The Imaginal Doorway: When Creativity Meets the Shadow Realm

On writing, ego dissolution, and the ever-present darkside

Dear Living Dark reader,

Yesterday, I shared a striking passage on Substack Notes from an equally striking interview by

Eleanor Robins

in her Substack newsletter How to Go Home:

I am someone who has ended up spending my whole life, to my mind at least, in service to the imaginal. I feel strongly that when I’m writing and creating, I am reaching into some place just as “real” as consensus reality, and trying to “bring down” or translate something from there…

I think that one “upshot” of understanding things in this way is that the world of form is free to become vastly wider and more subtle. To me, the imaginal realm is an extension or dimension of the world of form, a place just as real as the one in which we apparently walk around and have breakfast and feed the cat. In fact, it’s seriously real. If we’re not careful, the power and potency of that realm and its inhabitants can overwhelm us entirely!

Every artist struggles with this fact in one way or another I think.

—Anonymous interviewee in “My Friend’s Self Dissolved and Stayed That Way for Two Weeks. Here's Our Chat About It,” interview by Eleanor Robins, How to Go Home, October 15, 2024

I’m sure the reason why I would feel motivated to make a Note of that, and why I would then go on to talk further about it here, is obvious in light of my ongoing focus on, and our collective exploration of, the nature and experience of creativity as a felt engagement with a kind of intelligent force or presence, combined with my/our related focus on spiritual awakening. Robins’s interviewee is the anonymous author of Notes on Nothing: The Joy of Being Nobody, published last fall by the newly established As Is Press. The book is the author’s account of an unexpected experience of ego-dissolution that happened to him one morning and lasted for two weeks, with accompanying reflections on both its meaning and its ongoing aftereffects. As you might expect from such a description, Ms. Robins’s interview with this person is particularly relevant for those of us on the spiritual path of interrogating the nature of self and world in search of awakening to or remembering the fundamental reality—or, as the case may prove to be, relative unreality—of both.

Carl Austin Hyatt

, a friend of The Living Dark and an astute seeker/student in these areas (and also a fantastic photographic explorer of the interaction between the human and natural worlds), said the following in a comment on my Substack note:

As frequently happens during the give and take of my public interactions over words, ideas, art, literature, philosophy, religion, cinema, and more, this sparked a cascade of thoughts, beginning with a deep and hearty yes to this understanding of imagination as a door that swings both ways, a portal both for us to enter the imaginal and for the imaginal to enter us, for the visible world to be infused (invaded?) by the invisible even as the invisible accepts the exploratory entrance of the visible.

With my lifelong involuntary and helpless grokking of the resonances between such things and the literature, cinema, and vivid lived experience of supernatural horror—as reflected in my books interrogating the intersection between religion, horror, and creative expression—I can’t help recalling the narration from the opening and closing of Tales from the Darkside, the classic television horror anthology series that partly defined the emotional tenor of my adolescence during the 1980s:

OPENING CREDITS: Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality. But there is, unseen by most, an underworld, a place that is just as real but not as brightly lit. A darkside.

CLOSING CREDITS: The darkside is always there, waiting for us to enter, waiting to enter us.

The makers of the series even illustrate the point visually in the opening sequence: At about the 40-second mark in the video clip above, after a sequence of spooky shots depicting silent pastoral scenes devoid of human presence, and right as the narrator is invoking the “place that is just as real but not as brightly lit,” the picture flips from a gliding shot of tree trunks to a reverse or negative world consisting of darkened trees and landscape, representing the complementary underworld or darkside realm that always accompanies us through this sunlit world of what we believe to be reality.

Reflecting on this, and on the fact that it originally entered my consciousness at the highly impressionable age of 13, I see that it has clearly affected my whole life experience, including both my spiritual unfolding and my trajectory as a writer. Consider, for instance, this paragraph from the first story of mine that I ever saw published, “Teeth,” which appeared first at Thomas Ligotti Online in 1998 and then in the Del Rey horror anthology The Children of Cthulhu in 2002:

The walk back to my house was a preview of hell itself. Although the afternoon sun hung bright and warm in a brilliant sky, and college students lounged everywhere in the refreshing air, chatting at tables and lolling on fresh green patches of landscaped lawn, I saw it all as if through a dark-tinted pane of glass. The light appeared shaded and muted, like night scenes in a movie that were obviously shot in broad daylight with a filter on the lens. I kept noticing movements in the periphery of my vision wherever shadows and dark spots lay: beneath a bench, at the foot of a hickory tree, under the granite lip of a merrily splashing fountain. In each shadow I saw what looked like living forms crouched and waiting, but when I looked directly at them they disappeared. It gradually became apparent to me that I was seeing shadows more clearly than the objects that cast them, and that my inner eye was revealing a lurking presence in them that I had never suspected.

Today when I reread this passage—which I first wrote at age 24, then saw published at age 28, and then revised and republished in a new form at age 39 (in my 2010 fiction and nonfiction collection Dark Awakenings)—I deeply, directly, and vividly recall the emotion of heady, exhilarating, horrifying dark enlightenment that flooded through me each time I watched Tales from the Darkside as a teenager and listened to the narrator intone those words about a dark underworld that always accompanies us and sometimes, even without our seeking or courting it, reveals itself around us and inside us.

But back to that opening narration itself: Even though the words are obviously intended to be ominous—after all, it’s a horror TV show we’re talking about—note how their basic statement and structure can also be read, without any arbitrary stretching or undue eisegesis in search of far-fetched meanings, as describing our real situation and condition in relation to the imaginal realm, and more generally the realm of consciousness or spirit. Even calling that otherworld a “darkside” can be taken as accurate in its invocation of the Yin principle, and the dark feminine, and the Jungian shadow and unconscious, and so on.

Of course, then the final line of the closing credits says: “Until next time, try to enjoy the daylight.” So clearly the ethos and outlook of the series was vested in identifying with ego consciousness, the dream form of the finite, separate self, and milking for all its worth the potential for the realm of imaginal soul and spirit to seem horrifying from that perspective. Which of course is valid as far as it goes. “In fact, it’s seriously real,” says the anonymous author of Notes on Nothing to Eleanor Robins. “If we’re not careful, the power and potency of that realm and its inhabitants can overwhelm us entirely! Every artist struggles with this fact in one way or another I think.”

Would it be too clever or overly cute of me to close by urging you to enjoy the daylight while you can? I guess we’ll see…

Warm regards,