Waking dreams and the daemon muse: My Undercraft interview

Screenwriter and USC screenwriting professor Sean Hood—whose credits include Halloween: Resurrection, Cube 2: Hypercube, and Conan the Barbarian (2011)—has just published an interview with me for his newly launched Substack newsletter, Undercraft. This publication is devoted to what Sean calls “the creative practice of the waking dream,” referring to the cultivation of states in which the imagination takes on a life and agency of its own.

As part of his research for a book on the subject, Sean invited me to talk with him about the daemon muse, horror as a mode of metaphysical disclosure, writing into the dark, imaginal figures, Resistance, nonduality, and the strange collaboration that can unfold between the conscious mind and whatever seems to speak from beyond it.

At one point, I put the heart of the matter this way:

The egoic mind, on its own, is condemned to recreate the past in some form. . . . Novelty has to come from beyond the ego, either from the world outside or from the beyond within.

That idea also stands near the center of my books A Course in Demonic Creativity and Writing at the Wellspring.

Sean’s questions were unusually searching, and the resulting conversation went to some deep and unexpected places. I’m grateful to him for the invitation and delighted to be part of the beginning of Undercraft.

You can read the full Undercraft interview here:

Interview with Matt Cardin of The Living Dark: Creativity, Daemonology, and Horror

Weird horror, spiritual awakening, and your creative daemon

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:3 mins read

The very idea of the muse, daimon, or creative daemon is infused with mystery, and even with potential fear. The sense of relating to an other within oneself, of receiving inner communications from an outer source, is frankly uncanny. In fact, there are distinct parallels between the idea and experience of the daemon muse and the signature artistic-emotional effect of weird horror. Both dive into the murky unknown and evoke feelings you can’t quite describe.

The daemon is a mysterious presence playing hide-and-seek in the psyche, much like the elusive object of fascination and fear in a story by Lovecraft, Blackwood, or Ligotti. Your daemon muse haunts you with — and more, it haunts you as — an aspect of your very self. This is distinctly reminiscent of the numinous dread that pervades a weird horror story. To live in conscious communion with this presence, entity, force, or intelligence is to live in a darkly enchanted universe, one where the boundary between inner and outer is blurred, where the infusion of creative inspiration becomes entangled with vivid outward synchronicities that propel you through the gates of Chapel Perilous and into a fertile state of spiritual emergency.

And even more: This very fact — the fear of your inner genius — contains the seeds of its own solution. The experience of the daemon muse is essentially dissociative. It’s a phenomenon in which one part of the psyche, the ego, perceives another part as separate or different, as an autonomous presence or intelligence with which “I” interact. This means it can serve as the seed for nondual self-realization, an awakening to or remembrance of your real identity in and as the whole: not only the whole of the personal psyche, but the whole of the cosmos in which this self is embedded, and beyond that, the Absolute Subject in which both self and a world arise.

To say the whole thing differently: In the darkest depths of Chapel Perilous, where you encounter the sense of an invisible and inescapable presence that feels simultaneously helpful and haunting, immanent and transcendent, intimate and mysterious, the very flavor or texture of this destabilizing experience may serve as the catalyst for a shattering instant of self-remembrance. It may trigger a reawakening to your real identity beyond the both of you. After that — though, to be precise, there is no “after” in a zone without time — all bets are off.