When you work “above the line” on a movie (writer, director, actor, producer, etc.), watching it flop at the box office is devastating.1 I had such an experience during the opening weekend of Conan the Barbarian 3D.

A movie’s opening day is analogous to a political election night. Although I’ve never worked in politics, I remember having similar feelings of disappointment and disillusionment when my candidate lost a presidential bid, so I imagine that working as a speechwriter or a fundraiser for the losing campaign would feel about the same as working on an unsuccessful film.

One joins a movie production the same way one might join a campaign, years before the actual release/election, and in the beginning one is filled with hope, enthusiasm, and belief. I joined the Conan team, having loved the character in comic books and the stories of Robert E. Howard, filled with the same kind of raw energy and drive that one needs in politics.

Any film production, like a long, grueling campaign over months and years, is filled with crisis, compromise, exhaustion, conflict, elation, and blind faith that if one just works harder, the results will turn out all right in the end. During that process, whatever anger, frustration, or disagreement you have with the candidate/film you keep to yourself. Privately you may oppose various decisions, strategies, or compromises; you may learn things about the candidate that cloud your resolve and shake your confidence, but you soldier on, committed to the end. You rationalize it along the way by imagining that the struggle will be worth it when the candidate wins.

A few months before release, “tracking numbers” play the role in movies that polls play in politics. It’s easy to get caught up in this excitement, like a college volunteer handing out fliers for Howard Dean. (Months before Conan was released, many close to the production believed it would open like last year’s The Expendables.) As the release date approaches and the tracking numbers start to fall, you start adjusting expectations, but always with a kind of desperate optimism. “I don’t believe the polls,” say the smiling candidates.

You hope that advertising and word of mouth will improve the numbers, and even as the numbers get tighter and the omens get darker, you keep telling yourself that things will turn around, that your guy will surprise the experts and pollsters. You stay optimistic. You begin selectively ignoring bad news and highlighting the good. You make the best of it. You believe.

In the days before the release, you get all sorts of enthusiastic congratulations from friends and family. Everyone seems to believe it will go well, and everyone has something positive to say, so you allow yourself to get swept up in it.

You tell yourself to just enjoy the process. That whether you succeed or fail, win or lose, it will be fine. You pretend to be Zen. You adopt detachment and ironic humor, while secretly praying for a miracle.

The Friday night of the release is like the Tuesday night of an election. “Exit polls” are taken of people leaving the theater, and estimated box office numbers start leaking out in the afternoon, like early ballot returns. You are glued to your computer, clicking wildly over websites, chatting nonstop with peers, and calling anyone and everyone to find out what they’ve heard. Have any numbers come back yet? That’s when your stomach starts to drop.

By about 9 PM it’s clear when your “candidate” has lost by a startlingly wide margin, more than you or even the most pessimistic political observers could have predicted. With a movie it’s much the same: trade magazines like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter call the weekend winners and losers based on projections. That’s when the reality of the loss sinks in, and you don’t sleep the rest of the night.

For the next couple of days, you walk in a daze, and your friends and family offer kind words, but mostly avoid the subject. Since you had planned (ardently believed, despite it all) that success would propel you to new appointments and opportunities, you find yourself at a loss about what to do next. It can all seem very grim.

You make light of it, of course. You joke and shrug. But the blow to your ego and reputation can’t be brushed off. Reviewers, even when they were positive, mocked Conan the Barbarian for its lack of story, lack of characterization, and lack of wit. This doesn’t speak well of the screenwriting- and any filmmaker who tells you s/he “doesn’t read reviews” just doesn’t want to admit how much they sting.

But one thought this morning has lightened my mood:

My father is a retired trumpet player. I remember, when I was a boy, watching him spend months preparing for an audition with a famous philharmonic. Trumpet positions in major orchestras only become available once every few years. Hundreds of world-class players will fly in to try out for these positions from all over the world. I remember my dad coming home from this competition, one that he desperately wanted to win, one that he desperately needed to win because work was so hard to come by. Out of hundreds of candidates and days of auditions and callbacks, my father came in...second.

It was devastating for him. He looked completely numb. To come that close and lose tore out his heart. But the next morning, at 6:00 AM, the same way he had done every morning since the age of 12, he did his mouthpiece drills. He did his warm-ups. He practiced his usual routines, the same ones he tells his students they need to play every single day. He didn’t take the morning off. He just went on. He was and is a trumpet player, and that’s what trumpet players do, come success or failure.

Less than a year later, he went on to win a position with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he played for three decades. Good thing he kept practicing.

So with my father’s example in mind, here I sit, coffee steaming in its mug and dog asleep at my feet, starting my work for the day, revising yet another script, working out yet another pitch, thinking of the future (the next project, the next election) because I’m a screenwriter, and that’s just what screenwriters do.

On to the next campaign...

Undercraft

Active Imagination is the other A.I.

This Substack is meant to share a creative practice I’ve been enjoying for decades, one I call Undercraft…

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2 months ago · 37 likes · 10 comments · Sean Hood

In the meantime, in order to engage more deeply with some of the creators I’ve been reading, I’ll be interviewing people whose creative practice mirrors Undercraft in intriguing ways. I think that many imaginative people - writers, painters, musicians, filmmakers, etc. - drop into creative trances, like waking dreams, that deepen, intensify, and broaden their insight and inspiration. Examples include filmmaker David Lynch’s practice of transcendental meditation¹, painter Hilma af Klint’s experiences channeling others during seances², and Carl Jung’s use of “active imagination” to generate spontaneous material for his Red Book.³

It’s with this in mind that I interviewed about writing poetry. It occurs to me that the flow of images encountered in waking dreams - associative, non-linear, metaphorical - is reflected most directly in certain forms of free verse. She was kind enough to open up about her creative experiences and process, which mirror some aspects of Undercraft, but are also highly specific and unique.

SH: Your poetry has a kind of trance-like feel to it...which is to say that reading it puts the reader in a state of mind that, at least for me, recalls trance-like states of memory and association. Can you tell me more about what it is like to fall into one of these creative trances?

DG: It usually starts with a visual image. The whole process is very visual, actually. It involves a lot of daydreaming – I prefer to write when I’m a bit tired, because I slip into daydreaming more easily.

