HOLY SHIT
This will probably not be as impactful to anyone but me, but:
And in 1974, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby — the creators of Captain America — took a spin on reviving the Sandman. This time around, the hero wore a bright red and yellow costume, and prowled the “Dream Stream” in search of rogue nightmares, dispatching them with his magical pouch of dream dust lest they invade the dreams of children.
This Sandman only stuck around for a few issues, but a decade later his story was folded into a story in Wonder Woman. Even later, that story was folded into a story in Infinity Inc., a team book about the grown children of the retired Justice League of Earth 2.
And in that story, Hector Hall — son of Hawkman and Hawkwoman — became trapped in the Dream Stream and took over the duties of the Sandman. Eventually, he brought his wife, Hippolyta “Lyta” Hall — the daughter of Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor — into dreams as well, where the two conceived a child.
These two characters both have their influences on The Sandman. For example, Dream’s black, elongated helm is an interpretation of Dodds’ 1940s gas mask, and the linking of Sandman to actual power over dreams comes from Kirby and Simon.
So: When I was a little kid, my cousin gave me a huge pile of comics when she was moving out to become an adult, and I always remembered just a single issue of them that was, well, Sandman. When Neil Gaiman's Sandman came out, it always was this totally unexplained Mandela effect or self-memory-glitch that I swear I read a pulp-comic issue of it from decades before it was created (very clearly the same, same type of "helm," multiple characters in common, the same).
On this very day one of the great mysteries of my life has been resolved.