Dream: Vampire Lestat in Space
Dream 20040309, 1:30 AM:
I’m in a house that is sort of like the Avenel house. I am a vampire; there are two others here. One is a woman, the other is a powerful man, tall with long dark hair. He kind of reminds me of a KISS musician with his lanky strength. There is a woman at the door, for some reason, the woman vampire decides it would be funny to let her see the man vampire like he really is. It frightens her – I don’t remember whether she runs away, or gets eaten.
I’m talking with the man vampire. He tells a story about when I was five, and I graphed the moon for him in two dimensions. He says that I would have done anything to please him. I feel a great deal of sentimental warmth toward him, but at the same time he frightens me and I resent the hold he has over me. He says something about how he has my semen in a vial. The image of this is very clear – it’s a small, amethyst-colored tube of glass, decorated with beads on the sides, to be worn like a piece of jewelry. I am watching my face in a mirror, or it may be that I’m just seeing it from a different perspective; I see my face shift and curl with distaste, because I am angry that he is toying with me this way. Is the semen to be used as an alternative to taking more blood?
Then, there is a fight. I don’t remember what causes it, just that there’s a horrendous altercation between me and the man vampire. I fly out into space, and hang behind a rock out near Jupiter. Being behind the rock shields me from the sun, and I am there for many years, I think recovering from the fight. I see a man in a form-fitting space suit come out of a small craft, walking around trying to put stone on stone in a ruined building. I pounce on him, and drink his blood thru the suit; the sensation of his warm lithe body is strong through the suit, and the feeling of his blood going into my throat is very sensual – I can feel it going down my body, and I have been parched for a long time. I look for some kind of key that he ought to have, but then I remark that they never send the man out here with the key. I fly back toward the planet, chased by other men in another craft – I think they were in the main craft while the man in the space suit was flying reconnaisance. We go through a whole grand complex of music halls. I don’t remember any resolution, but the sense of being chased ends, and I am just traveling through the halls. I’m still in a flying-like mode, kind of Superman-style, prone, but not very fast. There is a man who sings opera in the lobby, it’s some simple song like the Star Spangled Banner. There’s an optional high note at the end, and I’m pleased to see that he chooses to take the high note. He’s kind of sad and deflated, as if he’s singing in the lobby because he didn’t make it on the stage. There are all kinds of ornately lettered signs, and I appreciate the Victorian beauty of the lettering. I remember at one point, clawing my way across banquet tables which are covered with food, and throwing the food to the ground – plates of shrimp, and canapes, and tiny sandwiches. There are two women with me now, and one of them is taking apart sandwiches to get to the meat of them. A serving girl hands her a plate that has all meat, and she smiles, glad that the girl is getting the idea.
I go out into the lobby, and out through the Musician’s Door. There is a separate one for dancers. There are all these beautiful striletzias – they are hugely tall, and multi-branched, but all in the standard Regina colors. I pick up a little black girl, and fly through the air with her; we sing Good King Wenceslas, and the crowd out in the courtyard sings along with us. I put her down, saying something about how she should go find her mother, and fly up into a tall pine tree.
The woman with me starts tearing out branches to screen us from below. We have the sense that we will be safe, if we can hide out here and not be seen. A giant dinosaur sees my foot, and, thinking that I’m a bird, grabs me. It’s like a rose-and-cream colored brontosaurus; it’s almost cartoonish, and clearly female. She talks with a woman’s voice, and a sort of simpering tone, along the lines of “Oh, hello, leetle birdie! I didn’t see you there!” For a moment, I’m terrified, thinking she’s going to eat me, but instead she’s some kind of dinosaur Good Samaritan; she thinks that I’m some kind of rare bird, and she wants to help me. She takes us to another, taller tree; I explain that I need to buy it, rather than just perch there, and much to my surprise, she says I can. Later, someone asks which tree; I explain it’s the one with the 13575 and the lot of zeroes that I’m going to write in the check. Later, I’m in the tree, but now it’s like a long, narrow cabinet – making a nest; apparently I’m somehow living a bird’s life after all.
Lestat in Space! 😀
I am currently re-reading a Lestat book (because I showed the silly Queen of The Damned Movie) so this is especially amusing to me.
Re: Lestat in Space! 😀
I ‘read’ a bunch of Rice’s books as books-on-tape, when I was working in an art supply warehouse… it definitely gave an interesting flavor to my days!
Do you take a lot of naps? You seem to dream way more than the average person sleeps.
Or are these dreams shorter than the descriptions make them sound and you have like 20 a night?
I’m just a little serious (obsessive? not me!!) about my dreaming…
Most people recall one dream, if that, per night. Research shows that we start having dreams within the first 90-minute sleep cycle, and have a dream episode, including waking up at the end, every 90 to 100 minutes thereafter. The dream portion of the sleep cycle gets longer each time, so toward waking, your dreams take up more than half yoru sleeping time. Most folks never realize that they wake up repeatedly – but that’s when we “toss and turn” and shift so that our bodies don’t become uncomfortable from being in one position too long. Typically, the brain just checks things out, decides you’re all OK, no unexpected tigers, not liable to fall out of the tree… and goes right back to sleep. But if you watch somebody in a lab with an EEG, you can see that their brain dreams, and wakes up, four to six times a night.
Part of my dream training, was learning to recognize these dream-awakenings, and get up and write something down to help me remember it. I’ve been lax lately, which is why I went several days between for a while… but I’ve been focusing again on waking up and catching more dreams. On good days, I usually get two or three; I know that there are more that I miss.
When I refer to “Magic Naptime,” it’s actually part of my night’s sleep… but also a nap. Lucidity Institute studies have shown that the most effective way to get into a lucid dream state, is to wake up a couple of hours before your wake-up time, spend a little time awake to engage the brain, and then go back to sleep… the Alpha cycle continues whether you’re sleeping or not, so you’ll often find yourself in the perfect state to dream, yet you’re awake because you’ve just been sitting up reading, so you can get lucid easier. I usually go to bed between 10:30 and 11:00, wake up about 1:30 from a dream, then wake up about 3:30 and move from one bed to another (Chris wakes up at 6, and if I don’t change beds when I wake up, his alarm wakes me up, and I don’t have to wake up until 7) and then sit up until about 4 or 4:30, then back to bed until 7:00 with my earplugs in. It’s a little complicated, but it seems to really allow for a lot of dream-stuff to get worked out, and surprisingly, I get enough sleep!
Thanks for sharing your…process (for lack of a better word.) Interesting. I try to write dreams down when I can capture them. Hoping to use them for my writing down the road.
Vampire dreams are always fascinating. 🙂