One image leads to another image in a way that is associative, rather than linear. I watch a sequence of images unfold and try to pin them down on the page by writing very freely – loosely.

I don’t aim for perfection. Usually every image has more than one meaning, but they are all related in my mind. The images that come to me are usually symbolic, not just concrete. If I write something and I can’t see it visually, then I will scrap it; it’s never convincing to me unless I can ‘see’ it.

When I edit, my state of mind is very different – more logical.

SH: You say you’re not “in your body” when you have these experiences, and I get that. When I’m in these states, I lose awareness of my surroundings and of my physical body enmeshed in these surroundings. However, I do experience a kind of “Imaginal body” in another imaginative space - it sees, it hears, it reaches out and touches and interacts. It’s like a dream-body in a regular dream. When you are playing with these patterns and webs of images in your brain, do you interact actively with them? Do you feel like you are present within the image, engaged with it (manipulating objects, standing in environments, dialoguing with others) as opposed to just passively watching it?

DG: Yes, I feel like I’m present in the image. Often, I might just be observing, but I’m still present. Like you say, a dream-body. I don’t think there’s really much dialogue with others though – mostly I am just standing in the environment…

SH: Is there a poem you’ve written that reflects this “waking dream” state?

DG: The last piece I wrote, “Pick up My Sleeping Body,” was written almost entirely in a creative trance because I then sent it by accident before I even got a chance to edit it.

Diary of a Deer

Pick Up My Sleeping Body

for Lenore and Harry…

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a month ago · 203 likes · 81 comments · Deer Girl

SH: You talked about starting with an image. It seems like there’s one aspect of your practice that’s about daydreaming and seeing images, and there’s another aspect that’s more about crafting the musicality of the words to capture those images. Would you say that’s true?

DG: I find that the musicality is instinctive and intuitive if I can see the image clearly in my mind. I might play around with the musicality after the first draft – but often, in prose poetry, I don’t. Often it’s just instinct. If I’m writing a formal poem, then I will play around with the musicality a lot more intensely.

SH: At what point do you bring in the “editor’s” perspective - sort of rationally selecting and rearranging words and lines?

DG: I’ll always free-write a first draft. Some first drafts are better than others – occasionally I will leave them almost untouched, but most of the time they need significant editing because when I free-write, it occasionally brings up really banal lines or images that are just irrelevant! After the first draft, the editing instinct kicks in. Here’s an example of something I found funny as a free-write:

Today:

Drowned out by rain. Clawing

at skin. No sky today. Doves

blown about by wind. Thunder.

Sudden lightning. Cosmos blown around,

Pink + white.

flapping, hitting the

wet window.

All those bright, white isles.

and for

It is still raining, so we

We hide out in bright, white

isles. For a while my eyes

can’t focus seagulls, blanket

of grey, fragile sky – squawking!

and then I remember

I’m by the sea.

Three floors up,

away from all these people,

closer to the sky

than ground.

fondling chocolate bars,

Talking about

groceries.

And how the

whole day

wrapped around

me. Tightly.

flashes of

Dark green. Black marble,

four angels, with their

eyes skywards

You walked here. You must

have sat for hours, pencil

tracing on paper as

light changed over the

water. Green light.

I remember green, moss

and bruise.

Bells cutting the haze

Stone wings. A body spread

open and gauzy into the

blue.

This is really, really old – it’s one of the first things I wrote after about five years of not being able to speak or write due to a virus that caused severe neuroinflammation. There’s potential in here, but look at some of the lines: fondling chocolate bars?! Very murky. So after writing this, I would then go in and delete obviously terrible lines and try and zoom in on the emotional throughline – this is so old that I have forgotten what the emotion was, but it seems like it’s about grief trying to break through the surface.

SH: You say you like to write when you are tired, and the boundaries between the conscious mind and the unconscious are more porous. Are there other things you do to get into a creative trance? Do you have certain rituals or habits of imagination?

DG: No… and in fact most of the time I don’t try and get into any type of trance. I find that if I’m trying to do something too consciously, then I trip myself up.

I’ve always been a really daydreamy person so I just let it come to me naturally – one of my earliest memories is in primary school when I had crossed over to the junior playground to get a cookie and a carton of milk and on the way back, I fell into a trance and the dinner lady had to physically pick me up and move me out of the way of the football pitch.

SH: What images are continually evocative for you? Are there certain things - memories, objects, environments - you come to again and again?

DG: So many things. I often feel like I’m just circling the same things because certain things interest me so much. I think I’m drawn to places and people that feel partly hidden.

My grandmother – she was a formidably intelligent, secretive person (a spy during the war, and her mother worked at Bletchley Park). After she died, I became obsessed with trying to find out who she was – why did this woman, who was so obviously upper class, live and die in a one-bedroom council house? I was very ill when she was dying, and I could barely speak to say goodbye to her. I missed her funeral. It was her dying wish that I’d become well enough to write. She was a photographer and an artist. Her cameras; her crabapple tree; her hands; her voice – they live in my mind.

I’m also really drawn to the natural environment. Misty coasts, Dartmoor in winter. Shells, flowers, fossils, old photographs, birds, the night sky. Scenarios where things were almost said. I love photography and one of the ways that I dealt with illness was taking one photograph a day. At this point I still wasn’t well enough to write, so again – the images came first.

SH: What guides you through the various images that rise up in your imagination? Or to put it another way, how do you decide which images to put into words? Is the through line an emotion, an idea, or something else?

DG: This is quite hard to pin down. The through line, I think, is an emotion. For the piece I wrote titled ‘Pick Up My Sleeping Body ’, I was looking at an image of my great, great-grandfather’s grave. He was a fairly well-known art critic in Victorian times. He’s now buried with his five-month-old child in a cemetery in London. I found it moving to see his grave worn away and covered in ivy. The emotion wasn’t straightforward grief – but connection, too. Buried with the child he loved.

To be clear, I don’t follow my own emotions; I try to follow the emotion that image brings.

SH: I love the idea that you try to follow what the image brings. That’s really important... because you are prioritizing the image itself... not your interpretation/reaction/feeling about the image.

DG: It’s really hard to explain it in a way that doesn’t sound wacky/eccentric? But yes – that’s exactly it – the image is the priority. The image can’t change its meaning just because I might be feeling happy or sad on a particular day.

