Laura's first dream-attack (the black creature)
Laura's first dream-attack marks the moment when the supernatural threat that has haunted her childhood becomes an active, physical assault, transforming vague dread into a sustained and terrifying ordeal. Occurring after Carmilla has been a guest at the schloss for some time, this event is the first of a series of nocturnal visitations that systematically drain Laura's vitality and establish the vampire's predatory pattern. The attack is not a simple nightmare but a liminal experience in which Laura remains conscious of being asleep while a monstrous creature crosses from the dream world into her actual room, leaving tangible evidence of its presence.
The Dream State and the Black Creature
Laura describes the experience as the beginning of a "very strange agony," one she cannot classify as a nightmare because she is "quite conscious of being asleep." In this paradoxical state, she perceives her room and its furniture exactly as they were, except that the space has grown very dark. Into this darkness comes a moving shape that she initially cannot distinguish but soon recognizes as a "sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat." The creature appears to be about four or five feet long, measuring the full length of the hearthrug as it passes over it, and it moves back and forth with the "lithe, sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage." Laura is terrified but cannot cry out. The creature's pace accelerates, the room grows darker and darker until she can see nothing but its eyes, and then it springs lightly onto her bed. The two broad eyes approach her face, and she feels a "stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into my breast." She wakes with a scream.
The Female Figure at the Foot of the Bed
Upon waking, Laura finds the room still lit by the candle that burns all night, and she sees a female figure standing at the foot of the bed, slightly to the right side. The figure wears a dark loose dress, and its hair is down, covering its shoulders. It is utterly motionless—"a block of stone could not have been more still"—with no detectable respiration. As Laura stares, the figure appears to change position, moving nearer to the door, then close to it; the door opens, and it passes out. Only then is Laura relieved, able to breathe and move again. Her first thought is that Carmilla has been playing a trick and that she forgot to secure her door, but when she hastens to check, she finds it locked on the inside as usual. Afraid to open it, horrified, she springs back into bed and covers her head with the bedclothes, lying "more dead than alive till morning."
Aftermath and the Charm
The next day, Laura is unable to bear being alone for a moment. She considers telling her father but hesitates for two opposite reasons: she fears he would laugh at her story and treat it as a jest, or that he might think she has been attacked by the mysterious complaint invading the neighborhood. She instead confides in Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine. Mademoiselle laughs, but Madame looks anxious. Carmilla, who comes down later than usual, reports that she too had a dream of "something black coming round my bed" and awoke in horror, but that the charm she bought from the mountebank—pinned under her pillow—made the dark figure disappear. Laura admits she had left her own charm in a china vase in the drawing room, and she resolves to take it with her that night. She pins the charm to her pillow, falls asleep almost immediately, and sleeps soundly, though she wakes with a sense of lassitude and melancholy. The attack thus establishes the pattern of nocturnal predation, the ambiguous boundary between dream and reality, and the temporary, illusory protection offered by the charm, while deepening the mystery of Carmilla's true nature.
