On many occasions throughout Dracula we have seen Vampires occupy and manipulate dreams in a supernatural and strategic way. From Jonathan Harker’s first experience with the three voluptuous women at Castle Dracula, throughout Lucy’s nights of sleepwalking, and now potentially into Mina’s dreams of creeping fog and misty columns in her bedroom, Vampires seem to be central to the characters’ experiences of dreaming.
In both Jonathan and Mina’s diary entries, their dreams are described as lifelike, Jonathan calling the dream “so real that now, sitting here in the broad, full sunlight of the morning, I cannot in the least believe that it was all sleep” (44). These dreams seem so real because they are Vampires manipulating their victim’s perceptions of reality and their actions, so as to prey on them. I think that this representation of Vampires as manipulating victims in their sleep allowed Victorian characters to maintain the purity of innocence in their seduction, while also allowing for allusions to sexuality and fears of the night. Lucy’s dreams caused her to sleepwalk, going places she would never normally go during the night and allowing herself to be fed on by Dracula in her altered state of mind. By removing Lucy’s will and allowing vampires to manipulate their victims in their dreams, vampires become even more powerful. This also creates the contrast between the typically peaceful image of dying in one’s sleep and the violence of being bitten and attacked by a vampire.
In all of these cases, the victims lack control while they are dreaming, as Mina says she is “powerless to act” (275). As there are such sexual connotations to the exchange of blood in this novel, and as vampires are hypersexualized with their youth, beauty, and reliance on seduction to lure in victims, I think the powerlessness of the victims allows these characters to be viewed as innocent and pure in the sexualized encounter with a vampire. Where the Victorian era emphasized sexual purity so heavily, this total lack of awareness and control by victims could ease the fear that they may be made impure by their interactions with vampires.