Philip K. Dick
was a writer of science fiction and it is fair to say that I have read the bulk
of his oeuvre. This piece is curiousier
yet and please read it. He is one of a
fair number of writers who have entertained and also inspired me throughout my life. Their kind is fading now as death marches
on. I feel that I have lost many old
close friends who poured their deepest hopes and fears into me.
I have made
significant notes inside the text here so go for it. Enjoy!
A
Life of Philip K. Dick: The Man Who Remembered the Future
December 27, 2013 By davidjones
By ANTHONY PEAKE
This year saw the 30th anniversary
of the death of one of the most influential writers of all time, the iconic
Philip K. Dick. Although virtually unknown outside of science fiction circles,
during his lifetime Dick’s intriguing philosophy on the nature of reality
has become a staple of the modern Hollywood movie. Huge blockbusters such
as Total Recall, Minority Report,
The Adjustment Bureau, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly and Paycheck were loosely based
directly on his novels or short stories, and movies such as The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Memento, The Matrix, The
Truman Show and Inception all
owe a huge debt to his vision.
One of the most
intriguing themes of Dick’s writing was the concept of the “precog,” a
person who could “see” the future before it happened. In 1954 Phil
introduced the concept of precognition in his novel The World Jones Made. In this novel
the eponymous anti-hero Floyd Jones can see exactly one year into the future.
From then on “precogs” occur regularly in his novels and short stories, most notably
in his 1956 short story The
Minority Report, his 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip, The
Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritchand many others.
[ It has been my own Geas to see the future as it unfolds greyly
and to rarely if ever be totally surprised.
Sorry folks, not even 9/11. It is
an interesting phenomenon and includes the shape of one’s own future. It is
also annoying since one is not necessarily allowed to take advantage. Do not fear though. The future is golden for this generation and
forever more. Arclein ]
What was it that made
Philip K. Dick interested in precognition? It had not been a particular
theme within classical science fiction nor had it been part of the books that
the young Philip read during his childhood years and early teens. The
answer may lie in one simple fact: Philip
K. Dick himself was a “precog.” He was not writing fiction but heavily
disguised autobiography. Let us review the evidence.
Like many of his
schoolmates, Phil was expected to attend the University of California in his
hometown of Berkeley. But in order to do so he needed to reach the entrance
grades required. This possibility started to fade rapidly when, during a
crucial physics test, Phil couldn’t remember the key principle behind the
displacement of water. As eight of the ten questions involved this principle,
he was clearly in trouble. And then it happened: a voice clearly and
precisely explained to the surprised young man the scientific principles he so
desperately needed to understand. All Phil had to do was write down the
words in his head. Phil received an ‘A’ grade.
Although this “voice”
effectively disappeared for many years, Phil continued to sense there was a
part of him that was alien in some way. Throughout the 1950s the voice remained
silent and then, under somewhat prosaic circumstances, it re-appeared. In an
interview with his friend Greg Rickman, recorded in October 1981, Phil
described how he had been watching a TV programme about the Galapagos turtles.
The fight for survival of one particular female turtle had really upset him.
After laying her eggs she had turned in the wrong direction and instead of
going towards the sea she crawled inland. Soon the heat had brought about
extreme dehydration. She was dying. As she began to fade her legs were still
seen to be moving. The film had been edited to give the impression that the
dying turtle was imagining she was back in the ocean. He went to bed with this
tragic image in his mind. He woke up in the night to hear a voice. In careful and deliberate terms the entity
explained to Phil that the turtle actually believed she was in the water:
I was just terribly
amazed and dumbfounded to hear that voice again. It wasn’t my own voice because
one of the sentences the voice said was “And
she shall see the sea” and I would not use the two words “see” and “sea” in
the same sentence. It tends to do that, use word choices I don’t use. One time
it used the expression “a very poisonous poison” which I would not use.1
It is clear Phil
recognised the voice as being the same entity that had helped him in his
physics exam all those years before. It was back. He was to continue hearing
this entity for many years, but only as a faint background whisper. In another
1981 interview he stated:
I only hear the voice
of the spirit when I am falling asleep or waking up.
