The Dream of the Black Animal

Laura's first dream-attack, in which a sooty-black animal resembling a monstrous cat enters her room and pierces her breast with needle-like fangs, marks the beginning of her physical and psychological decline under Carmilla's vampiric influence. This event, which Laura calls "the beginning of a very strange agony," initiates a period of nightly suffering that gradually drains her strength and will, and it establishes the pattern of nocturnal predation that defines the vampire's method of attack.

The Dream and Its Sensations

Laura describes the experience as a dream, yet she is "quite conscious of being asleep" while simultaneously aware of being in her own room, lying in her bed exactly as she actually was. The room appeared very dark, and she saw something moving around the foot of the bed—a "sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat," about four or five feet long, which measured the full length of the hearthrug as it passed over it. The creature moved with "the lithe, sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage," its pace growing faster as the room grew darker and darker until she could see nothing of it but its eyes. It then sprang lightly onto the bed, and the two broad eyes approached her face. Suddenly she felt a "stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into" her breast. She woke with a scream.

The Waking Apparition

Upon waking, Laura found the room still lit by the candle that burned there all night, and she saw a female figure standing at the foot of the bed, a little to the right side. The figure wore a dark loose dress, its hair down and covering its shoulders, and it was utterly motionless—"a block of stone could not have been more still," with not the slightest stir of respiration. As Laura stared, the figure appeared to change its place, moving nearer the door, then close to it; the door opened, and it passed out. Laura, now able to breathe and move, first thought that Carmilla had been playing a trick and that she had forgotten to secure her door. She hastened to it and found it locked as usual on the inside. Afraid to open it, horrified, she sprang back into her bed, covered her head with the bedclothes, and lay there "more dead than alive till morning."

Aftermath and Interpretation

The terror of that night did not fade with waking; it "seemed to deepen by time" and communicated itself to the room and the very furniture that had encompassed the apparition. Laura could not bear to be alone for a moment the next day. She considered telling her father but was held back by two opposite reasons: she feared he would laugh at her story and treat it as a jest, and she also feared he might think she had been attacked by the mysterious complaint that had invaded the neighborhood. She eventually confided in Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine; Mademoiselle laughed, but Madame looked anxious. Carmilla, when told of the dream, appeared horrified and revealed that she herself had had a dream of "something black coming round" her bed and had only been saved by the charm she had bought from the mountebank. Laura had left her own charm in a china vase in the drawing room, but she pinned it to her pillow that night and slept soundly. The dream-attack thus establishes the pattern of vampiric predation that will continue throughout Laura's ordeal, and it introduces the charm as a temporary but ultimately insufficient protection against the supernatural threat.