Morpheus

Morpheus ("he who forms, shapes, molds") is the principal Greek god of dreams. His father was Hypnos, god of sleep. Morpheus had the ability to take any human's form and appeared in dreams as your loved ones. His brothers Icelus, Phobetor and Phantasos were the other Oneiroi. He was mentioned in the Metamorphoses of Ovid and lived on a bed made of ebony in a dark cave decorated with poppy flowers.

The drug morphine derives its name from Morpheus based on its similar dream inducing power.

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Morpheus is also the name of a file sharing client operated by the company StreamCast[?] (formerly called MusicCity[?]) that originally used the OpenNAP peer-to-peer (P2P) platform. Located at Morpheus.com (http://www.morpheus.com/), it has a web-based search interface, just like Audiogalaxy, though Morpheus searches all kinds of media, not just mp3s. In 2001, Morpheus changed protocol from OpenNAP to FastTrack. On February 26th 2002, all Morpheus clients suddenly stopped working when the FastTrack protocol was updated and Morpheus users no longer were allowed to log into the network. This was apparently because of licensing disputes between StreamCast and the owners of FastTrack. On March 2nd, a new, less-robust Morpheus client using Gnutella as its P2P medium was released.

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Morpheus is a character in the comic book series The Sandman, written by Neil Gaiman.

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Morpheus is the name of a character (played by Laurence Fishburne) in the science fiction film, The Matrix. The Wachowski brothers, writers and directors of The Matrix films are fans of Neil Gaiman and based the character of Morpheus on the title character from The Sandman, also adopting one of his most common pseudonyms, Morpheus. They gave Fishburne some or all of The Sandman series to read, and the style of speech and mannerism of the Matrix character are heavily informed by the Sandman character, although since The Sandman is only a graphic novel, much of the tone and inflection is an original (though recognizable) interpretative creation on Fishburne's part. This connection is hinted at again in Enter the Matrix when Niobe calls daniels institute of dreams to get in touch with Morpheus.