A VAMPIRIC REVIERIE

 While watching a YouTube video on cartoonist Herb Trimpe, I began to nod off, so I closed my laptop and gave in to a cat nap. As I slept, I dreamed of what my mind was telling me was a scene from a vintage Hammer vampire film that was cut for being too sexually explicit.

In the dream, Peter Cushing, in his usual Van Helsing vampire hunter role, approached a bed upon which lay a beautiful female vampire, played by the lovely Veronica Carlson, whose considerable beauty was amplified by my subconscious imagination. The alluring revenant, clad in a pretty much see-through diaphanous gown, welcomed her hunter with beckoning arms and, though armed with mallet and sharp stake at the ready, he gave pause. Was he under her baleful hypnotic influence and being manipulated into misreading the situation, or was the undead vixen sincerely entreating him for something other than sustenance?

Van Helsing hesitated for another moment, then slowly put down the implements of the fanged predator's destruction. With great caution, he mounted the bed and knelt close to her, her thighs akimbo. Her cold hands caressed his face, and their touch did not repulse him. She pulled him close to her face, her eyes partially closed and a smile on her face that promised pleasures never before enjoyed by mortal man.

Tentatively, Van Helsing reached out for the gown's décolletage, beneath which the vampire's heaving bosom held him mesmerized. He clutched the gown an, losing himself momentarily, he tore the gown down to the fiend's nethers, eliciting a yelp of surprise from the immortal before him. He kissed her on the mouth, heedless of his neck's proximity to her pronounced canines, and she welcomed him, her tongue dead yet unabashedly piloted by her need.

Van Helsing took his time kissing his way down her body, savoring her scent and the the flavor of her sweat. Could a nosferatu sweat? The thought occupied the clinical portion of his mind for but a moment, then was gone.

When he was face to face with her most intimate of places, he stopped himself and gazed into her cleft, which was in a clear state of arousal and welcome. Throwing all caution to the wind, Van Helsing descended upon her, consumed with all-too-human lust as he venerated at her temple. There was no violence, no feasting on his blood, no killing. In that moment, Van Helsing knew he had betrayed his profession, but somehow he cared not one whit.

Later, as sunrise neared, Van Helsing observed the vampire, dozing as the revenant's cycle of sleep at the end of a night commenced, utterly sated but not upon her hunter's blood.

Van Helsing looked at her for what felt like a long time, as sunlight began to creep into the room falling just short of where his diabolical inamorata lay. Having made up his mind, Van Helsing closed the shutters on the room's window and latched them securely. With that gesture, he departed, conflicted by what had occurred.

As he made his way down the rocky path from the haunted chateau, he cast a look back and fought the urge to return and sit guard over the creature. But such dalliances were for others. This time he'd had the good fortune to connect with a being whose loneliness echoed his own, but he resolved never again to cross the line between his sacred calling and his primal needs.

Yeah, that was a good cat nap!

A DAY OFF'S DREAM

"The Dream Police, they live inside of my head/the Dream Police, they come to me in my bed..."

It's a day off between dialysis treatments, so though I awoke early and had some breakfast, I bundled up again afterward managed another two hours of blissful sleep, which when added to the night's slumber, added up to nine hours of rest, recovery, and recharge. Anyway, after breakfast I went back to bed, awakened only by a redundant call to confirm tomorrow's 9am car service pickup. (It was redundant because I called them before I made breakfast, just to get it out of the way.) 

 

During my post-brekkie nap, I dreamed it was Black Friday, which I always avoid like the plague, and I was out on the street, staying away from shopping malls and such while they were thronged with crazed consumerist zombies. But when my avoidance of the crowds maddened by lust for deals was noticed, a group of enforcers on motorcycles menaced me and herded me toward a nearby mall whose crowds at the entrance looked like a reversal of the exodus scene from THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. And the riders all looked like the undead satanist biker gang from the movie PSYCHOMANIA (1973).

THE DREAM BOX: UNDER THE SEA

I see the sea.
The sea sees me.

— "Suburban Bathers" by the Residents

Last night as I went to bed, I put on the movie DAGON and let it inspire my dreams.

It's a loose blending of two H.P. Lovecraft short stories, “Dagon” (1917), and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1936), both crawly tales of ancient sea gods and half-human fish people, subjects that hold great appeal to me as a water sign. As a child I often fantasized about growing me some gills, ditching the surface world, shouting “You fucking ROCK!!!” to Prince Namor (Arthur Curry is a big wuss — to say nothing of a MAJOR failure as an imitation — by comparison) and existing for the rest of my days amidst the limitless wonders found beneath the waves, and at times my adult reveries take me right back to that long ago part of my imagination. Most often in dreams.

There’s always a moment during my slumber when I know with absolute certainty that I’m dreaming, and when I reach that point I just surrender and let it take me where it will. Last night I came to in what the Australian aborigines call the Dreamtime somewhere very, very deep in the Stygian depths, unaware of how the hell I got there.

I felt the crushing pressure of the ocean, and even in a dream I knew that the air in my lungs would soon run out. My body drifted and bobbed about aimlessly, and my arms floated against my will, rendering me into a mock crucifixion position, preparing my flesh as some sort of questionable sacrament for any fish who might swim by. I hoped it would be a magnificent Great White shark, the badassed Carcharadon Carcharius, my favorite squaliform since I was a wee Bunche, who would come along and make short work of me, but I just hung there in undersea limbo for what seemed like an eternity. Then my attention was quickly diverted by a sensuous form, utterly at one with the Great Mother Ocean gracefully appearing as if from nowhere, and in an instant the merely strange leapt into the realm of the mythic.

A beautiful mermaid, a creature that I know does not exist, swam up to me, her huge hazel eyes filled with curiosity. Her gaze met me with a silent “What are you, odd thing?” and she circled me, her blue/green scales brushing against me in a frictionless tickle. There was no verbal communication; she was able to speak with a mouth full of water, clicks and whistles and such, but I had no such luck. All I could do was sit there and wonder at her otherworldly loveliness.

Her long, dark hair undulated around her mesmerizing face, slowly buffeted about by unseen currents that gave them a life independent of their source, and her perfect breasts, twin glories that would bewitch Poseidon himself, followed suit. Below this vision’s navel was where an ever-solidifying tattooing of scales formed into a lengthy tail that lazily fanned back and forth, assitsting the motions of her arms to hold her in place, and she craned her head forward to get a better look at me.

Those eyes held me transfixed as she appraised me, this clumsy foreigner in her world, and she appeared to reach the decision that I meant her no ill. At that, she moved closer and embraced me, her hands and tail wandering about my form in an effort to figure out what I was, touch being the one language we could share in her silent environment.

As what was left of the air in my lungs began to give up the ghost, the sea-goddess understood my plight, and she kissed me long and deep, sustaining me with her aquatic kindness. As our embrace became more affectionate, my ears resounded with a horrid mechanical beeping sound, and just before I awoke, my ichthyologic Isis embraced my head and softly said to me, “Soon.” I gazed into her eyes and saw her mouth draw back into a melancholy smile, and then she abruptly disappeared.

At that moment, I awoke and picked up the phone whose ringer I usually turn off before I go to bed, only to be greeted by some woman looking for “Anthony.” I told her that she had a wrong number, and she politely apologized, and I returned the phone to its cradle.

I then lay there on my bed, utterly awake, and staring at the ceiling, longing to return to the depths and the welcoming arms of that far away Nereid…

Sometimes dreams have as little mercy as the waking world.