The Sandman comic series often asks the perennial question: When is something serving you, and when are you serving it? At the end of the first book, Preludes & Nocturnes, the titular Sandman, often just called “Dream,” sees one of his powerful magical items destroyed, a ruby that carries out his work even when his attention is elsewhere.
It looks like this will be a fatal loss, but Dream unexpectedly feels all the magic he delegated rushing back to him at once, and becomes more powerful than he has been in ages.
“Silly Sandman! That couldn’t be me,” I thought, and picked up the strange glowing object called “Phone” where I seem to outsource more and more of my identity. Then I thought, “Uh-oh.”
Ok, maybe we’re all somewhat trapped by our magical tools. How do we start to take our power back? I’m not a magical being (or a comic book writer), but here’s what I would say.
See for yourself: Every summary, every outline, comes with its own biases. The more you rely on them, the less you know what you really think, and in fact the less able you are to understand anything but summaries. You’ll always be controlled by who’s creating them for you. But if you engage directly, no one can limit your knowledge.
Trust the process: Acquiring knowledge is only one half. The other is communicating and acting on it—daunting tasks, but the frustrations and challenges are as intrinsic to knowledge as discovering it in the first place. When you’re working through an unexpected problem and you see clearly where you “didn’t know what you didn’t know,” that’s when a breakthrough can happen, the magic lightbulb moment. But if you stick to passive knowledge, you’ll never find it.
Grow your mental library: I like having a dictionary in my pocket that I can use to look up anything. But that reminds me of the shortcomings of having to look something up. I have to know enough for questions to even occur to me. Imagine walking through a world where nothing suggested any connection, sparked any curiosity, because it’s all meaningless unless someone else defines it for you. It would be more disabling than being blind or deaf.
At one point, Dream remarks, “Tools, of course, can be the subtlest of traps.” This is good advice, not just for comic book characters.
