Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel Bomb here. You know, when you wake up in the morning and you have all that crusty stuff in your eyes, that's called room And it's just the remnants of a liquid coating that protects your eyes that you blink away when you're awake, but that collects and
dries when you sleep. But if you were a child living in central or northern Europe a couple of centuries ago, ground ups would have probably told you that when you woke up in the morning with crusty eyelashes, it was because the Sandman had been to your bedside, sprinkling his magical sleepy dust in your eyes, spinning the yarns of your dreams. This might have caused you some alarm, because the figure of the Sandman isn't all magical, benevolent snooze dust.
It turns out, as much as the Sandman is to sleep as Santa is to gift, giving, a sandman's shadow side is at least as conspicuous as Santa's penchant for shady around the clock surveillance and distribution of switches and coal to naughty kids. We spoke about how the Sandman myths got their start with Dr Maria Tatar, a professor of German studies, folklore, and children's literature at Harvard University.
She said, it's a bit difficult to trace his origins because stories about the Sandman are part of an oral tradition. I feel confident that there are similar figures in other cultures because so many of the jolly, child friendly creatures are shadowed by a disciplinary, evil person who invented the Sandman. Who knows the Sandman's first parade onto the page was an eighteenth century German dictionaries which briefly described the German idiom der Zantman Comte Sandman is Coming, which was used
to tease children who were particularly sleepy looking. The first story about the Sandman and his doings was published in eighteen eighteen by German writer E. T. A. Hoffman. Der Sandman begins with an exasperated nurse telling a story about a mythical creature who throws sand in the eyes of little children who won't go to sleep, causing their eyes to fall out of their sockets. The sandman then collects the eyeballs in a sack and carries them to his home on the dark side of the moon, where he
feeds them to his children. Tatar said Dr Zentman became an important story in psychoanalytic circles because Freud made so much of it in his essay The Uncanny Hoffman's story is a fairy tale for grown ups. Really, his sandman is this dark, predatory monster. It definitely wasn't written for children. Keep in mind many of the things we consider kids stories today of snow white sleeping beauty were originally told by and two adults, though of course not all fairy
tales were for grown ups. In eighteen forty one, Hans Christian Andersen published a fairy tale meant for a young audience called Old locai Ole, being a Danish first name and Loca translating to shut your eye. The eponymous character, always dressed in silk pajamas and carrying a colorful umbrella, is never referred to by Anderson as the Sandman, but the Sandman is the title most English translations assigned to the fairy tale. Old doesn't throws and into children's eyes,
he squirts milk into them. The story is a sequence of dream like tableaus, and all seems to be a benevolent figure in them, but he does introduce the main character, a young boy, too, concepts of sexuality and death, and at the end of the story, the boy discovers that Old Locai has a brother who, instead of coming night after night to our bedsides bringing dreams, only visits each
person once, bringing death. His name is also all Loci Tatar said, what's interesting about the Sandman's stories is they remind me a bit of the children's verses and lullabies. We sing to children, which are soothing and gentle, but there's a stark, violent side to them too. Somehow it seems to mirror our ambivalence towards children. We adore them and want to tell them gentle, lovely stories, but they
drive us crazy. At times, We and especially our ancestors, resorted to cautionary and disciplinary tales like Little Red Riding Hood, in which the wolf will eat you up if you stray from the path. In the Hoffman story, if you don't go to sleep, the Sandman's squ to come and scratch out your eyes. And if strong arming children and too settling down to sleep is not why the European
parents and nurses of old told cautionary bedtime stories. Maybe it's because they wanted to prepare their little ones for life's hardships. Tatar said, the unusual thing about the Sandman is he's a lot bigger than you are. There's no defeating him. You can't face him down like you can the villains in fairy tales. There's no happily ever after except falling asleep giving in. He can't be beheaded or
trapped or tricked like other villains. It's hard to distinguish fairy tale, myth, legend and all of that, but in a way, he belongs more to the realm of myth than fairy tales. Today's episode was written by Jescelin Shields and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeart Media and How To Works. For more on this and lots of other topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.