In Your Head

Every night you dream of the sunrise until the pain wakes you up. Your therapist finds it reasonable. If your vampiric delusion makes real sunlight agony, why shouldn't it hurt when you sleep?

You only mostly believe it's a delusion. But you eat food, and there's a GPS tracker around your ankle, so as long as you don't leave your house (except at night, supervised) the slow trial and error of psychiatry can take its own time. You don't drink blood. They know this, and you know this, even the part of you that doesn't agree with them on the rest.

You wonder about that sometimes. How can a vampire survive? In your dreams you hunt and feed  between the fall of night and the sunrise you willingly wait for. Only in your dreams. You tell your therapist about your hunts, too, especially when it's a coworker or a customer, a face from the endless video calls that pass for real life. She says it's absolutely normal to work out negative feelings in our dreams. Harmless. Perhaps healing.

You guess she's right. You often dream of hunting someone after an annoying call.

They do look much worse the next day, those you dream you hunt. Drained, exhausted. But who doesn't, as the week goes by?