Weird Dream- (sorry for switching back and forth between past and present tense)

This nightmare/thriller dream was obviously inspired by marathon viewing of TrueBlood, the southern-vampire HBO series based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels (and my own weird imagination). I chose to rent the DVDs at the local Hastings, not knowing the premise or novels, and watched the entire first season yelling and laughing at a series that's just too big for its pants (and I don't like admitting I watched the whole season, but you know what they say about train wrecks...)

Anyway, this dream seemed to "start" at night in a shoddy apartment building in a big city that is very familiar. Imagine cracked walls, moldy ceilings, and dank corners with broken glass sparkling by dim amber lights outside. I'm there with a small company of people, perfect for a horror setting, and everyone is on edge. Someone I know lives here, I think, but they are missing. I'm usually thinking in steps way ahead of my company in these dreams, so I'm already assembling weird facts together that I can't remember now. It gets later and later, and we explore the building until we go down below the basement.

We find a musty old office with a worn wine-red rug (I am so saving that!) with a dusty filing cabinet and a small window streaming cool moonlight into the room. There is a girl in our party, young with long yellow-blonde hair and wide eyes- she's the first. Before we notice anything else some stranger appears and begins talking to us. He's saying strange things and dressed funny, like he severely mismatched some thrift store clothes. I remember he both stood by the door and/or sat in an old lounge chair while talking to us, telling us about himself. All I remember is that I knew he was a vampire, pale skin and fangs. The tension fills the room, and the poor girl starts getting confident and talks to him. The vampire pulls something long, thin and silver from somewhere and flicks it toward her. She is confused for a moment, wondering if she is okay. The vampire clearly states she is not. He pulls the string, revealing lines on her body where it had wrapped around her face, neck, and shoulders, and it makes a strange whispering sound. She stands for a long moment, looking alarmed, and I hope to death that nothing is going to happen.

We first notice her hair starts falling in odd places. The lines on her body where the string had been were bleeding, very slowly opening her up. She seemed to feel no pain as we watched her slip apart, for she would say, "Hey, I think it's okay," as a third of her body fell away. For every second she was alive I thought, "There's no way my dream would allow this." The vampire held out his gleaming wire with no expression. She was still alive as only shoulders, neck, and head, saying, "Hey, I'm still alive--" then her face broke into meaty pieces.

After her weird death we moved from room to room, finding more in this underground area much like the Umbrella Corporation. Blah blah blah, there's a secret organization that uses vampires as weapons/experiment subjects, blah blah more people get killed in the same manner, blah. Somehow I'm still alive, and eventually we find a way out.

We find we are stranded in a forest on some island, miles away from whatever city we were from, and we run through the forest attempting to swim back home. Overhead we see lights from helicopters searching for us and there are cameras and floodlights all around. They catch us and take us to some other location, which happens to be my grandfather's house in town.At some point we gather in the living room, the part of the house I return to the most in my dreams, and the CEO or president of this organization has spared us for some reason. During our escape trials I start thinking that it wouldn't be so bad to join them, either for security or to root them out from the inside. The whole time I dread facing the vampires, so I never get a good look at their face. I started to feel confident in my survivalist skills and tried to leave the house- quickly he flashed the deadly wire around me and my stomach plummetted. I can feel the bite of the thread in my flesh ever so lightly, then abruptly he pulls it back with a quiet whisper and I feel all different parts of me start to cleave. I remember thinking, "No, no, I'm okay, this can't happen, it's not supposed to happen," the kind of thinking I'd imagine I would think if I were really about to die. I experience my pieces falling out, my neck and chest spreading open and neatly sliced in two, my blood spurting out onto the floor and then my head splitting out like a cubist portrait gone mad. There was pain, but mostly fear, and then darkness.

Then I get up, still inside the house, and somehow I'm a vampire. My thoughts change completely and I am free to live as part of their group. I am now walking through he house in new clothes and a new pattern of thought. "They're not so bad," I think, "I can deal with this just fine."

I'm pretty sure the vampires are just fear itself, the organization is the career options I've considered, and the violent deaths and such represent transition. The setting seem influenced by the Condemned video game, Lovecraft, and my own memory of San Fran, El Paso, Atlanta, and New Orleans at night. The forest island is influenced by the Tuskeegee woods. Everything else is a blur, and too much speculation may make it false.