Dear Living Dark reader,

The following essay appears in my 2022 book What the Daemon Said: Essays on Horror Fiction, Film, and Philosophy. I am reprinting it here, with a few multimedia enhancements specifically added for this online version, because I think its topic, theme, and focus—which uses my spiritually and psychologically traumatic/transformative experiences of sleep paralysis in the 1990s as a springboard to broader reflections on the nature of creativity and reality—will be of distinct...