waking, back to his future as Marco Polo.

I always thought this one of the clearest displays of Morpheus’ character across the entire series. Marco didn’t try to bargain in any way, he just offered water to someone who needed it. And Dream, even so utterly depleted and hence risking he won’t get home (in fact, Gregory found him unconscious in the soft places—we’re told this in #2), ensures that Marco’s story continues. It’s is both his way of extending thanks, but also assuring that one of the great human stories will be told. And Dream is the Prince of Stories…

Explorers and Travel Narratives

“Soft Places” is, at its heart, a story about storytelling, specifically about travel narratives and how they also begin to construct the world while describing it.

The Travels of Marco Polo is one of the foundational texts of the Western travel narrative tradition: Stories of exploring the unknown and returning with accounts so fantastic they almost seem unreal. They expanded European understanding of the world, but they also created that world as Europeans would come to understand it (often wrongly, I dare add).

Did Marco really see all of this? Did Rustichello embellish his retellings? And more importantly, we’re supposed to ask ourselves if it matters, because if the story shaped the world that followed, then in a way, the story was real.

And yes, “Soft Places” is about exploration, but also about what it costs. Gilbert’s grief over the disappearing soft places is also grief over the disappearance of the genuinely unknown, because every discovery means one less mystery. If you draw a map of a formerly “soft place”, it will harden. And Marco is participating in that. In a way, the world becomes both more and less each time someone returns with an account of what’s out there.

We Need Soft Places

Gilbert comes to the soft places for a break from his own reality in the Dreaming (and that’s not as contradictory as it sounds). In 1992, Morpheus has elected to take long walks in Fiddler’s Green with his new love interest (we’ll later find out it is Thessaly, but when The Sandman was first published, we had to wait for that revelation for a looooooong time). Apparently, they whisper sweet nothings to each other and do heaven-knows-what and it’s all a bit embarrassing (sorry, dude, you really have my sympathy 🤣). So he uses the soft places as a refuge, and heartbreakingly, we’ll later (in “Exiles”/#74) find out Morpheus does so, too:

In “Exiles”, we encounter Dream in the soft places twice:

[also: Dream, in both iterations, just can’t help himself when he sees a kitten! Why do you think Morpheus and Walks the Night Alone are my header image? 🐈‍⬛ 🥹]

And that’s why the soft places are such an integral part of the story, because they exist outside of ordinary time. And after Morpheus’ death, it means they can hold simultaneously what should be sequential. And that’s why, and I’ll not apologise for banging on about this constantly, people need to read and understand “Soft Places”, and they need to keep on reading after #69/Morpheus’ death, because soft places do not require you to choose between what was and what is. It’s a simple as that, and it’s not for nothing that the author had created them as an “escape hatch” should it ever be needed. Because it’s not just that time is fluid there, it’s also the border between what’s dream and what’s real that is softened.

We’re told (in “Soft Places”) that what happens in the soft places will fade like a “dawn dream”. But we’re also told that dreams, despite not being able to hold on to them when we wake, can still “colour the day”. The soft places are amongst the only spaces in the Sandman Universe where something that’s ended can continue.

And apart from the world-building that is so essential to the rest of The Sandman, maybe the moral of the story is that we need places where we can “get lost” (in the sense of losing ourselves so we can find again who we were to begin with, or who we’re supposed to become). Where time comes unstuck and boundaries between past, present and future, dreaming and waking, the known and the unknown, are not a thing. Maybe that’s why so many of us read and write, because the boundaries are set in stone in literally all areas of life. Stories are the last soft places available to us, and as long as someone can lose themselves in them, they’ll persist.

I love “Soft Places” so much because to me, it’s a “quiet” issue that at the same time speaks louder than many others. I insist it’s one of the most essential issues of the entire run because it explains how the Sandman Universe works, and because it plants seeds that’ll only blossom once you’ve seen where the story ends: What persists after change, what remains when one thing ends and something new begins? If Daniel walks the soft places after Morpheus while Morpheus still walks them, too, what question should we be asking?

Marco Polo walked into a desert whose name translates to you won’t come out again. But he did walk back out, with stories that ultimately shaped the world. He met an Endless at one of his weakest moments and offered him the only thing he had. Which made him continue a story far larger than his own.

And just like the “dawn dream on waking” mentioned in the issue, it coloured everything that came after...

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