Without mortal living beings, there would be no Endless. If there were no beings who could dream, or desire, or die, Dream, Desire, and Death would have no purpose. And so, many of the story arcs feature Dream as a co-protagonist, while humans in the waking world take on equally important roles.
One of the best examples is A Game of You, a story which takes place about halfway through the series. A young woman in New York realizes that the fairy tale land she dreamed of as a child is coming back to reclaim her. The world exists in the Dreaming (Dream's realm) because she imagined it, and it is being taken over by a malevolent nightmare creature. The beings that inhabit it, who were her imaginary friends when she was a little girl, send an envoy to the waking world in order to bring her back in an attempt to save it. Had she not imagined the Land (that is the name of her imaginary world), there would be no story.
That brings me to one aspect of the Dreaming that I enjoyed very much. In Dream's castle is a library that contains every book ever imagined. And by that, I mean every book EVER conceived, whether it got published, written, or never left the mind of the author (in the Dreaming, I am a published author). Dream has the power to create nightmares that never existed in the waking world, but the Dreaming is filled with things that reflect our imaginations. For example, the gates of the castle are guarded by mythological creatures that never really existed, but they are creatures we are familiar with because we imagined them.
Some humans are powerful enough to have drastic effects on the Dreaming itself. Two characters are introduced in the second story arc, The Doll's House, that each can have profound effects on Dream and the Dreaming (I don't want to go too far into who they are or what they can do in an effort to not spoil anything). We are the dreamers and we are the creators of myth and story.
Up next: A midsummer night's Dream...
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