I have to be very receptive to hear it. It’s extremely faint. It sounds as
though it is coming from a million miles away.2
The “Voice” Returns
In February and March
1974 the voice was to reappear and stay with him. It all started quite
innocently. Phil had been in considerable pain after having a wisdom tooth
pulled out. His wife, Tessa, called the dentist who prescribed painkillers. As
Tessa did not want to leave her husband alone in such a state of agitation she
asked if somebody could deliver the prescription to their house in Fullerton.
Half an hour later the doorbell rang and Phil dashed to the door. On opening it
he saw a young woman clutching the much-needed painkillers. Phil stood back
stunned. Around the young woman’s neck was a necklace with a fish pendant. Phil
recognised this as a symbol of something deep within himself. He asked her what
it was and she explained it was a sign used by the early Christians as a code
to show their secret beliefs to fellow Christians.
Dick later reported
this was the first time he experienced the pink light, the same light so
central to the Beatles incident (described below). He said a beam of this light
shot out of the pendant and entered his brain. This light opened up a part of
his brain that had long been asleep. He described it in
this way:
I suddenly experienced
what I later learned is called anamnesis – a Greek word meaning, literally, “loss of forgetfulness.” I remembered
who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all
came back to me.3
As we have already
mentioned, up until March 1974 what Dick had called “the voice” manifested
itself on rare occasions such as the incident during the school exam. But after
Phil’s “anamnesis” his hidden partner was to become very active in his life. It
decided that Phil had become far too slovenly in his personal appearance. He
was made to go out and buy a pair of nasal hair-clippers and it suggested he
trim his beard. The entity even had Phil go shopping for new trendy clothes.
It was also concerned
about the health of the shared body. It had Phil go through his drugs cabinet
and forced him to throw out those medications that were proving problematical
to his health. It discovered that wine was too acidic for his sensitive stomach
and suggested he change to drinking beer. This being had many skills that Phil
sadly lacked, such as business acumen. It realized he had made quite a mess of
his tax matters and within weeks the entity sorted this out.
It also had Phil sack
his agent after it read over his royalty statements and discovered massive
irregularities.
All of these were
minor interventions compared to its apogee, the saving of Phil’s son’s life.
Phil describes how one morning he was lying in a semi-sleep state when he heard
the voice announce that his recently born son, Christopher, had a potentially
fatal birth defect and that urgent medical attention was needed. Indeed the
voice was quite precise when it stated: “Your son has an undiagnosed right
inguinal hernia. The hydrocele has burst, and it has descended into the scrotal
sac. He requires immediate attention, or will soon die.” Phil told various
versions of this story, including one involving him listening to the Beatles
and the lyrics of “Strawberry Fields” were changed to give the instruction.
Tessa, acting on her husband’s frantic instructions, took Christopher to the
family doctor and it was, indeed, confirmed that Christopher had exactly the
problem the “voice” had described and surgery was needed.
Dick’s “Homoplasmate”
What was the source of
this “voice” and how did it have information unknown to Phil? Phil was
to conclude that it was an immortal part of himself, something he called a
“plasmate.” He argued this entity had bonded with him and in doing so had taken
human form, something Phil termed a “homoplasmate.” He was later to describe
how his mind had been invaded by a “transcendentally rational mind, as if I
had been insane all my life and had suddenly become sane.” He explained
that:
…mental anguish was
simply removed from me as if by divine fiat… some transcendental divine power
which was not evil, but benign intervened to restore my mind and heal my body
and give me a sense of the beauty, the joy, the sanity of the world.
This being, set free
from its shackles by Phil’s “anamneses,” was able to use its powers to help
Phil precognise the future. Indeed, Phil realised this being had been the
source of a series of peculiar precognitive incidents that had taken place
throughout his life.
