Morpheus

Morpheus is the god of dreams, a son of Hypnos (Sleep), who visits sleepers in human form, copying any face, voice or gesture. His name comes from the Greek morphē, shape, and lives on in the word morphine and in the phrase “in the arms of Morpheus”.

Almost everything known about him comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book 11). Ceyx, king of Trachis, drowns in a storm at sea while his wife Alcyone, unaware, keeps praying to Hera, Juno in Ovid, for his safe return. Not wanting prayers for a dead man, the goddess sends Iris to the cave of Sleep, in the land of the Cimmerians, where sunlight never enters, the river of forgetfulness murmurs and poppies grow at the door. From his thousand sons, Sleep chooses Morpheus, who imitates the walk, features, voice, clothing and favourite words of any man so perfectly that no sleeper can tell him from the living. His brother Icelos, whom mortals call Phobetor, becomes beasts, birds and serpents, and Phantasos becomes earth, rocks, water and trees.

Morpheus flies to Trachis on soundless wings and appears at Alcyone's bed as Ceyx, pale, naked and dripping with seawater, to tell her that he is dead and ask her to mourn him. At dawn she runs to the shore, sees the body drifting in and throws herself toward it; the gods turn both of them into kingfishers, and for seven calm winter days, the halcyon days, the sea lies still while she broods her nest.

Older Greek poetry gives dreams no single master. Hesiod makes the Dreams, like Hypnos himself, children of Nyx, the Night, and in the Iliad Zeus sends a deceiving Dream to Agamemnon in the likeness of Nestor, the closest Greek precedent for Morpheus' art. Homer also places dreams behind two gates, one of horn for true visions and one of ivory for false ones. The German pharmacist Friedrich Sertürner, who isolated morphine from opium in the early nineteenth century, named it after him.