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“PS: What Scares Me Most, Claudia, Is That I Can Often Recall the Future ” — The Memetic Prophecies of Philip K. Dick

Ubik talks to us from the future, from the end state to which everything is moving; thus Ubik is not here—which is to say now—but will be, and what we get is information about and from Ubik, as we receive TV or radio signals from transmitters located in other spaces in this time continuum.

— Philip K. Dick, Letters (1974)

S cience-fiction writers routinely forecast developments in technology and society—it’s their job. Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Arthur C. Clarke famously predicted countless technological innovations, although it is hard to discern which of their predictions may have represented anything more than the ability to infer future milestones from then-current trends. Besides predicting the Titanic disaster, Morgan Robertson predicted the development of something like radar and even a Japanese sneak attack on America, although it is not clear that his precognitive faculty was involved. ¹ Philip K. Dick’s visions of American consumer culture and the scrambled, fragmented reality it creates have been prescient in the same way. The cyberpunk writers he influenced are credited with having foretold our hyper-mediated, information-saturated lives, but it was Dick himself who saw how maddening and stupid a tech-saturated world (with its targeted advertising, robo-calls, and digital assistants that spy on us) might become. Year after year, life in America feels more and more like a Dick novel. And while he was not known as a “hard science” SF writer, he was no slouch in that respect either. Over a decade before John Wheeler coined the phrase “it from bit,” for instance, Dick was already writing about the universe as composed of information. ²

But this kind of social and scientific forecasting is not what Phil-Dickologists mean by calling the writer precognitive. ³ Rather, it is that he had a funny habit of predicting what we would now call memes —singular, often fleeting ideas and obsessions in popular culture, the kinds of things that made the cover of Time and Newsweek and Psychology Today as ideas or issues of the moment. It became increasingly apparent to Dick over the course of his career that he seemed to write about such cultural obsessions just before they occurred, and it was this that fueled his own evolving self-myth, that he was a “precog” right out of one of his own stories. ⁴ Dick’s private life too was a tapestry of “synchronicity,” reflecting in some cases his precognition of significant events and upheavals. Even if none of his literary prophecies are as memorable as predicting an ocean liner disaster down to the name of the ship, as Robertson did, it is possible to document in Dick’s life and works numerous even more striking coincidences, in part because he left such a voluminous archive of letters and journals enabling us to cross-correlate events in his life with his dreams as well as with his fiction. Such a project is also abetted by a fast-growing number of biographies and reminiscences by his many friends, wives, girlfriends, and others who knew this deeply troubled writer well and can confirm, disconfirm, or otherwise add illumination to the sometimes bizarre time loops that punctuated his personal, creative, and spiritual life.

Dick’s 1969 masterpiece Ubik is one of several examples cited by biographer Anthony Peake. If any one of his novels embodies all the qualities (uncertain and shifting realities, etc.) that are thought of as “PhilDickian,” it would be this narrative about dead—or nearly dead—people stored in a state of hibernation or “half life” and an aerosol spray product (the Ubik of the title) that somehow reverses or retards time because of the “counter-clockwise spin” it imparts. Dick submitted the manuscript to his publisher in 1966, but he subsequently encountered the idea of time as a kind of spiral energy whose polarity or spin could be reversed in a translated 1967 article by a Russian physicist and parapsychologist named Nicolai Kozyrev. Dick was so struck by Kozyrev’s ideas of time as a “torsion field” that he thought it had influenced his own writing of Ubik three years earlier. Peake, who compiled many of Dick’s alleged precognitive experiences in his book A Life of Philip K. Dick: The Man Who Remembered the Future , sums up Dick’s reasoning about how an exciting reading experience could constitute the seed of prior creative inspiration:

PKD concludes that the source from which he based his own plots was from information drawn out of time (in this case his own future). This information was subliminally understood and acted as the stimulus for plot devices. In other words, he perceives something, an article for example, when he is 49 years old, and this idea immediately appears in his 46-year-old mind. The idea is so powerful that the 46-year-old PKD writes a story based upon its premise, or premises. ⁵