For example, in his
1974 novel Flow My Tears the
Policeman Said, Phil has a sequence in which one of his characters,
Felix Buckman, is distraught at the death of his twin sister, Alys. He finds
himself in an all-night gas station and there he meets up with a black
stranger. Buckman and the black man start up a conversation. In the summer of
1978 Phil, uncharacteristically, decided to go out late at night to post a
letter. In the darkness he noticed a man loitering by a parked car. Phil posted
his letter and on the way back the man was still there. In a second uncharacteristic
impulse Phil walked over to the man and asked if anything was the matter. The
man replied that he was out of gas and he had no money with him. Much to his
surprise Phil found himself digging into his pocket and giving the man some
cash. The man asked for Phil’s address and said that he would return later and
pay him back. As Phil entered his apartment he realised that the money would be
of no use to his new friend. There were no gas stations within walking
distance. Phil went back out, found the man, and offered to drive him to the
nearest all-night gas station. As he stood watching the man fill up his metal
gas can he had an alarming sensation of a déjà vu-like recognition:
Suddenly I realised
that this was the scene in my novel – the novel written eight years
before. The all-night gas station was exactly as I had envisioned it in my
inner eye when I wrote the scene – the glaring white light, the pump
jockey – and now I saw something which I had not seen before. The stranger
who I was helping was black.4
Phil drove the black
man back to his car, they shook hands and Phil never saw him again. He finishes
off his description of this event with a slightly chilling comment:
I was terribly shaken
up by this experience. I had literally lived out a scene completely as it had
appeared in my novel…. What could explain all this?5
Uncanny Precognition
In early 1974 Phil
started a long-term correspondence with a graduate student called Gloria Bush.
As time went on Phil described to Gloria some of his deepest thoughts,
including his fascination regarding his own precognitive abilities. In a letter
dated 9 May of that year he described to Gloria a particularly strange
recurring dream he experienced in November 1971. In the dreams he always saw
what looked like a Mexican city with “square arrangements of streets and yellow
cabs.” The yellow cabs suggested to Phil a location in the USA rather than
Mexico or Latin America. At the time of these dreams he was living in Marin
County, north of San Francisco. In 1974 he was living in Fullerton, a southern
suburb of Los Angeles. Right next to Fullerton is a place called Placentia
which is a strongly Hispanic area. Phil explains to Claudia that he was
convinced this was the place he saw in these dreams.6
But Phil’s dreams in
1975 took a turn to the macabre. On 25 February he wrote a letter to Bush that
was very different from those he had sent before. In a fascinating postscript
to an otherwise standard letter, he mentions “the entity” again. It had clearly
been manifesting itself within his life at that time. How regularly and to what
intensity we cannot say as we have no other source other than this letter.
However, it is clear Phil wanted to bring things to a head. He told Claudia:
I was up to 5 a.m. on
this last night. I did something I never did before; I commanded the entity to
show itself to me – the entity which has been guiding me internally since
March. A sort of dream-like period passed, then, of hypnogogic images of
underwater cities, very nice, and then a stark single horrifying scene, inert
but not still; a man lay dead, on his face, in a living room between the coffee
table and the couch.7
On 9 May 1974 he wrote
another typewritten letter to Claudia stating that he felt “scared.” He didn’t
elaborate on this comment but at the bottom of the letter is a handwritten note
that states the following: “p.s. What scares me most, Claudia, is that I can
often recall the future.”
Almost exactly seven
years later Phil had failed to answer a series of phone calls to his
condominium. A group of neighbours then found his front door open. One witness,
Mary Wilson, entered the condo and described how she initially thought nobody
was home, but then she spotted Phil’s feet sticking out from behind a coffee
table. She immediately asked her mother to phone Phil’s close friend,
science-fiction writer Tim Powers. Powers jumped on his motorcycle to see what
he could do to help. In
his introduction to The Selected
Letters of Philip K Dick Volume Four Powers describes what happened
next:
As I was putting the
key in the ignition of my motorcycle I heard the sirens of the paramedics howl
past me down Main Street. When I got to Phil’s place the paramedics and Mary
Wilson were already there and the paramedic had lifted him from between the
coffee table and the couch and carried him to his bed, and Mary and I answered
a few hasty medical questions about him before they got him into a stretcher
and carried him downstairs to the ambulance.8
Phil’s February 1975
dream had come true in stunning detail. He had seen the circumstances of his
own death.
