For Fun -- Do You Believe in Vamps?

[The Chosen]

Just outta curiousity, how many of you believe in the fiendish creatures? I for one, am not a believer, but if I'm ever outside at night and alone, you won't find me without some sort of sharp piece of wood. (Just in case...)

Also, a question: Can someone explain to me what a "modern vampire" is? Like, I know for a fact that there are people in the world who say that they're vampires. What's up with that?*



* Not to be taken as a "What the frick are they thinking?!" tone, more like a "'Splainy..." tone. 🙂

 

[Vicariously]

I do not believe in vampires. They are merely mthyical creatures and nothing more in my opinion. Same with Warewolves ect.

A modern vampire is someone who is completely obsessed with the lifestyle of the mythical creatures and decides that they are going to embrace the vampire culture, style ect...they may actually sleep in coffins (you can purchase them) and they often times will get their teeth capped to look like fangs ect...

 

[The Chosen]

A modern vampire is someone who is completely obsessed with the lifestyle of the mythical creatures and decides that they are going to embrace the vampire culture, style ect...they may actually sleep in coffins (you can purchase them) and they often times will get their teeth capped to look like fangs ect...

Just looked it up and I honestly found a Vampire Support Page...isn't it a real medical condition or something? Because wanting to drink blood is just...yeagh!!!!

 

[Vicariously]

Just looked it up and I honestly found a Vampire Support Page...isn't it a real medical condition or something? Because wanting to drink blood is just...yeagh!!!!

I wouldn't have any idea...

 

[white avenger]

There are people who CLAIM to be vampires, who avoid sunlight and actually live off of blood, but they are only sick individuals. As for the supernatural fanged blood sucking fiends, no, I don't. I could be wrong though....

 

[Edmund Blackadder]

I believe in Vampires, in fact I was down my local a few nights ago talking to my friend, a leprechaun, the other night when this huge skulking orge came in trying to convince us that a vampire had just tried to suck his blood.

I was like 'Tiny, mate, vampires like human blood, not ogre, why do you have to lie.'

Tiny got a bit upset and started with his club but my friend had his lucky charms on him and used them to keep us safe. Mrs Periwinkles bar didn't fare so well.

 

[Joyce Summers]

My inclinations lean towards non-belief, but I have a personal rule never to say something doesn't exist. After all there are more things in heaven and earth than our dreamt of in our philosophy.

I'm a woman with an extremely open-mind. Plus I've seen wackier things, hehe.

 

[palabravampiress]

I think there are probably rare, but real, medical conditions that led people to come up with the myth of the vampire, but I don't believe in more-or-less immortal or undead blood-drinking super powered type folks. For example, some people are allergic to sunlight. Also, some mentally disturbed people have been known to drink blood due to a belief in its restorative properties. In most myths, there is buried somewhere a grain of truth. The truth is usually just a lot more mundane and boring than the myth.

In an earlier time period, I, myself, would probably have made superstitious people rather wary. My birth was a miracle. I should have died. I would have died had I been born any other where or when. As luck would have it, I was a lot stronger and more able bodied than the doctors ever said I should be. There was no explanation for it. Even so, I was always unnaturally thin and pale. The sun burns me like crazy. I can get blisters within an hour. Before I got braces, my teeth were all funky, too. I crave meat. I mean... really... throw me in a superstitious time period in which the inner workings of the human body were not so much understood, make me an outcast, and then see what strange things the locals say about the skinny pale lady who lives by herself on the edge of town. My guess is that vampire myth, like most other myths, just came from superstition and ignorance -- with a side of normal human cruelty.

 

[Blondie Bear]

I believe in porphyria, which is a hereditary disease that causes people to crave human blood and become incredibly sensitive to sunlight. But living-forever-drinking-vast-quantities-of-human-blood-feel-my-angsty-pain vampires? No.

 

[Joyce Summers]

There was a program that aired a while back that went deeply into the lore of vampires and the reasons why these myths and legends came about. Coincidentally it was presented by Tony Head and basically he travelled all over the world finding out all the different myths about vampires and reasons why they may have come about.

One such example was about the decomposing of a dead body how the shrivelling skin makes the teeth appear to be elongated and certain pressure on the vessels causes blood to stain the teeth or something to that effect which is what made people hundreds of years ago believe the people were vampires. There was more of course but I can't remember it off the top of my head.

