| A Vampire Owner's Manual |
| Wikipedia |
| The Main Ingredients |
| The negative image a vampire has |
| The invisibility of a vampire in a mirror |
| Wrapping Up |
| Written circa: 2002 |
Here at the start I'll pose the question: Why use the words "Owner's Manual"?, and I'll answer it at the end.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire for much detail.
I'm going to restict myself to just 2:
Put simply, angels and their like have a positive image, whereas vampires and their kin have a negative one.
Why then does the myth refer to something negative? It does not make sense to answer that just yet, so on the backburner it goes.
What could this mean? Here's how I look at it: If anyone can see themselves in a surface, that surface is functioning as a mirror, and if they can't, it isn't a mirror.
That may seem trite, but we're dealing with what's alleged to be an anti-mirror, or part-time mirror. How can this be?
My answer is fourfold:
Hence: Your dark side is something which doesn't appear visible.
In Freudian psychoanalysis, if something does not make sense, the first thing to do is to reverse it's meaning.
So: 'You' means 'me', 'black' represents 'white', etc. For instance, when people Project, they say 'you' when they mean 'me'.
Now we can say that the myth talks about a mirror precisely because you can see something dark in a mirror.
And what is that...?
Of course you can look into a mirror angled in such a way as to not see yourself, but arranging such a set-up, I assert, simply tells me you're deliberately avoiding seeing yourself.
Apart from that case then, the reference to mirror means looking at, or within, yourself.
Ahh. Now we're getting to the truth. We avoid admitting those things about ourselves which make us uncomfortable, or about which we feel embarrassed/ashamed/guilty.
So, these factors tell us that the negativity and the mirror combined refer to us avoiding (invisibility) seeing/admitting the shameful/embarrassing/etc (negativity) part of ourselves.
Time then to answer the question posed at the start: Why use the words "Owner's Manual"? Well, it's because each of us is the vampire!
So: Should we feed and water our inner vampire every day? No.
The best thing to do is to both see that admitting that (literally) VampiresRUs, and to recognize that such psychological insight is the first step in dealing with what is nowadays called 'your dark side'.