This is a gay, gothic, TV potboiler. A fellow in the 1800's is engaged to be married to, it turns out, a vampire-ette. When just before the wedding she catches him in the act of being fucked by the valet, she is consumed by jealousy and condemns him to eternal dungeondom. The only thing that will liberate him is the kiss of a beautiful young man. Fast forward to now, with the house of the basement an inn owned and run by gays. Of course, a young blond beauty boy finds chained vampire and kisses him. Waves of revenge then course throughout all the characters' lives.
This show plays with the notion of people's deep connections being an exchange of energy, often enough vampire-ish in nature. Love as liberator, love as ball-and-chains.
The dream aspect presents much that this culture has kept in the shadows about love and sex. Certainly the unfortunately all too popular notion that gayness is inherently sinful and evil produces the vampire-ish behavior of such conservative icons as Rep. Foley and Rev. Haggard. These poor shadows of human beings try to keep what they perceive as the demon of their own gayness in the basement dungeon, as they present Mr. Aggressively Perfectly Normal daytime faces to the world. It's not that gayness is dark. It only becomes dark when relegated to the dungeon of one's psyche.
Many of the attitudes toward love, straight or gay, in this culture have a strongly vampire-ish aspect to them. "Love" seems to be about sucking the life out of the other person in order to infuse into our own pale existences any life blood at all. We often draw the juices out of others and then become angry and resentful that they have become lifeless and pale.
Another aspect of the collective dream shown in this show is Looks-ism. All of the characters are, of course, attractive. But they don't seem able to get deeper than the other's skin. There is little wisdom apparent in any of the characters. It is like taking any dream only at surface value and not exploring the breadth and depth. Gay culture certainly has a pitch-black shadow of being excruciatingly looks oriented, turning everyone into husks of humans.