Edit:

Bored of the Dead agrees: Your use of the word 'coincidentally' is inaccurate - it was Tony Head on purpose

Oh. I didn't know that. I just presumed it was coincidence because he also did the other two companion pieces about monsters/zombies or something or other. In all honesty I'm not entirely clear what the other two were as I missed them when they aired.

 

[Edmund Blackadder]

Yeah, it was all intentional🙂

Anyway, seriously - I have my own philosophy that is basically
we live in an infinite universe thus anything thought impossible is the product of a mind incapable of understanding that simple fact on infinity.

Does that mean I walk the streets doused in Garlic - well yes, but thats because most of my meals have a garlic base but I don't carry a stake🙂

We are an impossible being yet we exist. If we exist then it is justifiable that somewhere out there the beings we can only imagine in our wildest dreams or scariest nightmares could feasibly exist also - by out there, I mean everywhere not just limited to this planet or plain of existence.

 

[JCC]

No, in the same way that I don't believe in hobbits. Strange thread.

 

[Edmund Blackadder]

No, in the same way that I don't believe in hobbits. Strange thread.

So wait, does that mean you DO believe in Vampires?

It is said that Mythological creatures are based on genetic memory which is passed through generation upon generation and in the case of 'The Hobbit' we have come full circle.

On an Island in Indonesia, the bones of a tiny cousin of humanity has been found with the characteristics of Hobbits.

If genetic memory was passed down through the ages it is feasible the first mentioning of these creatures(named by Tolkien as Hobbits but not the first mention of them through-out history) was based on them. The story then progressed but the species died out. After millenia we evolved sapiens find the remnants of this dead society and name it after the most famous incarnation of them.

A tiny hominid whose discovery in a cave on an Indonesian island unleashed one of the fiercest debates in anthropology has suddenly been joined by several other sets of dwarf-sized beings. At least nine other wee individuals lived in the cave, where thousands of years ago they skilfully butchered meat and handled fire, according to new findings. The initial find at Liang Bua cave, reported almost exactly a year ago, became known as the Hobbit Hominid, after the pint-sized characters of J.R.R. Tolkien's stories. Measuring just a metre or so (3.25 feet) high -- thus as tall as a chimpanzee -- and with a skull the size of a grapefruit, the strange creature lived around 18,000 years ago on the remote island of Flores.

Source

Edit:

Addendum:

JCC as strange as this whole thread might be to you, on the verge of silly even, do not be limited to the world as you see it. An openess to the possibility of anything is the greatest gift a man/woman/child/elephant can possess.

Our greatest Humans have been the ones that have not lived in a world of closed mindedness but instead in a world of endless possibilities, they've fought convention to show that anything can be possible.

 

[palabravampiress]

I heard about the "hobbit" people, too.

I sort of agree with BoTD. Like I said earlier, I think the myth is probably based on situations in which certain unfortunate individuals suffered from physical and/or mental ailments for which society had no rational explanation, and so the myth of the vampire was born.

That said, there are some weird creatures in the world. The fossil record even shows evidence of multiple primate and even hominid species. Beyond that, there's an entire universe out there. Do I think it is possible that a species or a sub-species of hominid-like creatures having characteristics similar to those of the vampire myth once existed, do currently exist, or may someday exist? Sure. Why not? Then, when we start getting into string theory and the idea of various other universes, well... then, really why not? I don't think I'll ever run into a vampire, but I won't discount the possibility of the existence of at least one such creature in the entire universe, either.

Then, there is the question of what it means to exist. One of the most fascinating things about humanity is its ability to create. We don't just create physical realities, like the buildings in which we work and eat and sleep; we also create and/or perceive intangible realities, like the gods and goddesses that we worship, the nations in which we live, and the fictional characters that we watch and read. In a sense, Buffy the Vampire Slayer can be said to "exist" merely because, before someone thought her up and stuck her in the movie of the same name, there was no Buffy but ever thereafter, there was a Buffy. Vampires might exist in the same manner. This sort of thinking makes my brain hurt, but, as a writer, I wonder about this all the time. Writers create entire worlds which they populate with amazingly complex characters, settings, and situations. In some way, then, vampires do exist just because humans have over time attributed a name and a lore to a certain idea.

 

[Edmund Blackadder]

Interesting Palabra, thats kind of the message at the end of a recent South Park episode entitled Imaginationland: Episode III

These 'make believe' entities such as Santa Clause, Vampires, Jesus(if you don't believe), Tooth Fairy ect they all shame who we are because of the way we interact with them in our imagination. Simply being told they don't exist is already too late as they have in effect affected who we are simply because we have been exposed to them and if that is the case then something must have a substance to affect us. If we take for fact that our world only exists in our own perceptions of it and we form because of those perceptions then everything must be worked on the very basic mental level. If that is so then on that same basic level, anything that does affect who we become MUST exist in some form.

