The New Sandman

I was moving, flying through a series of tunnels, unaware of where I was heading, but knowing that my quest was urgent. I rounded a corner, and now I was travelling down a corridor, the walls of which were panelled with dark wood.
Abruptly the scene changed again, and now I was racing down a heart-shaped tunnel, like the tunnel of love you get in some fairgrounds, but without the water. After a while the tunnel ended, and I stood in a small, old fashioned room.
The room was sparsely furnished, there was a wooden chair and a small table, on which sat a single candle, the only blight in the room. There was a man there, yelling at a woman who lay at his feet.
The woman’s clothes were ripped, exposing her bare chest, and blood flowed from her left temple, pooling on the floor. For all that, she was still incredibly beautiful, her cold eyes staring out at me, beyond the man that towered over her.
I moved on, drawn towards a mirror to one side. I don’t know what happened next, whether I broke the glass or simply moved through it like water, but suddenly I was falling through a great void, darkness pressing down upon me.
I landed on a clear, reflective surface, like marble, only pale blue in colour and strangely rippled, like the glass in old-fashioned windows. The plane stretched away from me in all directions, while the sky above was black as pitch.
I turned, and before me stood a man. Instinctively, I knew that he was the Sandman, and that I had reached my destination. The man was tall, with bright blue eyes and a long grey beard that reached his waist. He wore grey robes that had a strange shimmering quality, like boil on water. Long chains bound the man to a circle of grey stone, set in the floor a little way off.
“The chain is forged of belief.” He said “Each link is a broken dream, a lost faith.” There was something in his voice, and in his eyes too, that made me realise just how old, how ancient, and how sad, incredibly sad, he was.
He moved towards me, and pointed at the ground beneath my feet. I realised that we were no longer standing on the plane of glass, but instead were in the middle of a huge desert, with dark dunes towering over us and a blue-purple sky overhead. I knelt down and brushed away the sand at my feet.
About two centimetres below the surface, the sand abruptly stopped. Below was a seemingly bottomless drop. Far below, a stream of golden sand flowed by, an unending river of dream-dust.
“That is me, in my purest form.” The sand briefly formed various shapes; a dog being chased by a giant hare, a wolf and a queen playing chess, a man flying through the sky on a vacuum cleaner. The river of dreams flowed on.
I returned my attention to the Sandman, who was holding something out to me. It was a necklace of some kind; a large blue stone hanging on a golden chain. A trickle of sand fell from the stone, adding to the unending desert.
“This is yours now, your charge and responsibility. For you are my chosen heir, you are the new Sandman.” I took the stone, and then he was gone, the empty chains falling to the floor.
I turned away, and saw a door hanging in the air ahead of me. I took one last look at the desert, the empty shackles of the dead Sandman, and the unending river of sand that flowed far below.
And then I stepped through the door, and back into the waking world.