It’s rather like trying to read the mood of a person… It’s easy to impose your own mood on somebody else, but I think in order to find out the truth of what they’re feeling you have to really listen and read small changes in body language. That doesn’t necessarily mean I will have read the image correctly, but that’s always the aim.

SH: In my practice, I differentiate between passive daydreaming, in which I’m passively enjoying images that I control, and active imagination, in which the images seem to have their own spontaneous autonomy, and I interact with them as if they were objectively real. Do you experience “active imagination” when you see images and are present in imagistic environments?

DG: I do experience active imagination. I can be watching a scene in my mind, and then suddenly something unplanned will happen. Recently I tried to interact with them as if they were objectively real, but it pulled me straight out of a daydreaming state. I think I naturally lean more toward passive daydreaming. I try to observe the images until they reveal their emotional meaning. I’m much more comfortable observing than directing. That’s true in real life, too!

SH: What’s another one of your poems that evokes “waking dreams”?

DG: “Winter Timetable” also felt like a waking dream to me. The images played out strongly in front of me.

Diary of a Deer

Winter Timetable

I He draws them on the back of an envelope: the sparrow’s blunt tail, and the swallow’s forked into a whale’s fin. Fluke, he says, that’s what it looks like. Outside my bedroom the swallows swim through September…

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a month ago · 280 likes · 103 comments · Deer Girl

Many thanks to for offering this glimpse behind the curtain of her creative practice! Her insights are both fascinating and inspiring.

If you have an established creative practice and this discussion of creativity, waking dreams, and the imaginal resonates with you, I’d love to hear more about your experience and practice. Reach out to me, Sean Hood, in the comments or by direct message. Perhaps I’ll end up interviewing you as well!

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Many imaginative people - writers, painters, musicians, filmmakers, etc. - drop into creative trances, like waking dreams, that deepen, intensify, and broaden their insight and inspiration. Examples include filmmaker David Lynch’s practice of transcendental meditation, painter Hilma af Klint’s experiences channeling others during seances, and Carl Jung's use of “active imagination” to generate spontaneous material for his Red Book. You can read more about what I’m planning to write about when my Substack fully launches here.

With all this in mind, I began subscribing to The Living Dark and reading books by beginning with A Course On Demonic Creativity (which you can read for free by following the link). He kindly agreed to let me interview him.

is an American writer, editor, and educator whose work explores the intersection of horror, religion, consciousness, creativity, and philosophy. He is the author of the horror collection To Rouse Leviathan and Writing at the Wellspring, a guide to creativity and the inner sources of artistic inspiration. A former professor of English and religion and current college vice chancellor of academic affairs, Cardin publishes The Living Dark, a Substack devoted to creativity, the daemon muse, spirituality, the weird, and the cultural challenges of modern life.

For Cardin, the “daemon muse” is neither a psychological metaphor nor a literal supernatural being. He sees creativity as a collaboration with an intelligence that feels genuinely “other” than the conscious ego. Artists don’t so much invent their deepest work as they allow creativity to emerge through an ongoing relationship with this inner source. So, a creator’s task is not to manufacture originality, but to cultivate receptivity, discipline, and attentiveness so that the daemon can speak through them. The daemon thus functions as both a creative partner and a guide, revealing themes and purposes that often exceed conscious intention.

SH: Many of my readers are writers, filmmakers, artists, and poets working in the horror genre. You’ve suggested that horror reveals what is true rather than what is merely frightening. What kinds of deeper truths does horror disclose?

MC: One way to get at the truth that horror discloses is to begin with the fact that horror is not just a literary and artistic mode but a primal response. As Douglas E. Winter famously insisted some decades ago, horror is not really a genre but an emotion. Whether or not we follow him all the way, I think we would do well to pay attention to what this response involves. What, exactly, is horror?

The first thing to notice is that horror isn’t just fear. It involves something additional, some element of recoil or disgust, not just the feeling of being scared but the feeling of having your skin crawl and your gut churn, accompanied by a desperate desire to get away. The formula might be “horror = fear + revulsion.” Importantly, the revulsion can be physical, moral, aesthetic, psychological, or even metaphysical—or all of these at once. When you’re struck with horror, you have the sickening sense that “this should not be.” You’re simultaneously repulsed and afraid. And also, sometimes, fascinated.

That fascination is where horror links up with the famous “sublime” of Romantic art and literary theory. The question that naturally arises is: Why should we be drawn to what frightens and repulses us? What kind of weird response is this, and what kind of weird creatures are we that find it built into us?

I’ll start bringing this admittedly meandering response to a point. On the nondual view that informs my thinking, each of us, as an apparently separate being, constitutes a little cosmos, a world unto ourselves. You’ve never known anything but your own world, nor have I ever known anything but mine. Nor could either of us ever know anything else. This world is organized around a sense of separation between me and everything else. “I” seem to inhabit, and to be enclosed within and confronted by, “the world.”

But this is actually a set of assumptions layered over our primary reality by cultural conditioning. What we call “I” and “world” are mental projections—or, perhaps more precisely, psychological constructions by which we differentiate among aspects of the totally enveloping theater of experience, whose earliest phases reach back to the moment of birth, and even further, into the womb. Reality itself is far bigger than, and different from, the virtual version of me-plus-world that we project during most of our waking hours—and that, as you may have noticed, loosens or breaks down when we’re asleep.

This means we sometimes encounter things coming at us from “the world” that our assumptions and projections don’t encompass: things we can’t process or understand, things that elude our philosophical net. These might be physical threats, personal losses, terrible accidents, paranormal phenomena, or any other event, object, or condition that our map of reality cannot contain. You might say the outer skin of our world is punctured by something from beyond it. The anomaly therefore presents itself as an awful threat—which is to say, as something that should not be.

Remember Lovecraft’s famous definition of cosmic horror in his grand essay Supernatural Horror in Literature? He described the proper attitude as one of “awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.” For me, this has become a kind of master metaphor.