 

[palabravampiress]

My thought on this is at least as old as Plato, as are the South park guys' thoughts, I'm sure (and yes, I saw that episode!). You've heard of his theory of the existence of the perfect forms, right? Bear with me, here. It's been five years or so since I've taken a philosophy class, so I'm more than a little rusty. Basically, Plato theorized that the table in front of you isn't a table; instead, he theorized that it is an imperfect copy of the true, perfect form of the table. The world with which we interact isn't the true reality. It's just our perception of true reality. It is how we mimic the true reality. The world of ideas, he argued, is the truest and highest form of reality. Go read Plato if you want it to make any sense. He said it better than I ever could. 🙂

So, while maybe vampires don't exist as such in the material world with which we routinely interact in the realm of the senses, maybe they do exist in the world of perfect forms, and that's where the myth comes from in the first place. Maybe it's all just a matter of perception.

 

[Edmund Blackadder]

My thought on this is at least as old as Plato, as are the South park guys' thoughts, I'm sure (and yes, I saw that episode!). You've heard of his theory of the existence of the perfect forms, right? Bear with me, here. It's been five years or so since I've taken a philosophy class, so I'm more than a little rusty. Basically, Plato theorized that the table in front of you isn't a table; instead, he theorized that it is an imperfect copy of the true, perfect form of the table. The world with which we interact isn't the true reality. It's just our perception of true reality. It is how we mimic the true reality. The world of ideas, he argued, is the truest and highest form of reality. Go read Plato if you want it to make any sense. He said it better than I ever could. 🙂

So, while maybe vampires don't exist as such in the material world with which we routinely interact in the realm of the sense, maybe they do exist in the world of perfect forms, and that's where the myth comes from in the first place. Maybe it's all just a matter of perception.

I see where you come from and can even agree except with your use of 'maybe' in that final line.
There is no maybe about it. Perception is the only reality we live in. If we percieve something to exist then surely it must exist.

There are people who see colour differently to everyone else. I can't remember the name of the it but say we both see red and it is red. The Chosen also sees Red but from his perception it is blue. However because all his life this 'blue' has been called red he believe it is red.

Then on a similar 'note' I read an article once about a guy that could 'see' musical notes in colours.
He would look at a painting, say a Van Gogh, and play what he saw on a musical instrument. To the rest of use, we see shapes, we see colours, we even see textures, but he saw music.
Now, to us that seems odd, maybe even impossible but this man lives his live with an altered perception from our own. He manages to live quite well(well he did when I read about him some time ago).

Its all about the perception🙂

 

[palabravampiress]

I see where you come from and can even agree except with your use of 'maybe' in that final line.
There is no maybe about it. Perception is the only reality we live in. If we percieve something to exist then surely it must exist.

There are people who see colour differently to everyone else. I can't remember the name of the it but say we both see red and it is red. The Chosen also sees Red but from his perception it is blue. However because all his life this 'blue' has been called red he believe it is red.

Then on a similar 'note' I read an article once about a guy that could 'see' musical notes in colours.
He would look at a painting, say a Van Gogh, and play what he saw on a musical instrument. To the rest of use, we see shapes, we see colours, we even see textures, but he saw music.
Now, to us that seems odd, maybe even impossible but this man lives his live with an altered perception from our own. He manages to live quite well(well he did when I read about him some time ago).

Its all about the perception🙂

You're right about the maybe. It's funny that you should mention colors. I, personally, am colorblind. What others call "Green" very often looks brown or blue to me. Apparently, I mess up other things, too. To me, it's brown. Plain as day. I don't even notice that anything is amiss until I give directions or something and someone says, "You told me to turn at the brown house! There wasn't a brown house on the entire street!" So yes, it is all about perception.

Interestingly enough, that condition (the guy with the colors and the musical notes) is called "Synesthesia." After a friend of mine mentioned having it, I gave that condition to my Indra character in the RPG! In much the same way as my colorblindness, she didn't have any idea that she perceived things differently from most people until she was an adult and a doctor pointed it out. Perception shapes human experience. There is no doubt about that. Just as clearly as I see a brown house where most people see a green one, my friend sees me as "white" -- not my skin, mind you, but me.