The quoted text below appears in the 2002 book Demons of the Modern World by Malcolm McGrath, who was a doctoral candidate in political philosophy at Oxford University when he wrote it. The publisher’s marketing copy lays out the book’s thrust:
This fascinating discussion of modern demonology focuses on our ability to differentiate the physical world, with its mechanical laws, from the inherently less predictable psychological realm of thoughts and beliefs. McGrath points out that this ability was a hard-won historical development, and today must be learned in childhood through education. Because of this historical background and our rich fantasy life in childhood, each of us unconsciously suspects, or fears, that supernatural forces may break through the borders of our everyday commonsense order at any time. Indeed, at times of personal stress or societal crisis, the modern boundaries between fantasy and reality begin to slip, and then a magical world of demons and other phantasms can come flooding back into our disenchanted reality.
Or as McGrath himself says:
[T]he illusion of a world of demons lurking behind our day to day reality is built right into the structure of modern western culture. . . .
In the demonic-world illusion, this hidden reality that is hiding behind our everyday reality is the world of magic and nonhuman personalities. This is the world the way children and nonmodern cultures see it. It is a way of seeing the world that has been relegated to the world of fantasy by adult culture in the modern West. However, all modern Western adults have realistic memories of this world, and it is recorded over and over again in ancient mythology.
The trick of the demonic-world illusion is to get people to intellectually shift the location of the world of magic and nonhuman personalities from the realm of fantasy to some kind of hidden space in the real world, thus making our everyday reality seem like an outer layer on a deeper and more complex reality in which the symbolic and mechanical processes of the universe are intertwined. It is like getting us to believe that our everyday world is in fact nothing more than a two-dimensional Hollywood movie town hiding a completely different types of reality.
Malcolm McGrath, Demons of the Modern World (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2002), 187-188.
Notably, at least in terms of my personal constellation of interests (and also of yours, I assume, since you’ve chosen to read a blog post with this particular title), McGrath explicitly links these matters to the function and appeal of horror fiction:
This illusion, that the world of magic and nonhuman personalities actually exists hidden in some imperceptible corner of our daily reality, forms the basis of modern horror stories. . . . [R]egardless of how the illusion is produced, it is the production of this illusion that is the goal of the horror story, and the structure of the horror story is organized around this goal.
Demons of the Modern World, 188.
The above passages appear in Chapter 8, titled “The Illusion of a World of Demons.” Later, in Chapter 10, titled “Dreams as Windows on the World of the Demonic,” McGrath expands on the role of horror fiction in this schema when he applies his interpretive lens to the intertwined subjects of horror stories and dreams to elicit a profound connection between the two:
Within two months of [his] dream [of an ancient castle with a staircase and a “gigantic hand in armor”] in 1764, Horace Walpole had completed The Castle of Otranto, widely considered the first work of modern horror fiction. Thus it was that modern horror fiction began with a dream. From that time to the present, dreams and nightmares have continued to play an important role in horror fantasy, both as a source of inspiration and as a key element in the plot of numerous stories [including Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula, all of which were at least partly inspired by vivid dreams their authors experienced]. . . .
[D]reams have often been portrayed as a window on an alternative reality, simply because when we dream it often feels like we actually enter some kind of other reality. This feeling often seems quite real. . . . As a result, if one were willing to entertain the possibility that hiding behind our everyday reality there was some kind of demonic antireality, it would be easy to imagine that the strange creatures we saw in our dreams were part of that antireality. The idea that dreams are a window on an alternative universe is as old as human history. . . .
[T]here are two important reasons why dreams have come to play the role as windows on the hidden world of demons in the modern horror story. On the one hand, since the beginning of human culture, people have commonly seen their dreams as means of communicating with hidden worlds of demons, gods, and fairies. On the other hand, in a modern Western cultural milieu, when the possibility of communicating with such magical beings is no longer taken seriously, dreams take on an even more focused and exclusive role as windows on the world of the demonic. There is a kind of intuitive plausibility to the idea of communicating with demons in dreams that might not be taken seriously if it were presented as taking place in waking thought. This would explain why, in so many modern horror stories such as Dracula, the first encounters with demons take place in dreams. To the modern reader, accustomed to seeing the waking world as completely disenchanted, meeting a demon in a dream seems somehow more plausible.
Demons of the Modern World, 207, 212.