At the deepest level, in my view, all horror is cosmic horror. It’s made possible by our sense that we are separate beings in a universe where we can be threatened because our identity—the thing we take ourselves to be—has a boundary that can be punctured, whether this means a blade or monstrous talons puncturing our skin or some anomalous manifestation puncturing the shell of our mind. Horror happens when our personal cosmos is invaded by something from beyond it.

So what deeper truth does horror reveal? It reveals that we create the very conditions for feeling horror by taking ourselves to be limited identities in a world we didn’t make. And more: The thing that horrifies us is, in this sense, nothing but ourselves—the wider aspect of what we are, the totality of being, even Being itself—presenting itself to itself as something other and threatening. This also helps account for the fascination we feel.

Horror can therefore become a way of awakening to what we really are, if we can accept its offer, which we hardly ever do, precisely because it is so horrifying. It’s a strange and harrowing game we play with ourselves.

SH: One of the central observations of my practice of “Undercraft” is that the figures I encounter feel entirely autonomous. Do you think the objects, environments, and entities of the imagination are invented or discovered? Or, put another way, does it matter if the daemon is “real?”

MC: It doesn’t matter if imaginal figures really are separate, independent, autonomous beings possessing their own intelligence and will. What matters is that they feel and seem like this to us in the moment of encountering them. How could we ever know the truth of it? What would “the truth of it” even mean when we can’t see around our own corners? As I said, we’re all inextricably ensconced within our own theater of experience. We can’t step outside it to gain an objective view. What feels real is real, in a very real sense.

About the best we can do intellectually is to keep imaginal matters, including the experience of the muse and the daemon, deliberately in a liminal hyperspace by refusing to assign a truth value to them. Are they “really real”? Or are they just metaphors for unconscious processes? What do we even mean by “the unconscious”—a term that we’re too facile in throwing around without having recognized that we don’t know what the hell we mean by it?

Our best gambit, and our only really honest response, is to act as if these things are objectively real while holding tenaciously to the recognition that they might not be. I have found a vein of power in this dual attitude, which keeps minds and possibilities open instead of closing them with impossibly certain answers.

SH: How has Dean Wesley Smith’s concept of “Writing into the Dark” informed your own writing practice? Why is it important for writers to resist planning and outlining things beforehand, and face what is “unstable and unknowable, not available to perception, cognition, or direct awareness?” Why might this be particularly important for horror writers?

MC: I’ll start by pointing out that if someone wants to write an outline before drafting, they should definitely do it. The distinction between “planners” and “pantsers” among writers is a venerable one for a reason. Some people like to plan; others don’t. Some people’s creativity thrives on the former and some on the latter. Moreover, some of us find that we need to take different approaches to different projects. So I would never make the absolute assertion that no writer should plan or outline beforehand.

That said, Smith’s model of writing into the dark can be enormously valuable, and I recommend his book of that title to anyone and everyone. His deepest point is that we have basically two minds—or, in his vocabulary, two voices—as writers: the creative voice and the critical voice. What he calls the creative voice overlaps substantially with what I call the unconscious or daemon muse, but they’re not identical concepts.

As we can see from our own experience, along with the record of human history, our deep creative mind is primally imprinted with the patterns of narrative and storytelling. This is true whether we’re acting as writers or as readers and viewers, and it comes out in works of both fiction and nonfiction, and everything in between.

If we’ve learned through practice to get in sync with the creative mind, so that our conscious mind serves as a channel or conduit for it, we can simply start writing without a plan, proceeding from nothing but an idea, and allow the writing to form itself into patterns. Once those patterns become visible, the conscious mind can notice them without trying to seize control. We can then return to another round of writing and allow the creative mind to unfold them more fully. Eventually, we have a book, story, essay, poem, play, or screenplay, almost as if by magic.

Pressing too hard with the conscious critical mind—and, more than that, trying to make it serve as the source of the writing—represents a confusion of inner roles. This is what can happen if we become too locked into advance planning. But again, some people’s creative process thrives on planning. For whatever reason, their creative and conscious-critical minds have developed a fruitful way of working together through it. We should each figure out what works for us as the unique writers we are, and go all in on that.

For horror writers, writing into the dark may be especially valuable because horror depends so heavily on the arrival of what the conscious mind can’t domesticate in advance, all those images and presences that surprise even the writer. If you know too completely what’s waiting in the darkness, you may sap the story’s spirit.

SH: One of the things I look for in a creative practice is an encounter with an “other” that pushes back against my assumptions, beliefs, and goals. Does your concept of a muse/daemon provide this kind of generative friction?

MC: Yes, indeed, and exactly. The concept and lived experience of the muse, daimon, daemon, or inner genius takes me beyond myself. I can get pretty charged up just by contemplating it or reading about it. I have also gotten great creative exhilaration out of writing two books and many blog posts and essays on it.

The daemon isn’t just a source of inspiration. It can push back against the ego’s assumptions with demands of its own. Also, adopting the attitude that your creative process is an inner collaboration with a spirit that’s somehow separate from you and yet somehow also your own higher self doesn’t mean you don’t need or won’t benefit from more conventional encounters with people in the outside world who can give you necessary pushback and perspective. But it does mean that you don’t bear the egoic weight of the entire process alone at its deepest level. It introduces an element of self-transcendence into the whole thing.

SH: The idea of a personal muse/daemon suggests that creative people are not originators of what they create, so much as conduits, translating and transcribing patterns originating elsewhere. What are some of the advantages of looking at creativity this way?

MC: Though I accidentally anticipated this question in my answer directly above, I’ll expand on it by saying that removing from the ego the pressure to create—which is not its function—opens a whole new source of creative power. The ego and its accompanying intellectual mind can deal only in what they already know. Their whole substance consists of established memories and patterns. They’re great at working with what they already have, but they can’t manufacture anything genuinely new. Another way of putting it is that the egoic mind, on its own, is condemned to recreate the past in some form. (As I say this, I’m put in mind for some reason of the glut of sequels from thoroughly played-out franchises that has dominated movie screens for more than a decade.) But the ego does have its own well-defined job, and the daemon muse model clarifies what that job is: to receive and refine what comes from beyond it.

