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