vampire time

English

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Noun

vampire time

1. (informal) A schedule in which a person sleeps during the day and spends much of the night awake.
   • 1997, Anne Matthews, Bright College Years: Inside the American Campus Today, page 73:

     Undergraduates say they live on vampire time, sleeping in class, active after dark.

   • 2000, Pleasant Gehman, Escape from Houdini Mountain, page 133:

     That baby face that used to be such a drag when you wanted to pass for older or sophisticated comes in handy, all that subcutaneous fat staves off wrinkles, all that vampire time you put in as a decadent punk rock chick who rose when the sun set paid off ― your liver may be shot but there's no worry over sun damage, anyway.

   • 2004, Ben Cohen, Jason Salzman, 50 Ways You Can Show George the Door in 2004, page 9:

     It's also good for other people who work on vampire time like college students, artists, musicians, dancers, and others.

   • 2019, Scott T. Smith, José Alaniz, Uncanny Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability:

     Or as Ellen Samuels puts it, perhaps more apropos of Caulder: "Crip time is vampire time. It's the time of late nights and unconscious days, of life schedules lived out of sync with the waking, quotidian world.

2. (informal) Night; the time when there is no sunlight.
   • 1981, Beverly Lowry, Daddy's Girl, page 164:

     In the night, in the smoky smoky night: vampire time. Rebop syncopate do the dirty bop, request "Sixty-Minute Man," hear the Shammies, sing the song.

   • 2000, Ascent - Volumes 25-26, page 88:

     The stars were twinkling on, and the moon rising. Vampire time, the beginning of the night.

   • 2005, Maggie Jaffe, Esther Rodriguez, Roque Dalton Redux: An Anthology of Poetry & Prose, page 60:

     It's summer vampire time, 3:47 a.m., and I'm dancing, listening to "Ragas on Slide Guitar" on the CD player.

3. (euphemistic, slang) A woman's menstrual period.
   • 1985, Dennis Joseph Enright, Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism, page 58:

     But what would he have thought about the female character in a novel I recently read who, noting that she was in her menstual period, called it 'vampire time'?

   • 2010, Ralph Keyes, Unmentionables:

     Thus the curse of Eve and the monthly blues give way to sanitary protection and menstual health. On the street things are a bit different, of course. There it's vampire time.

4. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see vampire,‎ time.
   1. Time, when considered relative to a vampire's immortal lifespan.
      • 2010, Oliver Bonewits, Of Blood And Magic - A Vampire's Story, page 215:

        In vampire time Aleya had not really been around that long, but the sound, the scent, the routines that were uniquely her were missing. He missed her.

      • 2016, Kathryn Meyer Griffith, The Last Vampire, page 214:

        Ah, she was young in real time or vampire time?

      • 2016, Lorna Jowett, Kevin Robinson, David Simmons, Time on TV, page 130:

        Such elaborate patterning is made possible by vampire time and enables both stasis – the male vampire's desire for his true love remains unchanged over the years – and change – the object of that love may actually change as it is switched from one female to another.

      • 2020, Isadora Brown, The Vampire's Executioner:

        He was younger than Nikolai by a few hundred years which, in vampire time, was not that much.

   2. The manner in which a vampire perceives or measures time.
      • 2010, Miles Proctor, The New Vampire's Handbook:

        This disparity is dependent on geographic location and point in the calendar year, but generally most vampires switch to vampire time no matter where they reside.

      • 2015, Cat Devon, Tall, Dark and Immortal, page 46:

        Vampire time is different from normal time. Things happen very quickly here.

      • 2022, Simon Bacon, Nosferatu in the 21st Century, page 38:

        Vampire time is defined by repetition as well as circularity.

   3. The time at which one encounters a vampire.
      • 1976, CinemaTexas Program Notes, page 75:

        Even before this verbal utterance, the clock strikes one, the lonely caretaker looks up, the bats fly through the trees, a shrouded figure glides across the rooftops, and a scream is heard. These events tell the audience, "Boy it sure is vampire time tonight ! "

      • 2009, Susan Squires, Time For Eternity, page 3:

        Sooner or later, it would be vampire time for her.

      • 2011, Nick Armbrister, “Finland Station Soviet Style”, in Heart of the Country Short Story Collection, page 51:

        Finally it was the vampires turn to attack. […] It was vampire time now.

      • 2018, Katie Macalister, The Vampire Always Rises:

        The problem is that this was supposed to be my vampire time, not Cousin Carlo time. I don't suppose you know of any Italian vampires?

      • 2018, Craig Steele, Time's Up. She's Breaking the Ice, page 203:

        Vampire time! Know thy enemy. Out with the cross, in with the steaks, and all that stuff.

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