Novelty has to come from beyond the ego, either from the world outside or from the beyond within. The daemon muse represents our point of contact with that beyond within. Plato’s Myth of Er describes each soul as choosing a life before birth and then being accompanied into that life by a daimon charged with guarding the choice. James Hillman’s later “acorn theory” transforms this into the idea that each of us enters the world with a daimon carrying the image of the distinctive character and calling we’re born to embody and play out. I find this both fascinating and energizing to contemplate, even as a metaphor. In this picture, our deepest uniqueness, emblematized by a spirit that accompanies us into life, is also our ongoing point of contact with the divine realm and its power.

If you bring something like this to your creative practice—again, feeling free to take it as a psychological metaphor or however else you want to take it, all the way to ceremonial magick and the quest for Knowledge and Conversation with your Holy Guardian Angel as a means of discovering and enacting your True Will, if that’s your jam—then you light everything up with possibilities unavailable to you if you simply grind away at your writing through sheer force of conscious will. You also relieve the dread you might otherwise feel under the pressure of taking sole personal credit or blame for what you write. It’s really a nice package. It also happens to refer to something true—or at least “true.”

SH: My practice of “Undercraft” mirrors Jungian “active imagination,” involves the cultivation of “waking dreams,” and often includes direct conversations with “others” in the psyche. In your experience, what are some ways that creative people can develop productive relationships and collaborations with their daemon?

MC: I love each of the practices you’ve described, and I have experimented with them all myself, especially the latter technique of conducting conversations with others in the psyche. I recommend them all.

I also strongly recommend experimenting with morning writing, such as Julia Cameron’s famous practice of “morning pages” as laid out in The Artist’s Way. You can also get to the same place through Natalie Goldberg’s Zen-inflected “writing practice” as most famously presented in her classic book Writing Down the Bones. Brenda Ueland’s equally classic If You Want to Write likewise takes you there.

Even above these, I might recommend Dorothea Brande’s classic (am I using the word classic too much?) Becoming a Writer for its recommendations on adopting the attitude that you are a double or triple personality in which creativity represents an inner collaborative division of roles, along with Ms. Brande’s specific advice—which is still utterly fresh nearly a century after she first offered it—on practical ways to cultivate this.

To plumb your daemon’s depths, consider using Ray Bradbury’s list-making exercise. Come up with a list of what I like to think of as “power nouns,” words that refer to things in your life—objects, places, people—that carry a personal mythic resonance for you. Bradbury’s list was full of things that his readers can recognize from his most beloved stories: the ravine, the skeleton, the lake, the carnival, and so on. After you make your list, pick an item from it and explain to yourself, passionately, on paper, what it means to you. From there you just may fall into writing a story or prose poem or who knows what else, all of it arising from your daemonic passion as focused through the lens of this particular word that took on a unique and potent meaning for you because of its place in your life.

I might also recommend personifying not just your creative spirit but its opposite. Maybe the best voice on this matter is Steven Pressfield with his presentation of Resistance—note the capital “R”—in The War of Art. All our creative attempts, he says, and even our creative ideas, are automatically accompanied by what seems for all the world like a monstrous spirit whose sole purpose is to murder them. He goes into detail, with much shrewdness and wit, about how to recognize this demonic anti-muse, and how to recognize its insidious trick of masquerading as the voice of your own better judgment. I can’t recommend his book enough.

I’ll also point out that I talk about this at some length in Writing at the Wellspring and add what I consider to be something fundamental to the idea of Resistance, what it means, and how to overcome it.

SH: Creativity, in your view, is not something we consciously will; rather, we create the conditions for creativity to emerge all on its own. What are some things you do to create conditions that make it more likely your daemon will appear?

MC: I try to maintain an attitude of constant listening. I mean interiorly, although consciously searching for the quiet beneath auditory noise is also helpful. I have meditated off and on for decades, and this has helped me recognize the workings of my verbal and imaginal mind. It has also taught me to watch those workings and sometimes record what they’re doing.

Whenever I remember to do it, I also maintain an awareness of and receptivity to synchronicities in the outer world. I’ve found that when a creative idea with a strong, living charge is brewing inside me, strange synchronicities seem more likely to crop up in ordinary events. Sometimes an outer alignment of this kind, instead of an inner flash of inspiration, can serve as my notice that something is underway.

I also agree with the intelligent advice, which has become common in some online writing circles, about cultivating relationships, reading broadly, and doing other things that enlarge the surface area of potential serendipity. My daemon often seems to speak through such things.

I maintain a dedicated practice of early-morning reading, along with early-morning writing, and I let my interest have its head. More often than not, this keeps my enthusiasm for the things that interest me fresh, which in turn seems to feed my daemon muse.

I have also experimented with bibliomancy from time to time. A few months ago, I published a whole Living Dark series chronicling a seven-day experiment in bibliomancy. Using your bookshelf as a readily available oracle can be quite effective if you’re the type of person for whom such things feel meaningful. So can consulting more traditional oracles such as the I Ching.

SH: Lastly, there is an intensely spiritual side to your understanding of creativity. You suggest that the illusory ego is responsible for most of the blocks, resistance, and anxiety associated with creative work. I know this is a big subject, but can you talk about why concepts like non-duality can potentially free up the creative process?

MC: This spirals right back to my long answer to your first question about horror. Nonduality, at least as I have come to understand and experience it, is about recognizing that your sense of what you are is not what you actually are, and that “the world” is likewise fundamentally dreamlike in some respect.

The dividing line you draw—the outline you trace, as conditioned by culture, environment, and the inbuilt shape of the psyche—to separate “I” from “world” is an arbitrary division within a seamless total field of . . . something. We can’t really say what that something is, but it’s Reality, Being, whatever that really and truly means. “We,” as apparently separate egos, can never know it, even though we’re nothing but it. Hence the familiar analogies of waves or whirlpools in the ocean, recognizable differentiations that are ultimately nothing but water.

So how does this potentially free up the creative process? If the spirit of it really grips you, not just as a concept but as a living recognition, then you realize that your own life and identity are nothing more or less than a story being told by reality. Anything you write or otherwise create is effectively a subplot.

For me, something about this realization, combined with the daemon-muse model, has proved enormously invigorating. The apparent otherness of the daemon doesn’t contradict the nondual picture. It’s one of the ways the whole speaks to itself.

