Sandman and Hob Gadling - Immortality, Collective Memory, and Zone 2

I have often wondered what it would mean to live forever.
At first, it seems tempting: never to lose, never to end. But soon comes the weight — watching the world change, losing people, carrying memories that never fade.
In Sandman, Hob Gadling is this immortal human. He crosses centuries, meeting Morpheus every hundred years, as they reflect on what it means to continue.

The Original Paradigm: Memory as Immortality

For Indigenous peoples, immortality was not living endlessly but belonging to collective memory.
Each life left traces in the territory, in rituals, in shared stories. Continuity did not lie in the isolated individual but in the common flow that preserved names, gestures, and teachings.
Through this lens, Hob Gadling is not only a man who does not die: he is a metaphor of permanence when memory finds its place in the collective.

The avatar Iam reminds us: “It is not the body that lives forever, but what inscribes itself in the common.”

The Old World’s Domestication

The Old World domesticated immortality in two ways:

• Through religion, promising it as reward or punishment.
  
  

• Through science and economy, turning longevity into a market: formulas, technologies, fantasies of defeating death.
  
  

Hob Gadling becomes a mirror of this domestication: his immortality does not bring automatic glory, but solitude, wars, and losses. It is only through encounters — especially with Morpheus — that his endless life gains meaning.

Sleep Science and Evidence

Hob Gadling’s story can be linked to the functions of N2 sleep, crucial for memory and learning:

• N2 is marked by sleep spindles and K-complexes, fundamental for consolidating memory.
  
  

• Research shows spindles act as a “bridge” between hippocampus and cortex, turning recent experiences into lasting memory.
  
  

• More than storing information, N2 integrates memories into collective narratives.
  
  

Like Hob, our real “immortality” lies not in a body that continues indefinitely, but in shared memories that inscribe us in the collective.

Zone 1, Zone 2, and Zone 3

• Zone 1: immortality seen as individual desire, fear of death, and rejection of limits.
  
  

• Zone 2: immortality as collective memory, continuity through the common.
  
  

• Zone 3: immortality domesticated as religious dogma or market product.
  
  

Hob’s journey shows a movement out of Zone 1 (the selfish impulse never to die) and Zone 3 (fantasies of eternal power), toward Zone 2: the immortality that makes sense only when rooted in belonging.

Synthesis

Hob Gadling, in Sandman, is not just a fantastic figure: he is metaphor of our relationship with time, death, and memory.

• In original paradigms, immortality was inscription in the collective.
  
  

• In the Old World, it was domesticated as dogma and market.
  
  

• In science, N2 sleep shows how we consolidate memories that go beyond the individual.
  
  

• In our framework, true permanence lies in Zone 2: what lives on in collective memory, more than in an isolated body.
  
  

Or, as the avatar Iam concludes:
“To live forever is not to never die. It is to remain inscribed in what we share.”

Suggested References:

• Graeber, D. & Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
  
  

• Diekelmann, S. & Born, J. (2010). The memory function of sleep. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
  
  

• Iber, C. et al. (2007). The AASM Manual for the Scoring of Sleep and Associated Events.