A Search for the Heroic in Lovecraftian Fiction, Part One Novelist Jonathan Ryan recently wrote an essay, “Meaning to the Madness,” that was largely devoted to exploring the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft. Teeming Brain head honcho Matt Cardin wrote a response. There was then a Teeming Brain podcast (the first ever) about the whole…
Category: Columns
Horror for the Holidays: Santa, Krampus, and the Dark Divine
[EDITOR’S NOTE: For a kind of companion piece to this one, see Ryan’s “Have a Very Scary Christmas!” over at Dreamstudies.org.] This Christmas Eve as you lay the children down to sleep and lock the doors, you will have the chance once again to notice that feeling of holiday vulnerability creeping on up. You may…
Welcome to the Teem: Ryan Hurd
We’re extremely pleased to announce the addition of Ryan Hurd to our writing teem. He will contribute a recurring column titled “Visions, Dreams, and Visitations.” As indicated by such a title, Ryan is an expert on dreams and consciousness. He is founder of DreamStudies.org, a website dedicated to sleep, dreams, and consciousness research. He is…
Awakening the Esoteric Spirit: Mapping the Occult City
I am fresh from attending the recent American Academy of Religions pre-conference event Mapping the Occult City: Magic & Esotericism in the Urban Utopia, hosted by Phoenix Rising Digital Academy and DePaul University. Convened by Dr. Jason Winslade, Â the day-long event explored the interaction of the city as entity, idea, and cultural engine with esoteric…
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…
Legacy’s End: The Rise and Fall of the UCLA Parapsychology Lab
Many people are curious about the real story of UCLA’s former parapsychology lab (not a department!), which existed from about 1967 through 1978. In the early 1970s I personally conducted research there along two fronts. One front was in the lab itself, where I conducted psi training research groups from 1971 through 1980. The other…
Welcome to the Teem: Dr. Barry Taff
We’re happy to announce the debut of a new column titled “Aliens Above, Ghosts Below” by parapsychology pioneer Dr. Barry Taff. Dr. Taff’s presence here is particularly appropriate and compelling given The Teeming Brain’s intertwined focuses on the cultural, artistic, and philosophical experiences and meanings of horror, consciousness, creativity, and the paranormal. For it was…
Skeptics, Believers, and the Purposes of Parapsychology: Thoughts on Two Experiments in Unseen Realities
I’m afraid there is something missing in our cultural discussion of psi phenomena. With both sides (skeptics and the pro-psi crowd) mired in a battle of believers, and with scientific exploration devolving into polemical argumentation, the fact that parapsychology is an exploration of human potential and the boundaries of experience receives frequent lip service but…
To Suffer This World or Illuminate Another? On the Meanings and Uses of Horror
In his interesting book-length meditation, Danse Macabre (1981), Stephen King posited the following theory regarding the intrinsic and perennial appeal of Horror: Why do you want to make up horrible things when there is so much real horror in the world? The answer seems to be that we make up horrors to help us cope…
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?