For one thing, the relief of the nondual recognition—“My lousy, limited mortal life isn’t actually what it seems to be”—is a great comfort. For another, it makes creativity the name of the entire game, including at the very base of what, on a mundane, workaday level, I still regard and experience as “Matt.”

It all comes together in an understanding, and more pertinently an experience, of creative flow that happens when it happens and doesn’t when it doesn’t. The stakes are comfortably low because none of it really matters, since everything is actually somehow fine. But this very fact tends to incite a feeling of energetic playfulness, like “Why the hell not? Why shouldn’t I pour myself wholeheartedly into this idea that has grabbed me, and try to write the hell out of it?”

And then of course that folds back to a felt sense of ever-present permission just to drop the whole thing if it comes to seem too much of a burden, and also to pick it up again.

This may have turned into a deeply idiosyncratic answer whose point of contact with you and your readers is obscure, but it’s my honest one.

*

Thanks again to of The Living Dark!

If you have an established creative practice and this discussion of daemons, waking dreams, and the imaginal resonates with you, I’d love to hear more about your experience and practice. Reach out to me, Sean Hood, in the comments or by direct message. Perhaps I’ll end up interviewing you as well!

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As you walk past the soundstages, consider how all the events in your life have led you to this particular moment. Remember the girl who sat with you in a bean-bag chair in the seventh grade. Recall her recoiling from your cold, clammy hands, and squealing, “You are so NOT feeling me up.” Consider how this has become a metaphor for every botched opportunity in your entire life.

Now realize that while daydreaming, you have walked past your destination and nearly been hit by a passing tram. Maintain your dignity by waving at the tourists, knowing that you are a Real Hollywood Screenwriter on his way to a Real Studio Pitch…

… who is now 20 minutes late.

Later, in the waiting room, when the perky assistant asks if you’d like a bottled water, say no, and then wonder why you said it. As your mouth becomes drier and drier, decline to change your mind out of spite.

As you see others in the lobby with you, waiting for their own pitch meetings, notice that they all have whiter teeth than you and much cooler shoes. They speak in confident whispers. They cackle with insider’s poise. Decide that they are a bunch of arrogant hacks. Page through your notes, but discover you can’t concentrate because you’re just so… thirsty.

As you look up at the framed posters on the wall of Hollywood Classics, get lost in fantasies of success and acclaim for your final film. Imagine yourself doing DVD commentary, or swapping cocktail chatter with Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig. Compose your Oscar speech. Become smug. This way when the perky assistant tells you that the Big Executive is ready, you can be absolutely certain that all of your lifelong dreams are entirely dependent on the next ten minutes.

Begin to panic.

Arrive in the Big Executive’s office, feigning an attitude of ultra-cool detachment while understanding fully that you are fooling no one. As she sits politely, her pen poised expectantly over her notebook, make small talk about how you were almost killed by a tram.

At this point, a soft, rational voice in the back of your head will remind you that she is just an ordinary person, well-meaning and intelligent, who is just as eager to hear a good story as you are to tell it. Ignore this voice.

Instead, become paralyzed with rage and paranoia. Assume that this Hollywood gatekeeper is your personal enemy, the bane of artists worldwide. To her, it’s all about box office returns and bottom lines. Know that her friendly smile is secretly mocking you – judging you. Blurt out. “You wanna know what YOUR problem is?”

Silently pray you haven’t actually said this out loud. Fumble with your papers. Clear your throat. Feel your mind go completely blank. Look down at your notes, and discover they have morphed inexplicably into Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Then, without warning, remember the first beat of your story and abruptly begin pitching. Speak so quickly that the words gush out in an incomprehensible stream of gibberish. Continually glance up at the executive’s face to gauge her every reaction. When she stares blankly back at you, betraying nothing, assume that it’s all going terribly wrong.

When you finally see an emotion cross her face, forget that you are pitching a horror film and that her revulsion is probably a good sign. Assume instead that she not only loathes your story but that she hates you personally. She hates the dry-clicking sound your parched lips make in-between syllables. She hates your shoes.

As you continue to crash and burn, make up new story points and new characters off the top of your head. Allow these impromptu thoughts to lead you into hopeless tangents. Make up further improbable twists and absurd details; then listen to yourself explain how, at the end of the second act, your heroine vomits a three-foot-long centipede. Discover, as you listen, that you are pitching The Most Insipid Story Ever Told.

But then, when all seems lost, remember your story’s electrifying climax. Rise from the ashes. Speak clearly and emphatically. Finish with a crescendo of unexpected payoff and shocking revelation. Astound yourself, but resist the urge to burst into tears.

Bask in triumph.

As you stand to leave the executive’s office and she shakes your cold, clammy hand, hang on her every word. Listen desperately for any sign of affirmation. Look for any indication that you might have gotten through. When all she says is “It’s really… very interesting. Thanks so much for coming in,” know with absolute certainty that you have failed.

Lose faith in yourself. Hate your pitiful life. Abandon hope.

Hours later, sit in your little office and sulk. When your agent calls and asks how it went, explain to him that it was perhaps the worst pitch in recorded history, and that you are seriously considering giving up filmmaking forever.

“I just called her,” your agent will say. “And she said the pitch went great. She loved you, and she wants to think it over.” Knowing full well that “think it over” is code for “you are so NOT feeling me up,” assume that your agent, too, has joined the vast conspiracy against you.

Lastly, as you turn off the light to go to sleep, describe these painstaking details to your long-suffering wife. After the long silence, do not – DO NOT under any circumstances – consider her suggestion…

“Honey, try to get some sleep.”

“I’m too anxious. I’ve got another pitch tomorrow.”

As you lie there, staring up into the darkness, allow her fingers to lace with yours, palm pressed against palm, dry and warm. For a moment, just one moment, be content.

*

(While I'm finishing my forthcoming book, Undercraft: The Creative Practice of the Waking Dream, I'll occasionally share older essays, drawings, and curiosities like this one alongside new work about imagination and creativity.)

(Have a pitch horror story? Tell me in the comments. I feel your pain.)

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Undercraft

Active Imagination is the other A.I.

