The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You by Neil Gaiman

Dreaming the Self: Gender, Identity, and the Fragile Borders of Reality

In A Game of You, the fifth volume of Neil Gaiman’s genre-defining series The Sandman, the narrative scope narrows, yet the psychological depth expands profoundly. Rather than tracing the cosmic or mythopoetic arcs of Morpheus, the Dream King, Gaiman trains his lens on a more intimate geography—the internal landscapes of identity, trauma, and gendered experience. This installment demonstrates how the fantastical can serve as a mirror, not to power or grandeur, but to the quiet, ongoing struggle of becoming.

The titular “game” is not a mere flight of fancy but a confrontation with suppressed memory and fragmented selfhood. The protagonist, Barbie—a character reintroduced from The Doll’s House—is drawn back into a dream realm of her own creation, a once-idyllic fantasy kingdom now teetering under existential threat. Her journey, flanked by an unlikely cast of dream creatures and human allies, becomes a deft allegory for individuation, as theorized by Jung, as well as an exploration of liminal identity.

What distinguishes A Game of You is its structural conceit: the interweaving of fantasy and reality not as opposing poles, but as cohabiting dimensions. Gaiman refuses to privilege one over the other. Dream is not escape; it is a crucible. For Barbie, the dream realm is both refuge and reckoning—a landscape haunted not only by mythical threats but by the residue of patriarchal and societal expectations.

Gaiman’s nuanced treatment of gender is particularly noteworthy here. Wanda, a transgender woman excluded from a magical ritual on the grounds of “biological essentialism,” is portrayed with rare tenderness and complexity for a 1990s comic. Her narrative arc culminates in a moment of both heartbreak and affirmation, indicting the very mythologies that so often claim to transcend prejudice, while simultaneously crafting new ones that challenge it.

Thematically, A Game of You continues Gaiman’s preoccupation with storytelling as a means of survival and self-articulation. The tale gestures toward the idea that identities—like dreams—are constructed, deconstructed, and performed. Barbie’s final act of drawing a new face on the mirror is both symbolic and literal: a reclamation of the narrative that once confined her.

Colleen Doran’s and Shawn McManus’s artwork complements this fluidity with shifting visual registers—ranging from whimsical to grotesque—that echo the story’s oscillation between fairy tale and psychological horror. The visual motifs—mirrors, masks, thresholds—are not mere flourishes but semiotic devices, reinforcing the text’s central question: who are we when no one is watching, and who do we become when the dream ends?

In sum, A Game of You is not merely a chapter in The Sandman saga—it is an invitation to dream not as escape but as encounter. Gaiman subverts the traditional quest narrative by nesting it within a feminist, queer, and deeply humanist framework, asking the reader not what they desire, but who they are when desire speaks.

It is a story that whispers, rather than declares—and in that whisper lies a challenge to look inward, and not flinch.