"The Sandman: The Dream Hunters" is a novella by English author Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano. The story is tangential to The Sandman comic book series, and can be read without prior knowledge of the main sequence. It won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Illustrated Narrative. The story deals with a love affair between a Buddhist monk and a fox spirit or kitsune.

Gaiman's afterword states that it was based on an old Japanese folk tale, drawn from Y. T. Ozaki's Old Japanese Fairy Tales and retooled to fit in the world of the Sandman, but no such tale is to be found in Ozaki's work. Gaiman has since stated when asked that the story was entirely of his own devising, most recently in the Foreword to The Sandman: Endless Nights.[1] In December 2007, Gaiman noted on his blog, "I learned from Wikipedia that Sandman: The Dream Hunters was actually based on Pu Songling's Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, which I thought I ought to read."[2]