Allow me to confuse you further:

Part 1: The Dislike of Sunlight.

I’ve always preferred night to day, dark to light. Working a nightshift for the past 2 years has only strengthened this preference. I find I function better during late evening and the midnight hours. I think more clearly. I am more alert. But more importantly, I find myself comfortable. Comfortable with my lonely surroundings.

I like the peace and quiet. The world is asleep. The stars blink in the sky overlooking deserted streets. And somehow I feed off this. I feel in control. I am in control.

I also hate the summer. At least, I dislike summertime in London, even though you could argue that it’s never much of a summer. But when it’s hot, it can be very humid. London, with its over-pollution and high pollen counts, has a devastating effect on me. I have to drug myself up with antihistamines to survive. While people sit out in the sun in Hyde Park sunbathing, I find myself indoors. I would prefer to be abroad to enjoy weather in excess of 30 degrees centigrade. Autumn in London is far more pleasurable. But I much prefer the winter.

Give me dark grey skies over blue sun drenched ones. I like the weather to be epic. Thunderstorms and blistering rain.

This anti-social behaviour continues to evolve. The nightshift that I work has only helped enforce my inclinations. My sleeping patterns have cemented them.

Part 2: Sleep

When working, I sleep from 10am until 4pm. When I’m off, I still tend to oversleep until mid-day, and stay up to around 5am before going to sleep.

As I have already stated, I get this overwhelming sense of control during the night. I write more constructively. I feel more inspirational. I feed off, the fact that while everyone is asleep, ready for an early start the next morning, I am awake, working/thinking. I understand this sounds flawed. You could argue that the majority of people think and work better during the day, and that I am simply anti-social and a loner. Maybe. Maybe not. Probably.

So, night is where all the (lack of) action is. Therefore, sleep is the answer to waste the daytime away. And the act of sleep has played an integral part in all of this gibberish.

Nearly a third of life is spent sleeping. Immense information is given and received during that period. The experiences which are had during this time can be enriching.

You can make what you wish in regards to the break in consciousness between the waking and sleeping states. Some never remember their dreams. Others look forward to them.

And then there are those who prefer to take control of their dreams and live them out in a lucid state. And those who are controlled by them, suffering from sleep paralysis and awakenings.

A while ago, overwhelmed in paranoia, I believed I was suffering from mild narcolepsy. At this time my sleeping pattern was fucked. There was no pattern.

Hallucinations, vivid, often frightening, dream-like experiences, occur while falling asleep or waking up.

My doctor disagreed with me. He felt I was simply suffering from sleep deprivation. Insomnia? I wasn’t too sure. Although I didn’t suffer from decrease of muscle control I did experience sleep attacks, which would often result in extreme hallucinations and sleep paralysis.

So enter hallucinations and enter into the land of confusion. Visions of a vampires and demons first started to occur at this juncture.

Forever tired even when having slept. Tormented in sleep and waking, I was a mess.

Without the help of anti-depressants, I gradually re-structured my sleeping pattern to something that resembled borderline normality. I would sleep for 7-9 hours, but still only during the daytime. So I was on a permanent nightshift. Even when I wasn’t working, I was still up and about during the night. But that wasn’t a problem because of my lack of fondness for the daytime.

Sleep paralysis continued though, but I was eventually able to overcome it. And with this a new problem was created.

When you ‘awake’ within your dreams and became lucid, your environment will depend on when exactly you gatecrashed your subconscious. You could be flying in the skies above the pyramids, or driving a car through a futuristic Bladerunner world.

But when I break out of sleep paralysis, I tend to experience an awakening dream. I wake up (but of course I am still asleep) in my own bed in my own house. It’s always nighttime. At first, it was difficult to recognize whether I was truly asleep or not. Reality tests would help prove if I was. Personally, I have always found that an ‘awakening dream’ experience is more lifelike than a lucid dream.

(These dreams are great. It’s like being in a holo-deck from the Star Trek universe. There’s a lot to say for walking around in you subconscious. Of course, like a holo-deck not everything ‘works’ - for want of a better word. For example, you cannot turn a light on and off in a dream, read, etc. And normal social behaviour tends to be non-existent).

