Wendell the iguana

We're going to start in the realms of reasonable analysis before we get into the bonkers stuff.

So it's an established fact that standardised time - the idea that different local mean times should be synchronised to a single standard - was invented because it was needed for railway timetables. It was initially literally called railway time.

You can see this as a simple, practical adjustment that doesn't make much difference, or as a massive change in how people perceived one of the most central parts of their daily lives, the passage of time itself. Time used to be subordinate to the changing of the seasons or the rising and setting of the sun, but with industrialisation, the introduction of railway time, and the increased accessibility of artificial light, the natural world became subordinate instead.

Dracula is a novel of the medieval meeting the modern. Dracula himself exists on premodern time; his activities are governed by the rising and setting of the sun. The Crew of Light, meanwhile, exist on modern time: controlled, measured, and strongly associated with railway timetables. We can see the one giving way to the other when Jonathan observes that the trains literally run later the further east he goes, and the closer he gets to Castle Dracula.

Dracula also upsets everyone's notions of proper time. Pretty much everyone in this novel experiences disordered sleeping patterns, for instance. For various reasons they wake at night and sleep during the day. When Jonathan is in Castle Dracula, he is unable to keep his watch wound, which means he is deprived of the ability to track the passage of time in the way that he's used to.

OK. That was the reasonable bit.

Bram Stoker also messes up the dates in Dracula a lot. Today, Mina refers to "the man we saw yesterday", in events that happened two days ago. Jack loses a week in August. The dates on Van Helsing's travel and Lucy's letters are all over the place.

I suggest that none of these people make these mistakes until they, or the people close to them, come under the influence of Dracula. Mina, Lucy and Jack all get their dates right at the start of the novel. (As does Jonathan, admittedly... but we have no reference point for whether the dates he writes down in Castle Dracula are accurate). What I think is Mina's first error in recording dates happens about the day she first sees Dracula.

Coincidence? Well, yes, it is.

But wouldn't it be fun if it wasn't? If Dracula's influence was warping people's perception of the passage of time itself, so that Jack is very shaky on whether a week or a day has passed, Van Helsing loses track of when he last travelled to or from Amsterdam, and poor Lucy confidently writes entirely the wrong date on her letters? And Mina, when she compiles all of this, is fighting off Dracula in more ways than one?

Mina Harker - a portrait for my series of Dracula characters

Made another Dracula video—this time in ✨️colour✨️

You can get a (free) pack of the frames here on my Ko-fi.

If you'd like to see more, I've another animatic that also covers the entire book here.

Jonathan imitates the monster's body; she mirrors the monster's mind.

But more seriously, Dracula has ever opened the door once, to let Jonathan in. And Jonathan noted right away that the door sounded like it has been not used in years.

A character has ominous nightmares and attributes them to eating too much paprika

Dracula first appears wearing a fake beard

The person he was trying to fool with the fake beard immediately realizes Dracula and Beard Guy are the same man, due to both having really firm handshakes

We are told parrots are immortal unless fatally wounded

A Texan cowboy opens fire on a bat flitting around a window, and lodges a bullet in the wall of an occupied room

A woman is called a polyandrist for receiving blood transfusions from multiple men

An incorrectly addressed telegram leads to two deaths, multiple druggings, and several children being assaulted

Dracula, while trying to maintain a low profile, takes a lovely trip to the zoo and freaks out the animals so badly that he gets mentioned in a newspaper article

The one character who knows anything about vampires spends a good two-thirds of the book refusing to talk about vampires

Dracula went to Satan's Witchcraft Academy and somehow this is only brought up in two throwaway lines

A character gets stuck inside a circle of communion wafer crumbs

A major plot point of the book is Dracula (who was said to be a brilliant scholar and has the strength of twenty mortal men) realizing he can move boxes without human help

Someone is referred to as "manifestly a prig of the first water"

Two characters have a hobby of reading train schedules

A hospital lets a mental patient escape to see what will happen

A character starts vomiting up feathers from eating whole birds

A doctor refuses to give a medical diagnosis and instead makes a speech about growing corn

Dracula impersonates another character just by wearing the same clothes, despite being taller and visibly much older. This deception is successful.

A character "cleans" a room by eating all the insects in it

Suddenly: rats. Thousands of them.

The heroes progress in their efforts through "the wonderful power of money," i.e., bribery

Dracula has three other vampires in his castle. Their relation to him is never explained, nor are any of them named.

A character insists his salvation depends on having a pet cat

Dracula is thwarted by flowers on more than one occasion

A group of vampires stand in the hall outside a man's bedroom, talking loudly about their plans to eat him. When he comes to the door to confront them, they run away laughing

Dracula wears an unfashionable hat and gets roasted for it

A group of Romanians encounter a disheveled, shouting man and, "seeing from his violent demeanour that he was English, they [give] him a ticket for the furthest station on the way thither that the train reached."

A boat crashes due to Dracula having the munchies

A wolf is thrown through a window and immediately runs off, confused and covered in glass