Last night, I dreamt about vampires. I was in a big quasi-Victorian room like an old-fashioned laboratory with card cabinets and nooks and doorways. Most of the dream consisted of me locking windows because it was going to be night soon, and we had to make sure that the vampires couldn’t get in.
But in true horror movie fashion, I forgot one section of the windows, and at nightfall the vampires came in anyway. They were a bunch of quaffed cool-looking people, the kind of 20-somethings who go to LA clubs to snort coke. A couple of celebrities were with them, and I remember thinking, “Wow, I didn’t know Cameron Diaz was a vampire.”
The vampires were going to eat me, but at the moment they were too busy deciding who was going to hook up with whom to bother, which gave me an opportunity to go into the kitchen and grab a knife. Brandishing it high, I ran out and stabbed my knife in one of the vampires, and … nothing happened. The knife handle just stuck out of its chest.
“I thought knives were supposed to kill you,” I said.
“Only stainless steel knives,” said the vampire.
“That knife is stainless steel,” I said.
The vampire rolled its eyes. “Obviously not,” it said.
I took the knife out of its chest and realized that the problem was that it was coated stainless steel, which blocked the stainless steel properties from affecting the vampire’s heart. So I ran into the kitchen to get a metal scrubber to rub the coating off the knife, but one of them followed me in there to kill me. Luckily, my favorite tomato knife was in the kitchen, and so I stuck that in the vampire instead. It worked, but instead of poofing like they do in Buffy, the vampire bled all over me like Tom Cruise does in Interview with a Vampire when Kirsten Dunst stabs him. As the blood and vomit went everywhere, all I could think about was how my pants were dry-clean only.
Then this delivery driver appeared and unlocked the front door to give me something I ordered–thus letting in more vampires–so I told him to LOCK THE DAMN DOOR. And that’s when I remembered that I could levitate things with my mind. What a relief. Instead of stabbing the vampires, I could just levitate the knives and shoot them at them, stabbing them in the heart and avoiding blood and also danger.
Just as the dream was getting good with me getting to save the day with my levitating powers, I woke up. I discovered I was squeezing my hands into fists, apparently believing I was holing knives. I don’t know how long I had been doing this, but I’m guessing a long time. They are kind of sore now.
This is the second time this week I have caught myself making fists during sleep. So maybe it isn’t the writing that’s causing the sore hand problem after all.
Maybe it’s vampires.