He is not a kindly dream-bringer. In The Sandman: Keeper of Eternal Sleep, JD Arden follows the Sandman's darker trail - from Hoffmann's eye-stealer and Andersen's Ole Lukøje to modern sleep paralysis, medicine, and marketable slumber. This is a forensic, mythic tour of lullabies as threat: sand and sacks, masks and mornings, the tiny grit that marks a stolen waking. Through close readings, folklore, case vignettes, and conversations with sleep researchers, Arden shows how a bedside figure became a mechanism of control - punishing wakefulness, monetizing surrender, and normalizing nocturnal vulnerability. Witty, sharp, and quietly horrific, the book gives you tools to recognize the Keeper's work and leaves you with a single practical, unsettling question: when you wipe the sleep from your eyes, whose hands have been at work?