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

The dream of the outside world

Without mincing words: The dominant consensus reality is a hallucination. It’s a mirage, and also a trance. A dream of the outside world.

Anything that resembles a reality or a view of reality imposed from without, from outside of you, any explanation or model of things that tries to tell you what’s ultimately real from the vantage point of an objective, external world that you, as a separate individual, inhabit—in other words, the dominant consensus reality—is a sucker punch. It’s a trick.

The “outside world” isn’t outside at all. It exists inside you as pure consciousness. So does the “you,” the notionally independent self that seems to be located in and confronted by such a world.

The objective perspective, then, is an inverted view of things that’s constantly attempting to undermine the reality of your actual situation. You’re not a separate individual inhabiting a world. Instead, you’re absolute, pure awareness, and the world is a kind of virtual experience arising within you—including your experience or perception of being an individual unit, a separate being within it.

Holding to this understanding in a culture whose consensus view maintains the opposite will make you seem like an outlier to most people. The social consequences may be severe. But then, this perceived social reality, along with the perceived consequences of rejecting it, is likewise unfolding within the field of your own being. It’s you being reflected back to yourself.

Learning to navigate this reflection or projection is like learning to navigate your nocturnal dreams. You only ever encounter your own self, divided into the seemingly separate centers of subjective perceiver and objective perceived.

If you cultivate the habit of recognizing and greeting everything that arises, including your own subjective weather, as a complementary and ultimately harmonious dance of Yourself with Yourself (including when the feeling of it isn’t harmonious at all), everything takes on a rather wondrous aspect. Sometimes thrillingly so, sometimes mysteriously so, and sometimes darkly so.

This is just the way of dreams.

The mystery of the self and the dream of reality

We commonly overlook the fact that the ultimate mystery of existence and reality is our own mystery—the mystery of the self. We ourselves are the center of the wheel. And at those moments when we reawaken to the wonder, fascination, and longing of it all, what we are really feeling and perceiving, often unawares, is our very own Identity: the awesome Absolute in its sheer being, consciousness, and imperturbability.

“The world is nothing but the picture of your own ‘I’ consciousness,” Nisargadatta Maharaj once said (as recorded in Prior to Consciousness). “Do not worry about the world. First start from here: the ‘I Am,’ and then find out what is the world. Find out the nature of this ‘I.’” And also, as recorded in Consciousness and the Absolute (the final book of his transcribed and edited talks to be published before his death in 1981, “Not only is the body-mind unreal, but this manifest consciousness, this universe, is also unreal. The ‘I Amness’ is dream-like, ephemeral.” And thus: “Find out what you are and you will get all the answers.”

Having assumed the dreamlike perspective of individual beings inhabiting an objective world that is separate from us, we begin to receive intuitive intimations of a higher unity and an awesome, scintillating mystery that characterizes both our inner and outer experience. And it dawns on us that this wondrous infusion of a new felt perspective, which inflects and transforms our sense of both self and cosmos, is simply the way it feels for a dream character to recognize its simultaneous illusory nature as a separate being and its real identity as the One that dreamt all this, and that is still dreaming it now.

The algorithm of experience

Everybody talks about “the algorithm” these days, the invisible principle, or rather the collective set of them, that governs what’s delivered in our daily, individual interactions with the interwebs. An enormous slice of what we see and hear every day, the content that fills the container of our experience, is determined by hidden code. But there’s a deeper layer to consider: what might be called the algorithm of experience itself.

This is a metaphor just waiting to be extracted. In an age when the notion of “the algorithm” has become iconic, rising from the level of a mere technical term to become a universal, zeitgeist-level principle suffused throughout the cultural aether, it’s interesting to remember and reflect on how reality at large is essentially the expression of an algorithm that’s perpetually serving up everything that arises. And by “reality” I mean our individual experience—what Peter Brown, the late nondual spiritual teacher, helpfully characterized as our “experiential field.” Because at root, for each of us, it means the same thing. Reality is what’s experienced, what shows up. It’s all that’s ever encountered or known. Even thoughts or speculations about what might lie beyond immediate experience are only ever known in and as immediate experience.

This algorithm of your experience—which, again, is synonymous with reality, the only reality you can ever know—is fine-tuned with sheer, perfect accuracy, better than any tech company could ever build into their social media feed, for giving precisely what’s needed, whatever it is that inevitably has to emerge. A perfectly calibrated experiential feed. How else could it be? How could anything arise that wasn’t “meant” to?

When the point hits home, it marks a significant and subversive shift in perspective.

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.