Who, or what, was the
“entity” that seemed to share Phil’s life and know his future? Surprisingly
enough Phil believed this being to be a version of himself that existed
outside of time; a being that could observe the whole of Phil’s life from a
position of timelessness. Phil believed that during his dreams, in his
semi-waking states and during certain times of heightened awareness, this
timeless part of himself could communicate and use its foreknowledge to assist
him.
[ this is an excellent description of the soul as it exists
outside the physical and communicates in the state of luminous dreaming. His experience conforms wonderfully with my
own developing conjectures. - arclein ]
In October 1977 Phil
made a very curious statement during a radio interview at the Berkeley radio
station KPFA FM. He described an incident that took place in 1951:
Back at the time I was
starting to write science fiction, I was asleep one night and I woke up and
there was a figure standing at the edge of the bed, looking down at me. I
grunted in amazement and all of a sudden my wife woke up and started screaming
because she could see it too. She started screaming, but I recognised it and
I started reassuring her, saying that it was me that was there and not to
be afraid. Within the last two years – let’s say that was in 1951 – I’ve
dreamed almost every night that I was back in that house, and I have a strong
feeling that back then in 1951 or ’52 that I saw my future self, who had
somehow, in some way we don’t understand – I wouldn’t call it occult – passed
backward during one of my dreams now of that house, going back there and seeing
myself again. So there really are some strange things…9
If the figure at the
end of the bed was a future version of Phil then that version would have
foreknowledge of all Phil’s life-experiences between 1951 and 1977. Indeed, if
Phil’s interpretation can be taken at face value, we have here evidence that in
some way his mind from the mid-1970s was manifesting itself back within its own
past.
[ this gives us an excellent explanation for the phenomena of
seeing a spirit on awakening that has been so often reported – arclein ]
Vertical Vs.
“Orthogonal Time”
But Phil was not
simply happy with accepting this may be the case, he wanted to create a model
to explain such a belief. Immediately after the strange events of February and
March 1974, or simply 2-3-74 as he termed them, Phil started to keep a journal.
Initially in hand-written form and later as page after page of typewritten
sheets with diagrams and side notes, this became known as his Exegesis. In effect this was Phil’s
attempt to understand the source and meaning of the visions and revelations
that he continued to receive until his death in March 1983.
We are fortunate that
in November 2011 a single volume containing all the main sections of this huge
work was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Running to 976 pages this is a
fascinating read and in it one can discover Phil’s own understanding of how a
part of him could see the future. His solution was a radical re-interpretation
of time itself – something Phil called “orthogonal time.”
He proposes there are
two variations of time, both of which exist at right angles to each other. We
are usually only aware of “Vertical Time,” but there is another which runs at
right angles to our space-time. He calls this “Orthogonal Time.” If we could
perceive both times simultaneously it would look cubical, hence his term cubic time. He proposed that events
are actually located within this cubic time. As such the idea of cause and
effect cannot be applied within this model. Causality can run in reverse or act
simultaneously with an event in the past or the future. In other words within
orthogonal time all past and future states exist at this moment. In the whole
of the Exegesis Phil
makes one passing reference to a physicist by the name of Herman Minkowski, the
teacher of the much more famous Albert Einstein. With reference to his own
precognitions, Phil wrote:
This is a disturbing
new view but oddly enough it coincides with my dream experiences, my
precognition of events moving this way from the future; I feel them inexorably
approaching, not generated from the present, but somehow already there but not
yet visible. If they are somehow “there” already, and we encounter them
successively (the Minkowski block universe; events are all already there but we
have to encounter them successively), then this view might be a correct view of
time and causality.10
Phil suggested that
the basic premise of his short story Adjustment Team – that there exists a way in which the past