By itself, Dick’s hunch that he had precognized the article on Kozyrev, or the similarity of their ideas, does not prove that precognition was at work here. But the spray-can Ubik happens to be strangely similar to other memes in our culture that were also just around the corner when Dick wrote his story. For example, in the same self-consciously techno-babble passage that explains Ubik as reversing time through its counterclockwise spin, the fictitious aerosol product is also linked to the negation of an ordinarily protective aspect of the Earth’s atmosphere. ⁶ A few years after he published his novel, scientists linked chlorofluorocarbons from aerosol spray cans to the degradation of Earth’s protective ozone layer, and by the late 1970s spray cans had become a kind of “anti-icon” of the environmental movement. But again, this was not yet a glimmer at the time Dick was writing his story about an “ubiquitous” time-retarding spray-can product. William Sarill, a friend of Dick’s, has also pointed out that Ubik (the product) bears an odd resemblance to the original hype around the dietary supplement ubiquinol , now better known as coenzyme Q-10. ⁷ Although originally identified in a medical journal in 1957, it wasn’t until the 1970s that ubiquinol became the subject of research in Japan focused on its heart health benefits. It was then touted as having beneficial “age-reversing” properties when it burst on the alternative health and nutritional supplement scene in early 1980s, right around the time of Dick’s death. Ubik thus seems almost like a Dunnean-Freudian dream-image, condensing multiple cultural ideas that were just ahead in Dick’s (and America’s) future when the story flowed from the writer’s amphetamine-fueled brain in 1966. Was he somehow channeling his own future encounters with multiple pop-science memes in this one novel? ⁸

More striking than Ubik , consider a draft for a novel Dick wrote and submitted to his literary agency in October 1962, called “The First in Our Family”—about a small manufacturing firm that decides to branch out from making spinet pianos to building androids. Written in the first years of the Civil War Centennial celebrations but set two decades later, in the year 1982, the idea of Dick’s fictional entrepreneurs is that people might pay money to watch reenactments of the Civil War fought by robots. To interest investors, they produce two prototypes, one a simulacrum of Abraham Lincoln and another of his Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton. Both prove all-too-human; the Lincoln simulacrum fails to adapt to modern society because the real Lincoln (according to the story) himself suffered “schizophrenia.” ⁹

Various publishers rejected Dick’s manuscript, and thus it went unpublished and unread until end of the decade, when it appeared in serial form under the title “A. Lincoln, Simulacrum” in Amazing Science Fiction (November 1969 and January 1970; it was later published in paperback form as We Can Build You ). Consequently, there is no way it could have influenced the nearly simultaneous creation of one of the Disneyland theme park’s most iconic exhibits, their “animatronic” Abraham Lincoln. Publicly debuted in 1964 at the New York World’s Fair, Disney’s Lincoln robot became a permanent, well-known fixture at Disneyland in Anaheim California. When he read a newspaper article that Disney was about to display a robotic Abraham Lincoln, Dick was certain he had precognized that singular merger of high technology and American nostalgia. He says he clipped the story as proof of his precognitive abilities, and then went to visit the exhibit after it opened, “to look at the goddamn thing.” ¹⁰

The skeptical counterargument that will be made here is that the Civil War was on everyone’s mind in 1961-2, when Dick wrote his story, and thus it is perhaps not too coincidental that both Disney Corporation and a science fiction writer would come up with the idea of a robot simulacrum of this particular historical figure around the same time. More speculatively, one might suggest that Disney may have published somewhere their intentions to build an Abe Lincoln robot—which they did in fact conceive as early as 1962—and that Dick may have seen but forgotten it—analogous to Martin Gardner’s suggestion that Morgan Robertson might perhaps have seen such an article about the White Star Line’s intention to build a huge new ship called the Titanic in 1898. But there is no evidence of such a publication.