This Substack is meant to share a creative practice I’ve been enjoying for decades, one I call Undercraft…

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2 months ago · 13 likes · 4 comments · Sean Hood

In the meantime, in order to engage more deeply with some of the creators I’ve been reading, I’ll be interviewing people whose creative practice mirrors Undercraft in intriguing ways. I think that many imaginative people - writers, painters, musicians, filmmakers, etc. - drop into creative trances, like waking dreams, that deepen, intensify, and broaden their insight and inspiration. Examples include filmmaker David Lynch’s practice of transcendental meditation1, painter Hilma af Klint’s experiences channeling others during seances2, and Carl Jung's use of “active imagination” to generate spontaneous material for his Red Book.3

It’s with this in mind that I interviewed about their magical practice. I first became aware of when I stumbled upon their essay about the allure of these altered states of conciousness and the importance of returning from private reverie to test one’s insights by integrating them into the material world.

The Lovecraftian Witch

Why We Chase the Abyss

Let’s start with the obvious problem…

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2 months ago · 16 likes · 9 comments · The Threshold Witch

SH: Most of my readers are writers, screenwriters, filmmakers, poets, and visual artists, many of them working in the horror genre, so they will recognize Lovecraft… but introduce us to your Substack and the subject you write about. What exactly is your practice?

TW: Well, I started writing under the name The Lovecraftian Witch because I was deeply fascinated by the philosophy behind cosmic horror: the confrontation with the unknown, the dissolution of human certainty, and the awe and terror that come from standing at the edge of comprehension.

However, I realized the name carried associations I did not intend. Some readers might assume I was engaging with Lovecraft himself rather than the broader philosophical and artistic territory that cosmic horror explores. Others might mistake my writing for fiction rather than a reflection of my own spiritual practice. So I chose a new name: .

You see, the threshold is where my practice has always lived. It is the space between known and unknown, science and mystery, technology and magic, the conscious and unconscious mind. My practice does not belong neatly to a single tradition. It is eclectic, personal, and continuously evolving.

Magic is a practice of relationship: with symbols, imagination, consciousness, nature, technology, each other, and the unseen patterns that shape our lives. is my exploration of those liminal spaces.

SH: You and I seem to circle similar experiences but come at them from different angles - you from a magical/spiritual perspective, and me from a more secular, arts-oriented perspective. Both our practices in general concern inducing an altered state of consciousness, a kind of deliberate invocation of a waking dream. Would you say that’s accurate?

TW: Absolutely. Magic and creativity are so deeply intertwined that I couldn’t pry them apart if I wanted to.

Throughout history, artists and magicians have often been engaging with the same territory: entering altered states of awareness, encountering symbols and images from the depths of the psyche, and bringing something back into ordinary reality.

Some call it flow state, but it has many names: meditation, trance, inspiration, communion. Regardless, beneath these words there’s often a similar experience that we’re alluding to. An experience of stepping beyond the everyday self and entering a deeper conversation with the imagination.

I believe all artists ( knowingly or not) are doing magic. I mean, a musician can transform the emotional state of a room. A writer creates worlds. The artists take lead and turns it into gold. These are acts of transformation.

The magic practitioner and the artist both aim to take something invisible (an idea, a feeling, a possibility, a dream) and give it form.

SH: For artists, the point of descent is novelty, intensity, or insight that can then be materialized as an artwork; however, the practice is often very open-ended and exploratory, allowing discovery and metamorphosis by letting go of preconceived goals. Is this true of your practice as well? Is it open-ended, or does it have a spiritual goal?

TW: I would say it is both.

There is an openness required for any genuine encounter with the unknown. If we enter an experience demanding a very specific answer, we often only find an echo of what we already believe. A descent requires a willingness to listen, to encounter, and sometimes to be changed by what we find.

But openness does not mean directionlessness.

A central part of my practice is the search for what Thelema calls True Will: not simply what we want in the moment, but the deeper current of purpose and alignment beneath the noise of conditioning, expectation, and fear. Many people spend their lives pursuing desires they inherited rather than discovering what is genuinely theirs or what they even actually want for themselves.

I think before we can create intentionally, we have to know what we are trying to serve.

The rituals, explorations, symbols, and encounters along the way are not the destination. They are tools for understanding ourselves more deeply. The goal is not merely to have strange experiences (which, hey, are fun!) but to allow those experiences to transform how we live and create

SH: What rituals do you engage in to prepare for a descent?

TW: Preparation is important because entering altered states is, in many ways, an act of opening a door. I personally prefer to know what kind of doorway I am approaching.

Before a purposeful descent, I generally begin with cleansing, grounding, and protection. These practices create a container. A clear boundary between ordinary consciousness and the space I am entering.

That said, transformation does not always arrive politely, nor when we ask.

Sometimes the descent comes before we are prepared. Life itself can become the ritual: grief, crisis, profound change, creative obsession, or moments where the familiar world suddenly feels strange and symbolic. Those experiences often find us before we have chosen them.

Sometimes I approach the threshold intentionally.

Sometimes the threshold approaches me.

SH: Are there specific props, actions, or thoughts that you do repeatedly to get yourself into an open, trance-like state?

TW: Yes! Ritual is repetition with intention.

The specific tools I use can change depending on what I am doing, but the deeper purpose is always the same: to signal a transition to the mind and create a space where ordinary patterns can loosen.

Humans have always used ritual for this purpose.

We all ritualize our lives. For instance, drinking coffee every morning at the same time/place is a ritual. The difference is whether we do it consciously.

SH: How do you experience visionary material - in visual images, in voices/words, in other embodied sensations?

TW: I have experienced all the above.

When my eyes are closed, I am more likely to experience visual imagery. At other times, particularly with my eyes open, the experience is less visual and more auditory or intuitive.

Sometimes it is not a “voice” exactly, but a knowing. A thought or phrase that arrives with a quality of presence, as if it has been discovered rather than created if that makes sense.

I have also experienced physical sensations, such as a feeling at the crown of my head, almost like a thread gently pulling upward.

Also a side note, I don’t think visionary experiences always need to be interpreted literally. Whether someone views them as psychological, spiritual, artistic, or symbolic, the important question is often: What is this showing me? What relationship is it asking me to develop?

SH: How do you think Corbin’s concept of the Imaginal relates to your Lovecraftian practice?

TW: I think Corbin’s concept of the Imaginal is one of the useful frameworks for understanding the territory where my practice exists.

