Tag Archives: vampire

Vampire Fiction Vampire Reality

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Vampires are in vogue these days. Vampires have even hit late night talk shows. Young, pumped, brooding, and overly sensitive is the vampire of today. What attributes to wrap up into a love story and soap opera all at once.

The idea makes for a romantic setting, but vampires can only be romantic and sensitive in a made up world of fiction. Somewhere where Vampires are more than human. Throw in moral and ethical decisions and the stage is set. What mere human could make a decision as well as a Vampire.

While the world is swooning over Vampire hunks and hotties, and wondering how exciting it would be to be a vampire, perhaps reality is different. Having special powers, never growing old, and lifetimes of knowledge to draw on to do the right thing at the right time sounds exciting.

It was not until the last hundred and fifty years or so since the world has changed and modernized. The world has changed, we have not. We are for the most part the same people that walked around any previous time you wish to imagine. We have our faults, and we have our pinnacles of shining humanity. Most of us live our life somewhere in between. Most of us live a life of neither overly wonderful, or terribly unjust. How many lifetimes living a Vampiric life are enough for an average person? What if a real Vampire walks the street outside your door at night. What would a real Vampire really be like?

vampireIf there were real Vampires, its existence would be one of fear, boredom and misery. There would be brooding deep feelings, but they would not be from feelings caused by human/vampire relationships. How many killings before a Vampire starts going insane. Experiencing distress from boredom and frustration. Imagine living hundreds of years, watching generation after generation making the same mistakes the over and over. Watching people treat each other badly for years on end, would make the most brutal Vampire want to stop living.

What about one Vampire creating another Vampire? Vampires do not have sex, although according to folk knowledge are extremely sexy. How frustrating would that be, and how it would twist your view of life, even a Vampire’s life? What Vampire would want to create a Vampire? Vampires being immortal, would need to be very particular about who has the correct personality to thrive and survive as a Vampire. Not to mention being a friend and good company across the decades.

Vampires living with the fact that they are a murderer, no matter who your victims are would be difficult. A Vampire finding someone to trust would be almost impossible. Think of all the ulterior motives that people would have for wanting to become a Vampire too.

Existing through decades, or centuries, moving from place to place as people usually became suspicious of your lifestyle. Curious about unexplained disappearances and strange deaths in the community would make Vampire life difficult. Then their is a problem of old people recognizing a Vampire because a Vampire does not change. A Vampire would have to be constantly on the move.

Worrying constantly about being discovered by accidently while asleep. No matter how much money a Vampire could afford to pay someone, greed or guilt would eventually make that someone turn on their employer. After a few lifetimes, money would cease to be a thrill I think. Then there is the problem of bank accounts, always closing one account and opening a new account somewhere else.

The pathetic aftermath cleaning up after feeding would be disgusting. I can’t imagine the stink and feeling of being covered with coagulating blood after feeding. Killing anything in that manner is not as easy as in books and movies. People do not lay down and die. Our will to live is very strong.

As Vampires ride the wave of fame and fortune, at least for their creators in movies and books, reality is a along way from fantasy. Looking a little closer to home, how does our individual reality compare to the person we think we are? How do vampires measure up to our idea of us?

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Werewolves, vampires, monsters, and old habits

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When I was three or four, I remember my folks watching some television show about wooden ships on the high seas. There were two ships and one guillotine. I think you can figure out the rest. Later in the same month there was a show of a man running through the woods turning into a werewolf during a full moon. After that it was a late night movie about a vampire.

As a little boy the guillotine troubled me, the werewolf had me scared, and the vampire absolutely terrified me. For children that age, we can not separate reality from non reality, they are one and the same. I doubt my folks were even aware of what had happened, but vampires fit right in, being more scary than the monster under the bed, or in the closet.

I spent nights into teenage years scared of vampires. As silly as it sounds, I became a stomach sleeper during these years in an attempt to protect my throat. When sleeping on my side I could not sleep unless I kept my neck covered with my hand(s). About fifteen, I had a two week every night, all night dream, a vampire hanging on the window next to my bed! For two weeks, it begged, threatened, intimidated, and did everything else it could do to gain permission to enter into my bedroom. Vampires do not exist? One did for those two weeks!

As quickly as it arrived, it left, and I was sleeping peacefully once again. Lucky for me I was starting to have a slight interest in the evening news, and I noticed there were never reports of vampires killing people. Same thing at the library, in the ‘modern’ times of the nineteen-sixties, vampires only existed in books and stories.

I had a decision to make. My logical mind knew there were no vampires, or anything like them that could harm me. On the other hand, they did exist in my life for the last eleven years, and they were very real, and quite deadly. Judging on the previous few weeks of nightmares, I had done something to attract one to my window, real or not.

Over the next months I purged vampires out of my life, and changed my sleeping habits to be something in line with my version of normal. It was not easy, but it had become apparent even at fifteen that I could not let that behavior continue. There always was the option that if I was wrong, I could bring back all my fears, and concerns about vampires, but that did not seem likely.

For the most part I became normal when I slept again. That was so many years ago, I had forgotten all about it, until I read a blog last week of someone going through their own personal hell. They have discovered they are trapped inside their house, and are struggling to find the courage to change their life.

Part of me understands this, and of course another part of me does not. If it were only easy to say, that behavior is easy to change. Behavior is hard to change, especially when it is ours. As I think back on my life, it is easy to understand. Habits I have started and dropped, some only after trying for years. Smoking is a good example. I quit four times before I finally stopped for good. Other habits were quite simple to modify, others not so easy.

I know for sure, as it applies to me, is the longer I allow a habit, the harder it is to modify. For some things, such as quitting smoking, it was the only goal in my life for a number of months. Nothing else in my day to day activities mattered as much as not picking up a cigarette.

Sometimes we take on habit to get through the day, sometimes a habit has a way of becoming our day. All I can offer is this, when a habit is no longer serves its purpose, it is easier to leave behind, because we no longer need whatever need it fills in our lives, as much as we need something else.

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