can be “adjusted” to change the present – may be another of his fictionalised
accounts of something that really takes place.11
[ this may end up providing an inspired framework for actual
time travel itself – arclein – my problem there is that I can imagine popping a
worm hole back in time but that takes the present back with it and change
becomes meaningless. A second time
vector allows a natural work around this conceptualization. – arclein ]
Phil believed that
part of us exists within orthogonal time and this alternate-consciousness can,
under certain circumstances, communicate with the every-day self that perceives
only linear time. This was the source of “the voice” and VALIS (Vast Active
Living Intelligence System, Dick’s gnostic vision of one aspect of God). This
is how, in dreams, Phil found himself back in his own past observing an earlier
version of himself. In this way “the voice” was his own voice speaking from his
own future. This entity created his plot-lines using material from his own
future. Was this how the meeting with the black man at the gas station ended up
in A Scanner Darkly? All
information from all parts of our life is readily available to a mind open to
receive it. Phil suggested in a letter to his friend Patricia Warrick, written
in September 1981, that:
The universe is an
information retrieval system; which is to say, everything that has ever
happened, ever been, each arrangement and detail – all are stored in the
present moment as information; what we lack is the access or entry mechanism to
this stored information… where the past of each object – all its prior
manifestations along the Form axis – this is all stored in the present object
and can be retrieved.12
This is again
astounding evidence that Phil seemed to be accessing information from some form
of infinite data-field. It is very much in keeping with the work of modern-day
researchers such as Ervin Laszlo and Bernard Haisch, both of whom suggest this
“library” is, in fact, something known as the Zero-Point Field.13
Is this the answer to
the mystery of Phil’s precognitions? It certainly makes sense. The future and
the past are simply illusions. Phillip K. Dick and every being that reads
this article consist of two independent consciousnesses. One lives in linear
time and the other in orthogonal time. And in this way we may all be immortal.
After all, the transition between life and death takes place in linear, not
orthogonal, time.
[ this is at least providing us a new language even if it is not
particularly appropriate. Arclein ]
In his novel Ubik Phil created a concept
known as “Half Life.” This is a timeless place, hovering between life and
death. Tibetan Buddhists call this the “Bardo State.” Is this from where Phil’s
eternal mind communicated with him? To paraphrase the title of one of his most
intriguing books, could it be we all exist in a place where “Time is Out of
Joint”?
For more on the above,
read Anthony Peake’s book The Man
Who Remembered the Future: A Life of Philip K. Dick.
Footnotes
1. Gregg
Rickman, Philip K. Dick: The Last
Testament, Fragments West, 1985, 23
2. John
Boonstra, Horselover Fat and The
New Messiah, Hartford Advocate, 22 April 1981, reproduced inPKD Otako #06, 22
3. ‘How to Build a
Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later’, published as an introduction
to I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon,
Doubleday, New York, 1985
4. Lawrence Sutin
(editor), The Shifting Realities
of Philip K. Dick, Vintage, 1995, 268
5. Ibid., 269
6. The Selected Letters of Philip K Dick, 1974,
Underwood-Miller, 1991, 101
7. Philip K. Dick,
Letter to Claudia Krenz, 25 February 1975
8. The Selected Letters of Philip K Dick,
1975-76, Underwood-Miller, 1992, ix
9. Richard A
Lupoff, A Conversation With
Philip K Dick, Vol. 1, no. 2, August
1987, 45-54
10. Philip K.
Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K
Dick, Hachette Littlehampton, Kindle Edition.
11. Ibid.
12. The Selected Letters of Philip K Dick,
1980-1982, Vol. 6, Underwood Books, 2009, 262
13. Ervin
Laszlo, Science and the Akashic
Field: An Integral Theory of Everything, Inner Traditions, 2007
.
ANTHONY PEAKE is the author of a series of highly
acclaimed books, all of which develop a hypothesis that he terms “Cheating the
Ferryman.” In these books he presents an explanation for all of Philip K.
Dick’s extraordinary experiences. His book on Dick is The Man Who Remembered the Future: A Life of
Philip K. Dick. This expands on the issues discussed in this article.
Anthony’s website is www.anthonypeake.com.
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