In the following storyline, Dream takes more of a peripheral role as we watch stories that revolve around the dreaming and its inhabitants in The Doll’s House. It begins with a story told by an old African tribesman to a younger nephew, a story that is only told once and heard once. In this story we see a beautiful, but bored, the princess who falls in love with Dream. She discovers that he is one of the Endless, an ancient, immortal and powerful group of entities, and it is forbidden for the Endless to traffic in love with mortals. Needless to say, Dream has fallen in love with the princess as well, but she runs in fear of what may come. Their illicit love topples her kingdom to ruin, and she commits suicide and spurns Dream in death as well, causing him to condemn her to hell. Thus ends the story told by this tribe’s men.
The story then revolves around Rose, a young woman, who unbeknownst to herself, is the vortex, a person with the power to merge everyone’s dreams into one big mess. There is a tangent involving serial killers and the Corinthian (a nightmare from the Dreaming), but the vortex Rose is forming needs to be stopped.
This is managed in the Dreaming on the Fiddler’s Green (a lovely field in the Dreaming) with Rose’s grandmother dying instead of Rose, and the Dreaming is returned to its regular state of flux. We then see how Desire is plotting against Dream in a little endless family feud. Thus ends the second storyline. A short story occurs in the middle of this arc, a tale about a man from 1389 who gets drunk and decides not to die. Dream and Death overhear this and decide to see what it would be like to grant him immortality. With this, Dream approaches the man, Hob Gadling, and offers to meet him 100 years hence. The rest of this story continues with Dream and Hob meeting once every 100 years up to the present day and forming an odd friendship across the centuries as they sharing their stories across the ages.