My name is Shade and I'm a vampire. (Hello, Shade.)  Being a part of the vampire community has shed some light on certain issues for me as of late.  I was still in the process of exploring pranic vampirism and whether or not I fell into that category when something fell into my lap that changed my perspective.  All my life I have battled having low energy and have always felt the need to sleep on a continual basis.  Coming into the vampire community I began learning about pranic vampirism and how it plays into my life.

Since I was a child I have always loved nature and loved everything about it.  I spent my days out in the backyard among the weeds with my dolls and toys.  I played in the mud more than I should have and I used to spend hours sitting in a mimosa tree in the sun because it felt good.  I used to skinny dip in the spring-fed creek in our neighborhood on hot summer days and I used to play in the summer storms and drink the rain as it fell from the sky. Being inside, while comfortable, has always made me feel "cooped up" and strangely caged.  I was always outside and always immersed in nature.  From dawn until dusk I spent every moment I could being outside.  I apologized to trees who had their limbs pruned and hugged them.  I loved the way freshly cut grass smelled.  I shared an unusual affinity with animals, particularly horses.  The moon had always captured my curiosity and I used to bath in its light as a child.  It was during this time in my childhood when I began to explore how nature made me feel.  I loved the energy that came from the earth, from the trees, from nature.  I developed a particularly strong attraction towards stones, rocks, and crystals.  I began to notice how the air would change when rain was on its way and how all those things affected the way I felt.

My mother brought me up with a reverence for nature.  She taught me to pay attention to the signs of nature that signified changes in season or changes in climate.  It was always uncanny when, at some point, my mother and I would talk to each other and know that it would rain in 3 to 5 days.  Or when, after a day at school, I would come home and tell my mother that I felt fall in the air and she expressed the same sentiment earlier that day to my father.  My father has never understood how we can tell when fall is coming, he doesn't ever feel a change or a difference.  For me it's how the air smells, or how the sunlight falls, or how the leaves rustle on the trees; like nature is whispering to me that fall is coming.  It's a subtle feeling but very distinctive.  It wasn't until I was older that my mother told me that my grandmother used to "moonbathe," and that she, herself, used to sleepwalk into the outdoors and into the moonlight as a child.

Thunderstorms and rain showers have always had a magnetic pull on me as well.  As a kid, and now even as an adult, I would run out into the storm and let the rain wash over me.  I would delight in every single clap of thunder and every flash of lightning triggered something to stir deep within my being.  My entire life I have been fascinated with weather and even wanted to be a meteorologist when I was younger.  Even now I have the strong desire to become a storm chaser and hunt down tornadoes.  I have always dreamt of tornadoes and still do.  Thunderstorms have always excited me; they make me giddy and hyperactive.  People take cover during a storm and I run out into it.  I've always joked with my friends and family about "only being happy when it rains."

From very early on in childhood I had "practices" I used to participate in.  I used to go outside and plant my feet in the grass and imagine great roots extending from the soles of my feet and into the earth.  I'd reach my arms straight into the sky and imagine branches and sinews extending from my palms into the sky.  I would slow my breathing down and concentrate on my breath.  In my mind I would see my exhalations as being murky colors being carried away by the wind and my inhalations were always shimmering bodies of matter, usually in a blue or silver color.  Along with my breathing, the same energies would flow out through the "roots" in my feet and out of the "branches" through my palms, in exchange for the shimmering mass I would inhale through my entire body.  I used to leave my stones and crystals in water overnight, letting the moonlight cleanse them; sometimes I would bury them in the earth and exhume them later on, innately knowing that they'd been purified.

In my teenage years I started to work with energy on a different level.  Instead of just using it to supplement my own well-being, I started to help friends.  I would ease headaches and relieve neck aches just by laying my hands on people.  Of course, no telling what they thought, a loony teenager up to her eyeballs in her own universe; but apparently something made sense to them too because they always came back to me when aches and pains popped up.  The only problem I had with that method however was soon after working on someone I would start to feel what they had been feeling.  I began feeling tired and achy on a daily basis. I started to research and further my knowledge about metaphysical subjects out of my own curiosity.  While in a bookstore on a field trip I picked up a book about energy work and thumbed through it.  I was dumbfounded.  There, sitting in this book, were so many of the techniques and practices I had been doing since I was a child.  Early on I started to learn about stones and their different properties, my favorites being hematite and smoky quartz, and here in this book was a section about working with stones to aid in energy work.  I bought the book immediately and poured through every word of it.  Knowing I wasn't just some strange child who thought she felt energies was beyond comforting.  The book helped me focus and at last offer an explanation as to why I had been doing these things since early childhood.

