Vampires and rabies
There was this girl in the news the other day who had survived a rabid bat bite, after delaying medical treatment. She didn’t realize the bat had rabies. Because her treatment had been delayed so long, doctors had to treat her without vaccine, making her the first person to survive rabies without it.
So somehow that transferred in my dream.
I’ve been bitten by an animal, maybe a bat or cat, and don’t think anything of it, but then I start to get paranoid. There’s a long gash on my hand, and it looks like it’s starting to get infected. It’s been a couple of days, and I think I should pick up the rabies vaccine at the drugstore.
Ah yes. In my dream, such a thing can be purchased over the counter, but it’s something you don’t really want to be caught buying, much like condoms when you’re 16. (Dad, I didn’t buy condoms when I was 16.)
So I’m in the store with my friend Heather, and trying to get her to go somewhere else while I furtively try to purchase my vaccine. She goes to get lunch down the road, because she doesn’t like the look of the snacks and premade sandiches at this all-purpose drug store.
I casually pick up a bag of chocolate candy to bring with my vaccine purchase so I won’t be as embarrassed. I came in for the candy, you see, and oh, maybe I should have some vaccine as well.
Except the guy at the counter is looking irritated; he’s got a bunch of customers and is grilling up something.
I’m getting worried. The longer I delay, the greater risk that I will get sick. Maybe whatever bit me didn’t have rabies, but I’m taking no chances. That, and I don’t want to have to take it in front of my friend.
I open the bottle (it’s apparently ingestible, rather than having to be administered through lots of painful shots to the stomach) and glug a bit. Probably ignoring the instructions, but I don’t care.
But then I have a hard time getting the lid back closed, especially since I look around guiltily, and wonder if anyone is watching me.
I finally get to the counter, and the guy gets vaccine all over his hands. He’s mad, and says it’s against company policy to open things inside the store. I bite back the explanation that if he hadn’t been chatting with a customer instead of serving me, I wouldn’t have needed to drink some of it while I was there.
He puts both of my items in a bag, which is see-through, so then I worry further about the appearance of the vaccine. Then he goes back to grilling something else, even though he still has vaccine on his hands. Gross. Glad I didn’t decide to get any lunch here.
I hook back up with my friend and she asks if I got something to eat. She found a KFC and got some food there. Oh, just some chocolate, I say, but I’m not hungry (even though I’m ravenous), and I put the stuff in the trunk.
Then, in some sort of twisted dream logic, I dream about vampires, probably even in the same dream.
I’m on vacation with some friends. We’re renting a cottage on the shore of a pristine beach. It seems like one of them looks like Dave Foley from Kids in the Hall, probably because I was just watching Kids in the Hall. And maybe Mark McKinney.
We go exploring in a cave and find a vampire who looks like Ian McKellan. He’s dressed in casual clothes, a pair of dockers and a button down shirt. After a witty conversation where he tries to steer us to the dark side, he of course tries to kill us.
It almost seems like deja vu, or replaying a scene in a movie, with most of the details the same. It’s easier this time to stake the Ian look-alike, but because of the deja vu, I’m scared that he’ll come back. He was the head vampire, but there could be more in this cave anyway. But instead, we go deeper into the cave, and I wonder if this is because of my late rabies vaccine.
We eventually emerge from the cave, and I just want to have a shower to get the vampire gunk off of me. We go swimming in the water, but when we come back up, all I can see is Dave’s blonde head, floating in the water, but with no body attached. Same with Mark.
I freak out, but it turns out it’s just an illusion. But we find out after we get out of the water that our month in the cottage is up. Somehow, we lost time either in the vampire cave or in the water, and the landlord is now demanding another $1,200 that we don’t have.
We decide the vacation is over anyway, and get packed up.
I can’t find all my stuff, and discover that I’ve left my purse in the vampire cave. I really don’t want to go back in there, even though I’ve killed the head vampire, because those things have a habit of coming back to life anyway.
So I try to plot ways to get someone else to go, without me coming off looking like a chicken. Meanwhile, Dave and Mark seem to be getting different, needing to stay in the shade more. Wondering if somehow they got infected, and are slowly turning into vampires themselves.
I tear apart the car Heather and I will be taking back (a big Caddy or something uncharacteristically huge and luxurious) and still can’t find my purse. I find clothes for little dolls I’d picked up somewhere. I find Mountain Dew bottles. But no purse.
“Except the guy at the counter is looking irritated; he’s got a bunch of customers and is grilling up something.”
What’s he grilling? Hamburgers? Steaks? Right there in the drugstore, hunh?
He’s grilling a sandwich with some sort of sliced meat. I was an drug store in Berkeley last week that had an old soda fountain. And they were making sandwiches there. That’s probably where that came from.
I’ve never seen a drugstore like that. Interesting.
That is interesting. I was thinking this was some sort of 7-eleven drugstore or something. (Three-day-old hot dogs and amoxicillin. Yum.) I’d forgotten about the old-fashioned soda fountain. But this is a wild dream. Lots of shame and… Dave Foley. Which, any dream with Dave Foley is a good time, I suppose.
Btw, like the name of your dream category.
I don’t know about the Dave Foley and a good time thing. Have you seen him hosting Cleberity Poker on Bravo lately? Oh how the mighty have fallen…
The Dave Foley of my dream was the Dave Foley of Kids in the Hall days: no gray, still has some dignity.
Btw, in response to Heather, the name of the dream category. Yeah. I knew you’d like that. I actually mean to set up a separate blog for dreams someday, much like Tod(d) has done, but haven’t had the time/been quite smart enough to do it, to transfer my existing stuff over. But anyway, that would be the name of my dream blog when I ever do it.
Have to work on the name for that.
And I’ll probably have a shopping cart sighting blog sometime in the future as well.
You know what I love about this one Melissa? That Wisconsin is affecting you from so far away! But seriously, that dream was pretty cool. I think all vaccines should be over the counter.
Cool weird dream! I’ve been dreaming lots lately, but haven’t (obviously) written any of them down, or written anything really. I feel lately like my creative side is like some poor slug who is perpetually being sprinkled with salt–shrivelling up in painful death. . .
I’ve had a couple of very odd and a bit scary dreams over the last few days, actually, but I haven’t remembered enough to try to bother to write them down. Which I should. I think that writing them down keeps me writing a bit, and helping my brain remember that it can do things creative, that it hasn’t been killed by prolonged exposure to copy editing.
A fragment from the other night: a big thick field where the grass seemed to catch things and keep them. I was walking through the field, and had to free a deer. Then there was a guy stuck there in his tractor. And then there were some monster thingies, I think.