“The Next Big Thing” is a meme that asks authors to answer ten questions about their next project, after which they tag five additional authors to do the same a week later. Last week I was tagged in this regard by my friends, fellow authors, and fellow Teeming Brain writers Stuart Young and T. E….
Author: Matt Cardin
Teeming Brain founder and editor Matt Cardin is the author of DARK AWAKENINGS, DIVINATIONS OF THE DEEP, A COURSE IN DEMONIC CREATIVITY: A WRITER'S GUIDE TO THE INNER GENIUS, and TO ROUSE LEVIATHAN. He is also the editor of BORN TO FEAR: INTERVIEWS WITH THOMAS LIGOTTI and the academic encyclopedias MUMMIES AROUND THE WORLD; GHOSTS, SPIRITS, AND PSYCHICS: THE PARANORMAL FROM ALCHEMY TO ZOMBIES; and HORROR LITERATURE THROUGH HISTORY.
Creativity, psi, and synchronicity: “The demon knows more than you know”
The link between creativity and the paranormal or supernatural is an old and enduring one, beginning with ancient ideas about the muse, daemon, and genius, which connected the inner world of artists and poets to the realm of the divine. For a detailed laying-out of this point, see especially chapters one and two of my…
To Cleanse the Doors of Conception: Psychic Dreams, Scientific Monsters, and Transcendent Realities
Dream researcher, Teeming Brain friend, and future Teeming Brain contributor Ryan Hurd — who has spoken about dreams, consciousness, sleep paralysis, and related matters at Stanford, Yale, UC Berkeley, the Rhine Center, and elsewhere — recently shared an account of an apparently precognitive dream that he personally experienced. As I was reading through it, in…
Our “cognitive surplus” is temporary, just like the fossil fuels that power it
In his 2010 book Cognitive Surplus, released in hardcover with the subtitle “Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age” and in paperback with the subtitle “How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators,” Clay Shirky expanded his reputation as everybody’s favorite digital guru by arguing that “new digital technology” — primarily of the social media sort —…
Elizabeth Gilbert on the inner creative relationship: “There’s a contract between you and the mystery”
Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2009 TED talk about creativity as a relationship between a person and his or her genius has now entered the lore of contemporary digital media culture as a singularly popular and significant framing of the central creative question by a celebrity author. Gilbert used her TED time to talk about the damage caused…
Anomalies, Materialism, and the Liberating Death of Ufology
Would the death of ufology as a materialist scientific endeavor actually constitute the liberation of an ancient and persistent anomalous human experience from an exceptionally restrictive cultural straitjacket?
Christians and cosmic horror: Linked by Lovecraft?
In a fascinating October 30 article published at Hieropraxis — a website about Christian apologetics and, more broadly, “literature and faith, truth and beauty” — creative writing teacher Garret Johnson, who works for both the University of Houston and Houston Baptist University, talks about the deep value of Lovecraftian cosmic horror for Christians. Specifically, he…
Fuseli, Sleep Paralysis, and Horror’s Master Image
Just in time for the Halloween holiday, Ryan Hurd has published a horror-fied guest post by me at Dream Studies, his thoroughly excellent Website about dream science, nightmares, and related altered states of consciousness. The article describes my long-in-coming recognition about a very famous painting (you know the one; see above) and the way it…
Silence, solitude, and self-discovery in an age of mass distraction
“[T]he internet seizes our attention only to scatter it. We are immersed because there’s a constant barrage of stimuli coming at us and we seem to be very much seduced by that kind of constantly changing patterns of visual and auditorial stimuli. When we become immersed in our gadgets, we are immersed in a series…
Cosmic Horror, Sacred Terror, and the Nightside Transformation of Consciousness
What’s this? A discussion of current horror cinema that contrasts H. P. Lovecraft’s worldview of cosmic horror, pessimism, and despair with Arthur Machen’s worldview of redemptive sacred terror? And it’s published by — wait for it — Christianity Today magazine? The stars, it seems, are aligning. One is rife with despair, the other clings to…