One of the elements through which Gaiman does this is through his de-centering of the central core required for the interpretation of discourse. Throughout his series Gaiman keeps shifting the center that Jacques Derrida argues is central to language and required for interpretation. Sharkey argues that through the constant switching between the real world and the dream world Gaiman keeps de-centralizing our interpretive framework. In The Sandman series it is impossible to define which plain of existence is the actual real, or the centre. Both the ‘real’ world and the dream world influence each other through numerous means which makes it impossible to define a hierarchy between these two elements.

This destabilizing of the binary nature of the real and the dream Gaiman removes one of the differences upon which the interpretation of phallocentric and patriarchal discourse, according to Derrida, is dependant. Or as Sharkey puts it “our received barriers regarding modes of representation […] are […] transgressed.”(Sharkey, 2010: 12) This removal of the differences, upon which discourse is dependant, of the real and the dream is only one feature through which Neil Gaiman does this.

Another way through which Gaiman has de-stabilized the heterocosm in The Sandman is through his representation of a god and his incorporation of numerous religions all of which appear to have a fluid identity. Within the series there is mention of a creator deity – the shaper- but is never referred to as God in the Christian/ monotheistic sense of the word. With the series the Shaper is an indifferent deity which creates but does not influence when looking at those that could be labeled as the shaper of destiny or the influencers of the world one quickly arrives at the entities called ‘the endless’.

These six (or actually seven) entities are however better defined as concepts. But even these concepts are not stable or centered but fluid and changing, plagued by the duality of their nature. They are both independent and dependent on each other for their existence, one requires the others existence. Even the main protagonist of the series, Dream, is plagued by the duality of his nature and the absence of a binary divide of his identity and destiny. In fact, one of the Endless actually stopped fulfilling his role and disappears.

Within The Sandman series it would seem then that the reader, but also every entity in the series is stuck within the first of the three Lacanian orders ‘the real’ as nothing is separate from the other and everything is part of everything else. The binary divide upon which language is structured appears to have been removed in favor of fluidity in identity and it is impossible to create a stabilized hierarchy within the text.