I do not  know how I got  into the Twilight craze in the first place.  I guess it was a  slow and instinctive process, beginning with catching a glimpse of the movie trailer, and then just wanting to find out what it is all about.

No, I am not in love with Robert Pattinson nor his character Edward in the Twilight saga. Neither is it a high school crush on Stephenie Meyer, who is actually the latest link I got to meet in my Twilight journey.  In fact, it was only this week that I was curious enough to find out about the author behind all this young vampire craze.

I often wondered what Meyer is like, or how old she is.  And I also asked myself if she ever knew if Twilight was going to be the big thing that it is right now. As it turns  out, she is just a regular lady with three kids  who just happened to have a dream one night about a vampire making love to  a human girl.  How cool is that?

And all of sudden, within a span of I think only days or weeks, Meyer just could not help writing the Twilight lore.  In an interview, she did not say it quite this way, but I guess if a psychiatrist were to confront her, she would have admitted that it became an addiction of sorts.

Like a girl bit by a vampire, she went into a trance-like ritual day after day, night after night, completely oblivious of her kids, who  had to turn this time maybe to a nanny or Meyer's big sister for milk or  even good old diaper change.

This is how in fact she says it: "I had not realized how much I would enjoy writing.  I knew I loved to read, but writing was just that little better.  So when I got started I could not quit, I wanted to know what would happen to the characters next, what they were going to say now that that scene is over."

Yes, Meyer was definitely under the spell of the vampire as she fired off those words in the computer!  And could I be too?  Are we all, Twilight lovers  trapped and helpless under this spell cast by Edward upon  all of us, more than we care to admit it?  After all, the box office does not lie.  I just checked and the Twilight movie is the most watched vampire movie of all time.

Forget about Bram Stoker's Dracula which Francis Ford Coppola had immortalized, or for that matter, Christopher Lee's commanding performance in a number of Dracula movies.  Lee did such a great job that he was perfect as the equally manacing Count Dooku in the Starwars lore (about third in menace only to Darth Vader and the Emperor).

Forget about Anne Rice, too and her well-crafted vampire novels. It finally seems like the Dark Side has made a wager with  the novelist Meyer to get the story going for today's legion of young fans who do not know what to do with their money.

Rice got too old, in a sense, there was a need for another author to get the message out that Dracula is still alive and well on planet earth. And for that matter, it had to be a writer that appealed to the new generation, those young Girl Power messiahs who mesh Avril Lavigne's gothic with Barbie's pink.

This is what makes Meyer's one-night dream is so suspect!  Look at how big the fan fiction work alone has grown for Twilight, the last time Meyer checked on the Internet it was in the millions!  And USA Today claims that  the Twilight book is  the bestselling book of 2008.

Wake up, kiddo, there is something going on here!  The book has all the critics under its spell, too.  New York Times Editor's Choice, not to mention a long reign at the New York Times Bestsellers List and get this, the 2008 Peach Book Award. My, my!

Now all of a sudden I understand why I have been transfixed by Twilight myself.  There is a power greater than myself, greater than ourselves, or all of us combined, orchestrating this event. There is an Unseen Hand quietly working in the background orchestrating these series of events with one purpose:  Keeping Dracula alive!

Beware?  Or are you helpless just like me lying in this couch, seduced by the Dark Side? Somebody find an antidote!