One of my experiences has stayed with me all these years.  When I was about 14 I wandered into a rock shop in a small town and the woman behind the counter immediately rushed to me.  She explained that her name was Denise and I remember feeling a very pleasant energy radiating from this woman who smelled of fire and rain.  She showed me several different stones and after telling her my favorites she had me pick which ones felt right.  After doing such she wrapped the smoky quartz in sterling silver wire for me to wear and took me aside to give me the hematite stone, instructing me not to show it to anyone, that it was for me and for me alone.  I never questioned any of it because it all made sense to me.  She asked if I had been having health troubles recently and stunned I responded with an emphatic "yes."  She then began explaining to me that when I practiced energy working that I needed to imagine myself in a quartz crystal, that the facets would act as mirrors and deflect the unwanted or "bad" energy.  I left the rock shop feeling better than I had in weeks and crawled into the car with my mother and my aunts.  One of my aunts then asked me, "Why which stone 'felt right?' They're just rocks, they all feel the same."  It dawned on me that a lot of what Denise had been saying to me only made sense to me.  Another one of my aunts asked me about "this energy nonsense and what that crazy woman was babbling on about."  I wasn't about to tell them that I knew exactly what she had meant because I had worked with energy before.  The strange thing about the hematite stone she gave me was that it radiated two energies, one from the stone and one from Denise; gradually the energy from Denise's touch on the stone faded away.  One thing that eludes me to this day is that I never told Denise I worked with energy, she just started talking to me about it as if we were old friends.

A couple of years ago I began a friendship with someone who was a pranic vampire.  He explained that he had a low energy supply and needed to feed off of people in order to maintain a regular order within his body.  I was fascinated because so many of his symptoms seemed to echo my own.  That friendship with Anshar developed into a relationship and I have him to thank for the majority of my teachings on pranic vampirism.  He introduced me to the members of House Lost Haven and I began to exchange experiences and opinions with them and with other people who were pranic vampires and energy workers.  I had already known about grounding and centering energy techniques, those had been second nature to me for many years by then.  One technique I was not familiar with however, was filtering.  It was explained to me as something like a membrane around your being that allowed wanted energies in and unwanted energies would not be allowed to pass through.  It dawned on me that I had known this technique all along as Denise had taught it to me all those years ago, just with a different analogy.

After exploring pranic vampirism things still didn't seem to settle right.  I would go out and feed off of the ambient energy of people but the results were so varied that it always wound up with me feeling sick.  Every time I tried to feed off of people I would get jittery like I had had too much caffeine.  I would get anxious, uneasy, or nervous.  It was very disorienting, chaotic, erratic and overwhelming.  The effects were so varied and scattered that I just stopped.  I never knew what I was going to get no matter how much I filtered.  I began to question whether or not I was even a vampire at all, perhaps I was just an energy worker.  I resumed my old habits of energy working with nature, noting that I would always receive the same result: a calm, comforting, peaceful energy that soothed my body and my thoughts.  After discussing this with Anshar and relaying my experiences to him since we feed on different things, he stopped in his tracks and asked me, "Are you an elemental vampire?"  I think he was more asking himself than me because as soon as he uttered the words everything fell into place.  All the puzzle pieces fit together and it was undeniable.

An elemental vampire is someone who feeds off of nature and the elements such as earth, water, air, and fire.  A heightened or over-anxious state can be produced by feeding from severe climatic events or changes, such as hurricanes, fires, floods or even thunderstorms.  An elemental vampire feeds off of these very basic and nurturing energies. These sources are very abundant and inexhaustible and can be found virtually anywhere you look.

Looking back it all makes so much sense I wonder why I hadn't seen it before.  I was just recently diagnosed with "Idiopathic Hypersomnia," which means that I am more tired and sleepier than the average person without any cause whatsoever.  I'm beginning to think that this very well may be a physical manifestation of my pranic need.  Through my experiences and observations I am not sleepy when I am immersed in nature but am at my most drained when I am removed entirely from it.  I almost burnt my house down when I was 15.  I still carry stones in my pockets.  I still run outside when it's raining and immerse my hands in the downpour.  I still dig my feet in the earth and hug trees.  I am a metalsmith and so I work with earth's elements everyday, I work with fire everyday and I love every bit of it.  I get animated and excited when thunderstorms hit; my energy skyrockets whenever the weather changes.  Cold fronts blow through and I have a surplus of energy that makes me feel like I'm on top of the world.

Finally an answer to what I have been searching for for years.  The methods, the practices, the strong ties to nature and the elements.  Finally everything fits.  I am an energy worker, first and foremost, and I am also a pranic vampire.  My sources are not human beings, my sources are what the earth offers, what nature offers, and what exists all around us.  I am a human being who is an elemental vampire and nature is my sustenance.

House Lost Haven
Used with kind permission of the author

The vampire community contains a range of perspectives on vampirism.  Experiences can and often do vary greatly with individuals.  The reader must seek his or her own truth and decide what is applicable or useful to them.

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