Land of Morpheus: the Realm of Dreams

The Land of Morpheus, as mortals often named it, was one of the realms of the Greek world, the domain of Morpheus, the primordial God of Dreams and son of Nyx. Also known as the Realm of Dreams, it was a bizarre world of eternal night where imagination and reality converged and where time itself ran distorted. Its shadow reached into the waking world more than once, most cruelly through the curse of the living sleep that claimed the father of the Barbarian prince Alrik, and most dangerously when its master sought to merge it with the whole of creation after Helios was torn from the sky.

A world of eternal night#

Morpheus, the God of Dreams and a son of Nyx, was counted among the Protogenoi, the first order of gods who embodied the essential aspects of nature, the same ancient generation described among the Primordials. The ancient Dream God resided in and ruled over the Realm of Dreams, which mortals called the Land of Morpheus after its master. It was a strange country of unending night, a place where imagination and reality flowed into one another and where time was distorted beyond mortal reckoning.

The realm was a world of imagination, of fears and of desires, and was often thought to be the other side of the coin to the World of Man and Gods. In that respect it resembled the night universe of Nyx herself, the Night incarnate and mother of many conceptual primordial deities, among them Morpheus and Thanatos, the God of Death, who presided over a realm of his own, the Domain of Death. Like those dark countries, the Dream Realm was spoken of as a parallel world, a mirror of the waking and physical world. It shared this metaphysical and primordial character with the Realm of Chaos as well, a domain long since tamed and brought to order by the Skyfather Ouranos. The existence of so many such realms, standing for chaos, night, darkness, dreams, and death, revealed the sheer vastness of the Greek cosmos, and these were only the ones whose names were spoken, with many more left unexplored.

The realm was not wholly cut off from the affairs of gods and men. As Hermes, the God of Speed and messenger of Olympus, was the deliverer of dreams to sleeping mortals, it was held likely that he traversed the Land of Morpheus in the course of those duties, just as he walked the Underworld in his office as a guide of the dead.

The balance of light and dark#

The divine order of the Greek world rested on a balance of Light and Dark, and the Land of Morpheus lay on the dark side of that scale. If the balance were ever disrupted in favour of Night and Darkness, Morpheus would be able to merge the Realm of Dreams and Night with the rest of creation, drawing all things into one, with the Dream God alone holding supreme power over what remained.

That possibility set the realm apart even from the other hidden regions of the Greek world. Like the upper Underworld and Tartarus below it, the Land of Dreams could be merged with the World of Man and Gods, but where those chthonic realms were physically joined to the living world by the Titan Hyperion, a merging of the dream world promised a far more severe and stranger outcome for the rest of creation.

The danger nearly came to pass when Helios was torn from the sky. With the sun gone and the balance broken, Morpheus cast the gods and mortals of Greece into slumber and began wrapping the earth in black fog, content to wait as the whole of creation drifted toward union with his dark realm. Only when Kratos restored the sun god to the heavens was the balance righted and the merging undone.

The living sleep#

The realm pressed most directly upon mortal life through the curse called "the living sleep". The King of the Barbarians, father of Prince Alrik, fell ill from a curse secretly inflicted upon him by Hades, God of the Underworld, as motivation for Alrik in the Wager of the Gods. A Healer who tended the King on his sickbed revealed to the prince that his father suffered from the living sleep, a curse that imprisoned the King within the Land of Morpheus until it finished draining away his life force.

In a desperate attempt to save his father, Alrik ventured forth on a quest for the Tree of Life to obtain the healing drink of the gods, the Ambrosia of Asclepius, having learned of its powers from the elder Healer. He failed. The Spartan warrior Kratos, then the champion of Ares, captured the Ambrosia to save his own daughter from an illness of her own. Alrik returned home empty handed and found his father, who had succumbed to the curse, already being cremated. Crowned the new Barbarian King shortly after, Alrik swore vengeance upon Kratos.

Fate of the realm#

What became of the ancient realm in the aftermath of Morpheus's failed plot to depose the gods of Olympus was never recorded. Gaia recounted that the Dream God retreated into the shadows upon the return of Helios, which was taken to mean that he withdrew into his own realm to hide from the wrath of Olympus. He was never spoken of again, and it remained unclear whether he stayed beyond the long reach of Zeus and his pantheon. If he did not, then his realm may have fallen into disarray and chaos. Yet if Morpheus did escape punishment, he would have lived through the destruction of Olympus, the deaths of Helios and Zeus, and the departure of Kratos from Greece, and the ruin of the Olympian order would have offered a perfect opening for his return to the waking world.