Vampire

The fear associated with emotional or sexual relationships; feeling that someone is too demanding; the sense of not being able to be independent of one’s parent/lover, and feeling any personal independence or will is sucked away by them. We create this creature out of our own doubts or fears. If a man or woman is afraid of sex – afraid his mother/lover will disapprove if he has any sexual feelings of his own – the fear and perhaps anger, will sap any good feelings about sexual relationship. Such a man or woman, every time they have sex – because they still do not really wish to give of themselves – feel bad after sex, perhaps sucked dry, even ‘dead’. The fear or anger about not having a will of their own, and still emotionally dependent on mother/father, turns back upon them, depicted as the vampire.

Example: I had a breach birth and arrived blue with near suffocation. When I relived this experience in therapy I felt my body trapped and I was struggling for my life. I was imprisoned in a woman’s body and it was killing me. As I witnessed this I realised like an explosion of insight how my difficulties with women and sexuality had arisen. There was no way I could happily put my dick back in a woman when one had nearly killed me. John B.

Example: I hurried away to find a police station to report this situation. When I found the police station I went in and said to them that they had some strange people in the town that seem to be like vampires, wanting people’s body or blood. There were four or five policemen in the police station, and they looked at me unsympathetically, their faces gradually changing. I began to recognise the same situation in them as with the dog and the man. They looked at me and told me to get out and mind my own business. They said that if I wasn’t from a country that would cause a fuss if I were to disappear, they would lock me in a cell and nobody would hear of me again.

I hurried out of the police station feeling, not terrified, but certainly anxious and worried about what was happening. I was still walking along the roads in this town that looked as if it were in Central Europe somewhere, not at all modern in its buildings or feeling. As I walked another dog began to follow me. This one looked aggressive and seem to be excited by my anxiety. I made the mistake of starting to hurry away, and the dog bit at my calf while my back was to it. I now turned to face the dog and it backed away but certainly did not run away. It was waiting to see what I was going to do. I had no weapon and could only stand and face it, wondering if the situation would now degenerated with other dogs or people starting to surround me. As I was thinking this, and noticing people watching from behind; stores or through windows, a young woman came toward me with a stout broom handle and drove the dog of. She took my arm and told me to hurry and come with her. She said I was in danger if I did not.

She took me to her home, which was very basic, stone walls, stone floor, open fireplace. In her home she dressed my wound that was bleeding but not too badly, and would hopefully soon heal.

I asked her what was happening in this town that the people were so strange. She told me that the war and difficult times had done awful things to people giving them strange and extraordinary needs. She said they recognised in me something I did not realise I had, and wanted it from me. As she said this she was kneeling bandaging my leg and looked up at me, and I could see in her face the same hunger and strangeness as in the faces of the others.

She could see the recognition in my eyes and stared at me tears forming in her own eyes. “Please don’t be afraid of me,” she said. “I am needy too, but not in the awful way some of the townspeople are.”

She began to cry and look at me with great longing and earnestness. As she did so, to my astonishment her whole body and face began to change into that of a young girl of about 12 or 13. She stood up and reached her arms out to me to hold her. I could feel the pain and desperation, her need for love. I began to recognise this painful need was behind what I had glimpsed of her own inner vampire. I took her into my arms and held her. I felt a tremendous sexual stimulus, as if I were still holding the woman as well as the child. But somehow I knew that I must allow this feeling without acting upon it. And as I did so the girl relaxed in my arms as if she were exhausted and began to slip into sleep. I discovered her bedroom, tucked her into the bed and lay down beside her on top of the covers and also fell asleep. When I awoke in the morning she was still asleep, but now a young and very attractive woman again.

The above example is an excellent description of what makes a vampire in the inner world of dreams, and to some extent in the waking world. But in the book Beggar Among the Dead by Hans-Ulrich Rieker, he describes a scene which he witnessed of a slinking human living among the sick in India living in extreme poverty going from person to person sucking their blood. It seems the answer is either love or a caring society.

In his book Dreams and Nightmares, Hadfield suggests that crab, spider and vampire dreams depict the internal bodily feelings connected with orgasm. The crab, he says, portrays the tension in the abdominal muscles which produce a gripping sensation. The relaxed, perhaps ‘washed-out’ feeling of fatigue following orgasm, are shown as the sprawling legs and soft underbelly of the spider image. Therefore the blood being sucked dry by the vampire figure is an excellent description of what is experienced.

But many vampire dreams are centred around all the vampire films now produced. Any fear of being possessed or attacked by an influence are actually a way of expressing ones own fear of the unknown and unseen. There are sometimes also a response the dreamer’s spontaneous life process being met and are interpreted as being taken over by a vampire, demon or even an alien. The reason is that we have now experience of such spontaneous interventions. See Two Powers