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Originally posted by Suite Madame Blue:

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Originally posted by Suite Madame Blue:
OK, I just referred to my copy of Brief Lives. Del's memory of her past appears in chapter 2, page 20: "...they stood on the hill (because this was on Earth in the dawn days, even then he spent a lot of time on Earth)."

I reread Del's story in Endless Nights, and it's the story of a girl very deep within Delirium's realm. She seems to be in danger of getting lost in there, which is why Barnabus gathers a group who can navigate through the madness and lead her back.

It does make sense that something happened directly to Delight. She seems to feel things so deeply, such as when Destruction left. Could Desire have been the one to tempt Eve with the fruit, or cause the serpent to do the deed? I was thinking about this last night, and it sounds like something s/he would do, just for fun. And Delight, upon discovering that her sibling was the one who caused Adam and Eve to be sent from Eden, would have been devastated. Thoughts?

I thought the girl was Delirium. She just looked different.

The "Endless Nights" story about Delirium, I thought, was a metaphor for what happened to Del. She got caught up in all of her happiness, and all of her, well, delight, and slowly it turned to madness.
I think that by changing her to Delirium, but with 'flashback' quirks where she's more of Delight, Gaiman is making a saterical statement that in these later centuraries, it is difficult to find true, pure delight without a little bit of madness tossed in.

I love her! She is so cute and disturbed... A little child who is older than the unniverse and has powers greater than humans can fathom! She and Desire are my favorites among the endless.

I think she changed since the world, and it's inhabitants, changed. She was needed more in that form than in the form of Delight.

when she was delight she was innocence, so she defines maturity or something like that. its like the old saying ignorance is bliss, the problem is that delight learned too much, and it drove her mad. her inherent innocence was corrupted by gaining the knowledge of things. this was mentioned when everyone got together in one of the first books where we meet dreams family, i'm sure of it.

Maturity...that's a good one. Refusing to grow up, so being caught as a nonsensical child forever. And Destruction and the rest of the Endless basically knew she'd go through another change soon--she HAS to grow up, just like everything and everyone else.

I wonder what will happer to her. Will she go back to being Delight, or will it become something different? She can be destructive--maybe she'll replace her brother's role. Then again, delerium is a destruction-that of the mind. Or maybe something else entirely. Some new human aspect.

There is one thing that no one has pointed out yet regarding Del's story in Endless Nights. First of all, "a girl" is not lost in Delirium's realm as Suite Madame Blue suggested. DEL is stuck in her OWN realm. At the end, when she finally comes back, it's Barnabas, Matthew and Daniel/Dream that rescue her. If Morpheus/Dream has already gone on into Death's realm and Daniel/Dream is present, then this story takes place after (at least) The Kindly Ones. So Del's story in Endless Nights is not telling us about her change from Delight to Delirium. It is telling us about what happened to her after Morpheus chose to die instead of change. Neil has said that the Sandman is basically a story about how the Kinf of Dreams had to either change or die. He chose to die. Del chose to change. Destruction changed also, just in a different way. Heck, Despair changed too. I think that's the whole point of it all. Change is the only constant.

Whoa! You took the words right outta my brain!

you might find my explanation cheesy, but I believe it expresses how thin the barrier between delight and delirium (as emotions, and not anthropomorphic personifications) is. *shrug*

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So Del's story in Endless Nights is not telling us about her change from Delight to Delirium. It is telling us about what happened to her after Morpheus chose to die instead of change. Neil has said that the Sandman is basically a story about how the Kinf of Dreams had to either change or die. He chose to die. Del chose to change. Destruction changed also, just in a different way. Heck, Despair changed too. I think that's the whole point of it all. Change is the only constant.

I agree. Sometimes, you have to change or die. But you can also do something different... Dream chose to die, Destruction chose to leave, Delirium did not chose. Se only have to follow the world that was changing... Because, no matter how painful, Delight still EXIST into Delirium, and sometimes she comes out. I think it's very important: you know a lot and you can't afford all the pain that come along with Knowledge, but you can also still find delight, deep into yourself... even if it is painful..

