Vampires

Vampires appear in Nic Sheff’s nightmare as children whose difference is exposed by a school inspection and punished with immediate death. The dream transforms the routines of childhood vigilance into horror, while Nic’s protest that Vampires cannot help themselves makes the scene as much about helplessness and fairness as about fear.

Appearance and the School Check

The dream borrows its procedure from the lice checks Nic Sheff and his classmates experience at school. In those inspections, gloved teachers part each child’s hair and examine the scalp; finding even one nit means the child is sent home for delousing. In the nightmare, the teachers’ gloved hands remain, but the examination shifts from hair to mouth: they lift the children’s lips to see whether fangs have replaced their eyeteeth.

That close resemblance makes the vampire check feel like a distorted version of an ordinary school ritual. An inspection that already sorts children into infected and uninfected becomes a test for a more frightening difference. The dream’s menace comes not from an unseen creature approaching, but from the possibility that a familiar examination will identify someone as monstrous.

The Dream’s Violence

The children who prove to be Vampires are struck dead with a stake through the heart. The dream offers no trial, treatment, or chance to explain; discovery is followed immediately by punishment. Its sequence is stark: the children line up, the teachers inspect them, and those identified as Vampires are killed.

The severity of this imagined outcome contrasts with the real lice checks that supply the dream’s structure. Those checks can be painful and frightening, but they lead to being sent home for treatment. In the nightmare, the same logic of inspection and removal has escalated into irreversible violence. The children’s fate makes the act of identifying a difference indistinguishable from condemning the person who bears it.

Nic Sheff’s Objection

Recounting the dream in the car one morning, Nic Sheff says the procedure is unfair to the Vampires because they cannot help themselves. His response does not deny the threat represented by the fangs; instead, it questions whether the children deserve punishment for what they are. In the dream, the feared category and the children subjected to the check are not separate: the Vampires are classmates, lined up alongside everyone else.

The book places this nightmare among signs of the children’s broader unease. Nic Sheff and his friends are afraid to play in the yard without an adult nearby, and he asks his father to check on him every fifteen minutes after a story at bedtime. Against that background, the Vampires give childhood fear a visible form, while Nic Sheff’s defense of them exposes a countercurrent of sympathy within the dream: even in a scene organized around detecting danger, he notices the unfairness of destroying those who cannot change what they are.