The coincidence, and strangeness, is actually deeper and more personal, however. Dick lived and wrote in the Bay Area, in Point Reyes, throughout the 1960s, when he wrote “The First in Our Family” and when the Disney exhibit went on display. However, in 1972, he moved south to Orange County, which encompasses Anaheim and Disneyland. In an interview in 1977, Dick recalled his astonishment at finding that a woman who lived in his apartment building ¹¹ turned out to work at Disneyland, and to actually have the job of applying makeup to the animatronic Lincoln every night after the park closed:

You talk about synchronicity that governs the universe—coincidence which is meaningful … I rented an apartment in a building where one of the ladies living in the building worked at Disneyland. I said to her, “What do you do there?” She says, “I reapply the makeup to the Lincoln every night, so the next morning when the park is open, it looks real.” …

Can you imagine how I felt, finding I lived in a building with a woman who added a touch of verisimilitude to the damn thing? “Well, let me ask you a question,” I said. “You see this thing after the park is closed. How real does that thing seem to you to be?” And she says, “Well, I’ll tell you exactly how real it seems to me to be.” Now it’s important to remember that every part of all the rides are continually scanned by closed circuit television … So anyway, she says, “One time I was painting the Lincoln thing and one of the monitors was still on. The guy on the screen saw me and reached over and pressed the controls. And the thing stood up.”

“And what did you do, miss,” I asked.

“I peed my pants.”

“I take it … that you found a high degree of verisimilitude in this simulacrum.”

“Sure scared the shit out of me.” ¹²

The coincidence or “synchronicity” is more striking when certain details in “A. Lincoln Simulacrum” are considered. It is not one of the author’s most polished works. Frustrated at writing in a category of genre fiction that was so marginalized, he had in the early 1960s been attempting to write more mainstream works that less foregrounded the sci-fi elements—but this early attempt at such a hybrid is not cohesive. Although it delves a little into the fascinating idea of androids and their humanity—themes he would develop much more fully a few years later in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep —it gets sidetracked midway through to focus on the entrepreneur narrator’s self-destructive infatuation with “Pris,” the mentally ill daughter of his business partner, whom they have hired to design their Lincoln robot. ¹³ Early in the novel, the narrator imagines Pris alone with the simulacrum, working all hours to give realism to their creation, and specifically applying paint or makeup to its face :

Pris, I decided, was probably at home these days, putting the final life-like colors into the sunken cheeks of the Abe Lincoln shell which would house all those parts. That in itself was a full-time job. The beard, the big hands, skinny legs, and sad eyes. A field for her creativity, her artistic soul, to run and howl rampant. She would not show up until she had done a topnotch job. … ¹⁴

And a few pages later:

The Lincoln container, when Pris and Maury brought it into the office, flabbergasted me. Even in its inert stage, lacking its working parts, it was so lifelike as to seem ready at any moment to rise into its day’s activity. …

To Pris I said, “I have to hand it to you.”

Standing with her hands in her coat pockets, she somberly supervised. Her eyes seemed dark, deeper set; her skin was quite noticeably pale—she had on no make-up, and I guessed that she had been up all hours every night, finishing her task. ¹⁵

In the interview, Dick made no allusions to details like this in his novel—only to the larger fact of his having seemingly precognized “the Lincoln.” But if there was a precognitive inspiration for Dick’s story, it may not have been merely a news story about Disney’s Lincoln, or even his visit to the park to see it in person. It may have been precisely his astonishing encounter in his apartment building at least a decade later, with a woman responsible for making a fake Lincoln seem real, after hours. If so, it would be yet another causal loop: Dick’s shock at the coincidental encounter with the woman who applied makeup to Disney’s Lincoln was due to his having written a decade or more earlier about precisely such a person. Much like Morgan Robertson’s Futility or Norman Mailer’s Barbary Shore , Dick’s novel seems like a literary-presentimental butterfly trapped in amber; its literary merits or lack thereof are less interesting than its “prophetic” qualities. ¹⁶

There are so many examples of this kind of coincidence in Dick’s life and published (and unpublished) writing that exploring the writer’s mystical and prophetic side has become almost a cottage industry. Peake lists numerous other examples in his biography, some of which, such as Dick’s claimed precognitive awareness of his infant son’s life-threatening hernia in 1974, are well-known parts of Dick lore but may have more mundane explanations—at least, cryptomnesia cannot be ruled out. ¹⁷ Others can be explained as the writer consciously or unconsciously fulfilling his own myth after the fact. But in some cases, the priority of Dick’s writing to the putatively precognized meme or event is clear from publication dates, adding up to a compelling case that this author was either more precognitive than most people or else simply more aware of and interested in a faculty that we all share but are generally oblivious to. ¹⁸

In fact, Dick and his precognitive experiences fit very well into the pattern elucidated by Jule Eisenbud. Like Morgan Robertson, Dick was a deeply ambivalent, tortured writer gripped by an addiction, lifelong guilt, and unresolved Oedipal feelings. Precognition seems to have answered much the same need for absolution in Dick’s case that it did for Robertson, even if the roots of Dick’s guilt were different and even though Dick seems to have been much better aware of his own complexes.

