Weaving New Dreams From Old Cloth

This chapter discusses the significance of Gaiman's creative disruptions of scripts and schemas in two of his visual retellings for young adults: The Sleeper and the Spindle (2014) and the graphic novel The Sandman: The Dream Hunters (1999). By weaving the old, well-worn cloth of fairy tale narrative scripts together with new schematics, Gaiman and his collaborators present sometimes radical ideologies clothed in the comfortable garb of rehearsed, longstanding traditions. As much as this action masks the changing cultural attitudes represented by the "new cloth," Gaiman's weavings also reveal to careful readers how narratives become ubiquitous and achieve metanarrativity. To understand how our minds interpret scripts, schemas, and metanarratives, this chapter will bring to bear conceptual blending and schema theories on my examination of the verbal and visual interplay of source texts and Gaiman retellings