When David Lynch discovered transcendental meditation it changed his life. Now he wants it to change yours

DAVID Lynch strides into the hotel room, his heavy black overcoat billowing like a pirate sail, and cocks a finger at me. "Coffee?" he asks with the gleeful intonation of one who expects an affirmative reply and will be real glad to hear it. He is a great advocate of coffee and drinks around 20 cups a day. This is surprising given his calm demeanour, though no doubt there is a rich brew of ideas percolating perpetually inside his mind.

Lynch, the director of art cinema milestones including Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, and creator of the television series Twin Peaks, is in Scotland to talk about transcendental meditation; he has practised it for much of his adult life and says it has helped him make his films.

Dressed in a dark suit and tie, a sprig of lucky heather in his jacket pocket, he has an air of weighty paternalism mixed with callow charm, as if he were, simultaneously, a retired president on a global speaking tour and a youngster excited to be away at summer camp. At 61, his Mount Rushmore face is topped by a sheer quiff that appears to have been dug out of a Welsh mine and beaten into shape by a guild of silversmiths fixated on Elvis. His eyes twinkle with the kindness and mischief of a 10-year-old boy; that's the age he says he feels inside.

We are meeting in Edinburgh. The day before, Lynch visited Glasgow for the first time. "I felt there was a real good energy," he says in his hypnotic, nasal voice. "It was like an art feeling. There was a creative energy. I was in the drama and music school and I felt really good in that place."

Lynch particularly appreciated the solid architecture of Glasgow and its industrial heritage. He grew up during the 1950s in America's rural northwest - "pretty close to heaven" - which meant the sound and fury of big cities were unknown to him; as a result he has come to fetishise furnaces, heavy machinery and thrumming electrical power.

"I love industry and shipbuilding but now it's gone," he says. "I came to the north of England on a photographic trip in the 1990s and they were destroying one smokestack a week. The old factories were going and that was a sadness to me." He is a great fan, too, of fire and feels some regret about being away from his home in LA while California is burning. "I hope someone is filming it," he says, wistfully.

On a cold night in late October, Lynch appeared at the Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT), the first half of a double-bill that also featured a performance by his friend and colleague Donovan, the Scottish singer-songwriter of Mellow Yellow fame.

Outside the cinema, someone had chalked the shape of a fallen body on the pavement. If Lynch saw that, it may have taken him back to Philadelphia, the city to which he moved in 1965, aged 19, to attend art school. He and his first wife Peggy, from whom he split in 1974, lived in a bad neighbourhood and kept a sword beneath the bed for protection. One day a kid was murdered just down the street and the chalk outline made by police forensics remained on the pavement for almost a week, a visible reminder of the violence and horror Lynch sensed around him at all times; this dread has seeped into his films like blood into a shroud.

"Philadelphia was my biggest influence," he says now. "It was unbelievable. Such a contrast to what I had known before." One night he visited the morgue across the street, curious to see the bodies. "That was a huge experience," he tells me, but won't elaborate.

Although fascinating, Lynch is in some ways a frustrating interviewee, reticent and reluctant to go into detail. I ask him 53 questions in an hour, which is way more than average. "David isn't very articulate," his colleague Mario Orsatti told me. "He's an artist, so putting things into words isn't what he does best." He shakes with nerves before he goes on stage to talk.

This lack of fluency and specificity, this antagonism towards words, is entirely in keeping with most of the films Lynch has made in the last decade; with the exception of The Straight Story they have abandoned linear narratives in favour of atmosphere and suggestion. They are films to be felt rather than followed, and his conversation is the same.

At the GFT, he was articulate enough, taking questions for an hour from an audience of around 400. The first seemed hostile, the actor Tam Dean Burn demanding that Lynch justify his recent trip to "the apartheid state of Israel", a question he didn't quite answer, but the rest were respectful.

Lynch didn't reveal much about his life beyond a couple of interesting details; we learned that he watches Billy Wilder's The Apartment every New Year's Eve.

Mostly, the audience seemed keen to hear about meditation and other esoterica. "I was wondering," asked one young woman, "whether you had any thoughts about the relationship between dream imagery and the creative dream consciousness on the one hand, and ordinary waking life on the other?" You can bet Eli Roth doesn't get asked that stuff.

Lynch talked at length and with evangelistic passion about meditation, and how much it has helped children in certain American schools that had previously been blighted by stress, violence, drug abuse and suicide. Two years ago he formed The David Lynch Foundation For Consciousness-based Education And World Peace with the aim of funding the teaching of transcendental meditation in schools. One of the reasons he has come to Scotland is to announce the establishment, probably in Edinburgh, of a new university based on the technique and named after Donovan.