But while I have control of my environment when lucid, during an awakening I have no control of my surroundings.
The same pattern is always followed with such an awakening.

Part 3: The Dream

I * awake *, wearing black clothes. No one else is in the house, and all electrical appliances and the like appear to be missing. No PC, TV, microwave, etc.

Elsewhere in the house there is only dimmed lighting. There are no mirrors. Outside there is a full moon. It is slightly misty, though the stars shine brightly enough to be seen.

I have never seen my reflection, but I can feel the fangs in my mouth.

My neighbourhood in reality differs vastly from the dream state. In real life, I am not too far from a high street and busy road. In the awakening, the area around my house appears to be slightly more detached. There is a feeling of being deeper within the countryside and in another time period.

It’s almost London by Gaslight. I half expect Jack the Ripper to walk past me.

Even though I am lucid and in control of my actions, I feel that there's something within me controlling my instincts.

And my instincts cry out for: BLOOD

So what do I do in this gothic-like dreamscape? Well, I go on a walkabout and vamp out now and again.

I have lost count of the necks I have bitten. I’m a fucking monster. I never used to discriminate against the sex of my victims. Blood is blood, regardless of the person. I need my nourishment. But I now much prefer to lunch out on the neck of a woman. Sucking the blood out of the neck of a bloke is…well, a bit gay.

So, not only am I a vampire, I’m a homophobic vampire. The point is, my dream persona evolves with each dream.

Its such a great rush killing someone...err...I...*cough*...I...better re-think that one. I suppose, it’s not really me running around, sucking the life from people, but a subconscious paradox of sorts. I mean, it's just a dream. So I shouldn’t feel guilty enjoying the moment. Because I’m only killing figments of my imagination...Ok, this paragraph is weird. Please ignore.

I have yet to be chased by a Peter Cushing type character and have seen no stakes or garlic. So, it’s been an easy ride for Count Junkcula.

The dreams always end in the same way.

The way I awake from the dream is almost poetic, in some weird subliminal way. All of a sudden the moon will disappear from the sky and be replaced by a burning sun. I never escape its rays and, as legends tell of vampires turning into ashes when in sunlight – so do I. Well, sort of. I lose lucidity and wake up in a state of shock.

I always find myself thinking: WHAT THE FUCK?

I have no idea why I should be having a recurring dream of this magnitude. It’s fucking insane.

CONCLUSION (?)

Ok, I admit that disliking the humid weather with the conviction that I do is pretty anti-social. I spend half of my waking life awake at night because that’s when I work. So, obviously I must like working nights.

But vampire tendencies? Well, I don’t bite. Well, what I mean to say is that I don’t go around biting strangers. I like to bite apples. I’d playfully bite a girlfriend in a sexual way if she liked that sort of thing as well.

But sucking blood? Never. Though I have an obsession with drowning almost everything I eat with tomato ketchup. Not exactly the same thing. And a while back there was this one girlfriend that enjoyed biting my body. But that’s another story altogether. I do hate garlic, but I like a good well done steak (blame GFY! influence for that pun).

Though, pretty much like a vampire, I have always been fascinated with the concept of living forever. Even though to want to do so would be admission of loneliness. Everyone around you, friends and family, would die as you continue to live. Though it wouldn’t matter much if you were a vampire because they would die on account of you killing them.

So, the evidence? Well, having read everything above this sentence, my conclusion would be that I am utterly insane. What the fuck is my point? Do I have some deep-rooted psychological problem that strives my subconscious to encourage my conscious self to live out a fantasy to be Dracula?

I suppose in reality I am just a nighttime person. But what the fuck are the dreams all about?

The last visit to my gothic vampish existence in snoozeland resulted with me... well, I don’t even know if I should talk about it, but if I said “blood-orgy-in-a-farm-yard” I think you may get the picture.

But the scariest thing of all is, all of a sudden – for no inexplicable reason – I feel sympathy for the vampires killed by that bitch Buffy.

She’ll get her comeuppance someday soon. Till then, I will continue to vamp out and suck blood.

P.S. someone please drive a stake through my heart.