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

A story I don’t remember writing

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:1 min read

While browsing through my old files recently, I came across something that genuinely surprised me: an unfinished story fragment that I have no memory of writing.

The piece, which I have now given the title “The Book of Rahmat Ghraam,” reads like a fragment of incipient weird religious horror, narrating an encounter with a strange, possibly apocryphal text that opens onto something deeper and more unsettling. Or at least that’s where it looks like it would have gone if I had pursued it further. It’s the kind of thing I would have expected to remember writing, but I don’t. That strangeness alone was enough to make me want to share it.

I’ve posted the fragment, along with some brief reflections on its origin (or lack thereof), in a new entry at The Living Dark:

An Unfinished Story That I Don’t Remember Writing
A fragment of weird religious horror from my archives

And, of course, for the many stories that I have written to completion, you can always delve into To Rouse Leviathan, which collects most of them.

‘Ghost Stories for the Dead’: An overlooked Thomas Ligotti classic

One of Thomas Ligotti’s best stories doesn’t appear in any of his books. “Ghost Stories for the Dead” was first published in 1982 in the second issue of author/editor Thomas Wiloch’s small press horror magazine Grimoire. It was republished a few years later in Crypt of Cthulhu and then at Thomas Ligotti Online in the late 1990s. After that, it basically disappeared.

I find this mystifying, because if I were to assemble a list of my eight or ten favorite Ligotti stories, this would be among them. “Ghost Stories for the Dead” is a dark and reflective piece, partly mournful and partly horrific, about the bliss of nonexistence as contrasted with the nightmarish agony of existence. Ligotti contrasts the torments and absurdities of embodied existence with a strange, almost beatific condition of post-existence, where identity, memory, and suffering fall away into a state of absolute negation. But in the end, the story suggests that even this annihilating escape may not be secure.

In January, Chiroptera Press, which has published several gorgeous editions of Ligotti’s work, announced that they’re planning to publish a new collection later this year to be titled Thomas Ligotti, Menagerie: Uncollected Early Stuff. One hopes that as details emerge about this welcome development, “Ghost Stories for the Dead” will be listed among the book’s contents.

For a fuller reflection on this story, see “The Best Thomas Ligotti Story You’ve Probably Never Read,” in my Living Dark newsletter. It includes a link to read the story itself, along with an accompanying reflection on Ligotti’s rise to mainstream literary notoriety after years as a cherished cult author, as well as a brief account of how my own authorial beginnings were bound up with Thomas Ligotti Online and my deep response to his work.

When reality outweirds fiction

At what point will we no longer need to read weird fiction or watch weird cinema anymore because we can just look out the window, step out the door, watch the news, or introspect for five minutes to encounter everything we always sought from such art and entertainment?

There’s a great deal of strangeness and dread afoot these days as we navigate collectively—and, it seems to me, rather blindly—through a kind of transformational gauntlet across every dimension of life: social, cultural, political, psychological, economic, educational, religious, spiritual, ecological, and even biological. It will be fascinating to see what this all does to art and literature. Or maybe, with the meteoric rise of the weird to an unprecedented level of cultural prominence and centrality in the early twenty-first century, we’re already seeing it.

The real question may be just how truly weird reality will end up becoming. On this note, one can’t help wondering: Would—or will—that quality of weirdness be located only in our subjective experience, in our minds and perspectives, standing as a mere mental interpretation and emotional coloration laid over an objective world that remains unchanged? Or will it also, in the manner peculiar to the very mode or genre of weird storytelling, manifest “out there” in the world, revealing a nondual identification of outer and inner? Will it perhaps take on the guise, role, and unsettling force of the Old English root of our modern word “weird”: wyrd, meaning fate, destiny, and/or a supernatural force that controls both.

More: Has the weird already done this, already alchemized the inner-outer field of our experience, working a fundamental and still-unfolding transmutation upon it, while we simply weren’t paying attention?

Is our current global weirding not an aberration, but an indication, an unveiling, a revelation of a deeper order?

When the self is only a puppet

Those who have long inhabited, in their imaginations and fascinations, the crossover territory between religion and unitive spirituality on the one hand and supernatural horror on the other—in other words, people like me—will find much to fascinate in the following passage from Terence Gray, writing famously as Wei Wu Wei. The Ligottian vibes are especially strong in this articulation of the way the self is only a puppet:

[A] sentient being objectively is only a phantom, a dream-figure, nor is anything done via a psycho-somatic apparatus, as such, other than the production of illusory images and interpretations, for that also has only an apparent, imagined or dreamed, existence. All phenomenal “existence” is hypothetical…

“Our dreamed “selves,” autonomous in appearance, as in life, can be seen in awakened retrospect to be puppets totally devoid of volitional possibilities on their own. Nor is the dream in any degree dependent on them except as elements therein. They, who seem to think that they are living and acting autonomously, are being dreamed in their totality, they are being activated as completely and absolutely as puppets are activated by their puppeteer. Such is our apparent life, on this apparent earth, in this apparent universe.

—Wei Wu Wei, Open Secret (1965)

For comparison, here are two sections from Ligotti’s poem cycle I Have a Special Plan for This World that articulate perhaps the darkest possible angle from which an organism can intuit the nondual reality of things, including its own identity. It’s no accident that these appear next to each other, in succession, among the cycle’s thirteen numbered sections. I consider them to represent high points, veritable mountain peaks, both thematically and artistically, among Tom’s total body of work.