As Lynch spoke in the GFT, he raised his hands near his face and moved his fingers around. By chance, a spotlight projected the shadow of his right hand on to a white wall; when he pinched his thumb and index finger together, a rabbit's head appeared and seemed to waggle its ears.

Someone wanted to know why his films are so dark if he is full of bliss. "I get asked that a lot," he replied. "All great stories have conflict and contrasts - highs and lows, darkness and light, all kind of torment and suffering. But the artist doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand suffering. And when you experience this transcendent level, understanding grows."

IN Edinburgh, Lynch tells me that he began meditating during the summer of 1973. He meditates for 20 minutes every morning and again in the afternoon. His sister got him into it. He was suspicious at first. "I thought it was a total waste of time. People sitting with their eyes closed doing nothing? I just wanted to work and work and work."

He was in the middle of making Eraserhead, his first feature. He had begun preparing for the film in 1971 and it wasn't released until 1976. It was a slog. Lynch had no money but didn't want a regular job because that would prevent him from making the film, so he began a paper round. There he was, a 27-year-old husband and father, doing a schoolboy job, and obsessed with completing a film which had absolutely no commercial prospects. "I looked inside one day and I'm hollow," he recalls. "There was no real inner happiness. I could feel it."

Meditation seemed like it might make him happier. In his book, Catching The Big Fish, Lynch describes the anger and depression from which he suffered at that time as the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit Of Negativity. He says he was a fool, an angry man who fought with his wife, the person he was supposed to love. Beyond "my situation in life" he's reluctant to explain what was making him so angry, though later, when we talk about the bohemian existence that was his ideal, it's clear that feeling trapped by marriage and fatherhood was at least one element.

"The art life means you don't get married, you don't have children, you live in total freedom, the number one thing is your work," he says. "Art life is you smoke cigarettes, drink a lot of coffee and work. You have girls but they must stay far, far away mostly."

He laughs. "That didn't work out."

Lynch meditated for the first time at the Transcendental Meditation Centre in Los Angeles and remembers that it was like being in a lift when the cable is cut. He plummeted through several levels of intellect and splashed down into "the ocean of pure consciousness" - the level from which he says all creativity, happiness and intuition emerges.

Lynch believes that all humanity is connected at this deep level of the mind and agrees when I suggest that this is why he is so good at disturbing audiences with his films; he is able to provoke unease and fear because his frequent meditation gives him access to a primal part of himself and all of us. With meditation came success. Despite, or perhaps because of, the shuddery weirdness of its subject, a man becoming the reluctant father to a mutant baby, Eraserhead was a cult hit. Lynch could easily have spent his days as an entirely marginal figure but instead found he was in demand. He had a great success with The Elephant Man, George Lucas asked him to direct Return Of The Jedi (sadly, he declined) and Dino De Laurentiis asked him to direct Dune (sadly, he agreed).

He has never been career-minded, though. Over the years, Lynch has established himself as a film-maker who puts the contents of his head on screen and hopes, though not too hard, that people will be willing to pay to see what's been going on in there. The trend in Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006) has been a growing abstraction and a concern with shifting identities; the latter, he says, is inspired by living in the unreal zone of Hollywood.

Lynch's recent work has been criticised for being incoherent but he says that's missing the point. If you watch his films in expectation of a beginning, middle and end then you will be frustrated, even annoyed.

Lynch started as a painter, and continues to work in that medium, and it is perhaps more useful to consider his films as you would paintings. He mentioned at the GFT that Francis Bacon was a great hero and influence, so I ask about Bacon's famous 1944 triptych, Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion (which, by the way, is worth looking at as a possible inspiration for the look of the baby in Eraserhead).

Bacon's masterpiece - like, say, Mulholland Drive - has characters and seems to contain some sort of narrative, but it's not entirely clear what that is. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," Lynch smiles, delighted by the comparison. "If you had those paintings on the wall and 100 people came in and you said, Tell me the story that you get from that triptych,' you'd get 100 different stories. But there could be some beautiful stories."

There also seems to be a common mood between Bacon's paintings and Lynch's films. "Sure," he agrees. "A kind of lonely despair and sickness." He laughs. "Yeah."

We are almost out of time. There are so many things still to talk about, but it's impossible to guess what Lynch would discuss. His erotic photographs of fetish shoes? The time he visited Fellini on his death-bed? Why he keeps a friend's uterus in a bottle at home? Flustered, I say something dumb - is it true that he carries a rubber ear around with him?

"What? No, I never carried that around. People send me ears sometimes. I guess people think since Blue Velvet that I would be happy to get an ear, but it's not really true."

He looks a little perplexed and wants to clarify something. "They don't send me real ears."

Lynch has to go. He leaves behind an empty mug, a bewildered journalist and his customary detritus: a whole bunch of unanswered questions.