Destruction is very fond of Delirium, He said it himself during their reunion in Brief Lives, and we can see together the two of them many times, even in Endless Night. Well, i think that Destruction feel sorry for Delirium: to create a new world you have to destroy the old one, again and again, this is Changing. So he, Implicitly, has little part in Del's changing.

(hope you all can understand what i'm thinkin... I'm a mess in explaining myself, sorry ^^)

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I wonder what will happer to her. Will she go back to being Delight, or will it become something different? She can be destructive--maybe she'll replace her brother's role.

I was wondering about this too. Destruction is change, and the youngest Endless is the one who changes.

This would explain why [the former] Destruction has been appointed as Del's guardian in the Destruction story in Endless Nights. It also might explain two other aspects of that story:
--why Delirium says she doesn't know her brother's name anymore (He was still called Destruction in Brief Lives, even though he had abandoned his realm and function; but maybe now he has passed on even his name);
--why Delirium says that it's the presence of her and her brother together that has caused the weapons cache from an alternate, apocalyptic future to appear on the penninsula.

It's also possible that, if Delirium abandons her old role to become Destruction, the abused girl who was part of the rescue party in Delirium's Endless Nights story--the girl who says "I hurt too," and who embraces Delirium as they safely return to the world--becomes the new Delirium. At the end of the story, she's shown to have eyes of two different colors, just like our Del.

Well, I think it's a lot simpler than you guys are making this.

Delirium changed simply because when you are an adult, you can't feel that same childhood delight without feeling...delirious...I.E. high, drunk, or intoxicated in some way.

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Originally posted by Peter Cottontail:
Delirium changed simply because when you are an adult, you can't feel that same childhood delight without feeling...delirious...I.E. high, drunk, or intoxicated in some way.

I agree that this is more or less the allegorical meaning of Delight's transformation, but this doesn't mean that the change doesn't (or won't, if Neil gets around to writing it) have a less abstract cause within the narrative. (For example, maybe something in the distant past Delirium loved and lost, and this (both the love and the loss, I guess) allegorically represents the loss of "childhood delight" that you are talking about.)

I think we just don't know yet, though. And my earlier post wasn't about how Delight changed to Delirium, but about what what might be going on with her now.

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Originally posted by TheKeraTheodmet:
There is one thing that no one has pointed out yet regarding Del's story in Endless Nights. First of all, "a girl" is not lost in Delirium's realm as Suite Madame Blue suggested. DEL is stuck in her OWN realm. At the end, when she finally comes back, it's Barnabas, Matthew and Daniel/Dream that.

There is most definitely a girl: a rape victim, described by her mother as having been catatonic for a year. It's possible that she and Del were connected so strongly because they shared the bond of grief: Del grieving the old Dream, the girl grieving her loss of innocence. When she returns home, she tells her mother she met a girl who was hurting.

I don't know if there was a change in Deliriums (Deliria?) here, as slvn suggests. Could the Endless handle so much change all at once? It seems more like Daniel/Dream sent Barnabas to find Del and bring her back, so she's not entangled in this girl's mind anymore. They have been torturing each other for a year, and it's time to let go of all the grief and hurt, and start healing. Neither one can stop hurting until they separate. And if you look at the illustrations, you'll notice that she has the bi-colored eyes in the second-to-last drawing of her ("Hi, Mom. I'm home."). In her final drawing, both eyes are normal ("The girl I saw. Mommy, why did she hurt so much?").

The endless are shadows of us (humanity). As we change, they change. sometimes the light changes position, and the shadow moves with it.
Did we change? at what point did madness enter our world as freely as it roams now?
I think we changed delight.
If Ignorance is Bliss, what did we do to remove our ignorance? We Learned, and we learned to record things so they could not be lost by memory or word of mouth. We learned to write. we learned how to record and how to mark. We learned how to mark who owes what taxes and variable rates on the economic market and how bad we felt when we were dumped. Written word brought in the madness, the craziness of the modern world, and with it our happiness, our ignorance, our bliss, died.

Who changed delight into delirium? Neil did. And all the other writers that have ever been.