I dreamt of a scene right out of World War II. It happened in a farmhouse and looking back I think it must have been located in France. But maybe that impression has been colored by movies I've watched since. I thnk it was cold and dreary, a place going through a rough season.
Nazis had occupied the farmhouse I think, though it belonged to a young girl, just edging into adolescence, and her sick mother. The mother's sickness wasn't a small thing, she was cadaveric, barely alive. She couldn't even move. All she could do was look at the soldiers with fear, especially the captain.
It was as if I was watching a movie and had arrived just in time for the climax.
Because I could see a man arriving on the scene, a tired, dejected man who doesn't look like much, and the young girl running to him with her friends. Perhaps the movie had been a story about her and her friends and their youth in Nazi-occupied France and the strange friendship they had struck with this strange man.
She had run straight into his arms, frightened, but telling him her mother was ready, telling him about the capitain and the soldiers and how terrified her mother is but that she knows HE will protect her little girl.
The man tells her it will be alright, but that she and her friends must leave now. He must do this alone.
Into the house he goes, where only the sick mother and the captain wait for him. There was a sense of menace, of barely averted disaster. The Nazi captain would have done horrible things to the mother. Or maybe to the young girl. But the man calmly picks the mother up, light as a feather, as if she weighted nothing at all. The captain stares, dumbfounded.
"What we must do, let us do in the comfort of your own bed," the man tells the woman as he lays her down in it. And I am not sure if the next part was a memory I could see, a flashback, running through the sick woman's mind but I could see her in her bed, weak, so weak, with her terrified daughter, who she couldn't even talk to anymore, who she couldn't even comfort.
But the man is speaking for the mother as if he can read her thoughts. "You will be brave and I will be alright. Hold me now, because I don't have the strength to hold you."
That was how they had said goodbye.
But we are back in the present, with the man and the woman, and he asks her: "Is it time?"
And she answers: "It is."
He pounces on her then, just as the Nazi captain is climbing the stairs to confront them. (I suspect the captain wanted to get rid of this man because he had stopped him in town, when he was ransacking the place and terrifying everyone there. The captain was sick and tired of this man and he was ready to put an end to his problem.)
But he found him now, with the sick woman, in the middle of feeding. And it wasn't that delicate, romantic vampire feeding we are so used to by now. No. The dying woman convulsed and the creature intent on her made terrible, wet, predatory noises... the sort of noises a wild carnivore makes when feeding.
In that moment, the captain knew he was a dead man.
I woke up before the end, but it isn't hard to guess.
When considering the dream and the dream-logic in it, I think it's one of my most coherent dreams. I fear I might have stolen the idea from somewhere else, it is so well constructed. Perhaps the vampire was staying in that dreary village, because he wanted to avoid brighter, sunnier places. Perhaps he hadn't gotten rid of the captain and his soldiers before because he was starving, hadn't fed in a long time. But the woman and her daughter had so moved him that he had agreed to feed at last. Maybe he had sworn not to feed from the unwilling, maybe he couldn't, maybe he could only feed on the dying.
Whatever it was, I think someday it will make for a good story.