One of the biggest misunderstandings about imagination (in my humble opinion) is that people often treat it as something unreal or only for children, like it’s only good for fantasy or escapism. Corbin’s Imaginal challenges that idea. It is not simply the imaginary; it is a realm where symbols, archetypes, and meanings take form. It is a bridge between the material and the invisible.

This is also where I find the connection to Lovecraftian thought fascinating. Cosmic horror is often described as confronting the unknown, but I think the deeper question is not simply “what terrifying thing exists beyond our understanding?”

It is: “What happens when our perception of reality expands beyond the boundaries we assumed were fixed?”

The threshold is that meeting place.

For me, my Lovecraftian practice is not about dwelling in nihilism or fear of the unknown. It is about cultivating a relationship with mystery. The unknown can inspire terror, but it can also inspire awe, transformation, and a deeper sense of connection with the vastness of existence.

The Imaginal gives us a language for that encounter.

SH: How does your practice relate to the Jungian practice of “active imagination”?

TW: I see active imagination as a close cousin to magical practice because both involve intentionally creating a relationship with the unconscious rather than simply observing it from a distance.

Jung’s method involves allowing images, figures, and symbols from the unconscious to emerge and then engaging with them in a conscious dialogue. Rather than dismissing these experiences as meaningless, he treated them as communications from deeper layers of the psyche.

That idea resonates strongly with my practice.

Whether one understands these encounters psychologically, spiritually, or somewhere in between, the important thing is the relationship we build with them. A symbol is not just something to decode intellectually; it is something to interact with.

The danger is either dismissing these experiences completely or accepting them without reflection. The practice requires both openness and discernment.

SH: You’ve written about the importance of The Return... What steps do you take to break the trance, let go of the images/experiences, and return to ordinary consciousness?

TW: The Return is every bit as important as the descent, if not even more so.

A journey without a return can become ungrounded. This is where the vase cracks, if you will. The purpose of entering these states is not to permanently escape ordinary reality, but to bring something back.

After a descent, I focus on grounding and reorienting myself. This can be as simple as returning attention to the body, engaging with ordinary sensory experiences, eating, drinking water, moving, or reconnecting with my physical surroundings.

But the deeper part of the Return is integration.

I do not try to immediately force meaning onto an experience. Sometimes the significance of a symbol or encounter only reveals itself later. Part of the discipline is allowing something to unfold rather than chasing after an interpretation.

It’s important to remember the threshold is a place we visit, not a place we live.

We have responsibilities here. We have relationships here. We have a life to create here. The wisdom gained in those altered states must be brought back into the world.

When we forget that, the search for transcendence can quietly become another form of avoidance. The threshold ceases to be a teacher and becomes a refuge we cannot bear to leave. The real work, in my opinion, has always been the return.

SH: Lastly, what concrete steps do you take to incorporate and contain the material you find into your daily life? Artists tend to contain the material in writing, painting, dancing, music, and other artworks, but how do you do it?

TW: I write it out!

There is a reason we keep grimoires.

A grimoire is not just a record of spells or rituals. It is a container. It is a place where experiences, symbols, observations, and insights can be preserved, examined, and revisited.

Writing is the primary way I process what I encounter. The act of putting something into words transforms it from an experience into a relationship. It allows me to look back and notice patterns that I might have missed in the moment. Which is nice because my memory is not that great.

Sometimes the material becomes an essay. Sometimes it becomes a ritual. Sometimes it becomes a concept, a question, or a creative seed that continues developing over time.

I think every artist has some version of a grimoire. It might be a sketchbook, a notebook of dreams, a folder of photographs, a collection of unfinished songs, or fragments of dialogue written at 3am in phone notes.

The container itself is less important than the act of returning.

We descend, we gather what we find, and then we bring it back into the world.

Many thanks to the for sharing their magical practice and answering my nosey questions!

If, dear reader, your own creative practice resonates with any of this, please tell me about it in the comments or contact me directly. I’m currently writing a book about Undercraft, so if you have experiences dropping into imaginative trances that inform and underlie your artistic practice, I’d love to talk to you about it.

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This Substack is meant to share a creative practice I’ve been enjoying for decades, one I call Undercraft.

Undercraft is a general term that covers a certain kind of human creative activity, one in which the practitioner drops into a focused trance and plays with whatever forms and patterns spontaneously arise in the psyche. The trance, when one is deep into this meditative state, feels like a kind of waking dream, one in which awareness of the outside world dissolves and you focus only on the images, voices, sounds, and objects of another autonomous space. It’s both mysterious and enormously fun.

If you are a creative person, you’ve likely already had experiences of this state of mind. It’s an imaginative capacity that most of us possess as children and gradually lose as adults, but can nevertheless be recovered. It’s a way of cultivating creativity not by force of will, but by nurturing the conditions under which it can emerge all on its own. I hope to inspire you to take up the practice, return to it, or simply practice it more deliberately and regularly.

As I write more about Undercraft, many readers will recognize similarities to Carl Jung’s Active Imagination (the other A.I.), as well as with artistic reverie, daydreaming, meditation, hypnosis, or the imaginative play of childhood. Undercraft shares something with all of these traditions and activities. Yet it is not a therapeutic method, a spiritual doctrine, or a trivial pursuit. It is a creative practice.

I’m writing about it now because human creativity is particularly relevant in our technology-saturated times. Unlike the mechanistic regurgitation and reworking of patterns of language and image produced by artificial intelligence, Undercraft connects the practitioner to a natural source of spontaneity, novelty, and insight. This is not to say that I am anti-A.I. I use these tools myself for research and development. But I believe Undercraft is a vital counterbalance, helping us to cultivate uniquely human capacities for spontaneity and creative discovery.

Beginning in September of 2026, I plan to publish weekly articles, reviews, and interviews, all related in some way to Undercraft. I’ll be doing all this in conjunction with a non-fiction book I’m finishing, called Undercraft: The Creative Practice of The Waking Dream.

If you are interested in creative exercises and experiences that work “Under” your current “Craft” - the craft of screenwriting, filmmaking, painting, fiction writing, but also sculpture, dance, design, and even the creative activities of science and mathematics; really anyone interested in the psychology, philosophy, and practice of creativity - please hit the subscribe button.

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