Like Freud himself, Dick had survived the loss of a sibling in infancy—a twin sister named Jane. He was nowhere near old enough to form a memory of Jane or her death, but his mother repeatedly told the story, and how she could not produce enough milk for both babies, who had been born six weeks premature. Dick had a lifelong obsession with his twin. Dominating his psyche was his guilt at having survived where she did not, and his anger toward his mother whose insufficiencies, he thought, starved her but whose narrative implicitly blamed Phil for “getting all the milk.” “[I]f there can be said to be a tragic theme running through my life,” he told one biographer, “it’s the death of my twin sister and the re-enactment of this over and over again … My psychological problems are traceable to the loss of my sister .” ¹⁹ Again, in the psychoanalytic framework, trauma resides not in an event as such—which may not even be remembered—but in the thoughts formed about it afterward. The story of his origins, surviving Jane’s death, became the total framework for Dick’s self-understanding.

Another recent biographer, Kyle Arnold, traces Dick’s visionary imagination and his obsession with unreality to this trauma:

Because of his mother’s repeated retellings of the story, Jane was an intensely present absence in Dick’s childhood, bridging the real and the imagined. Thoughts of Jane were thoughts of someone who had never been fully real for Dick. Like science fiction, they were thoughts of what might have been, what should have been, and what was not. They were intimations of possibilities, of stifled alternative universes. Jane was a window onto other worlds. Yet, for the most part, Dick could only gaze through the window, unable to pass through it. His creativity was catalyzed by longing. He compulsively reenacted his origin story throughout his life, repeatedly running afoul of authorities, chasing his deadly muse-twin in destructive relationships with women, and seeking salvation through a kind of desperate spirituality. As he writes in his journals, “the ultimate problem confronting me all my life has been the senseless injury to and neglect of my sister.” ²⁰

A Freudian would see Oedipus as the subtext in all this, and Dick would have agreed. He even admitted to his third wife, Anne, that in his teens he had had a dream in which he slept with his mother—“I won my Oedipal situation.” ²¹ His adult romantic life was a roller-coaster of obsessive and needy relationships to increasingly younger women, the “dark-haired girls” who seemed to represent fantastic versions of his lost sister and who (in his accounts) always somehow turned very quickly into his cold and unloving mother. ²² Dick’s fifth wife, Tessa, was 18 when they met in 1972, 26 years his junior. When these relationships failed, it was always somehow his partners’ fault, their baggage, their craziness. Like one of the two patients who first pointed Freud toward formulating the Oedipal theory, Dick also suffered a debilitating agoraphobia. In Freud’s patient’s case, fear of being in public represented a fear of his own murderous impulses toward his father. ²³ Dick’s agoraphobia too may have been a fear of his own hostility—he had a pattern of behaving badly or embarrassingly in public (even violently on a few occasions). And as we will see, a typically Oedipal un-stuck-ness in time was essentially the template for his spiritual experiences in his last decade.

The question of Dick’s mental state has always cast a shadow over his reliability as a narrator of events in his life. There is no question that he sometimes exaggerated, sometimes lied, and wildly shifted his interpretations of events in his letters and conversations. As Arnold puts it, “It is as if he were saying ‘I will be whomever you need me to be to take me seriously.’” ²⁴ At times, his perception of reality was seriously distorted by paranoia almost certainly brought on by decades of amphetamine use and abuse. An ephedrine prescription at age six for asthma led to lifelong medical and nonmedical use of various stimulants. (Contrary to common belief, he was not a frequent user of hallucinogens.) Some of his most storied experiences, such as the notorious break-in of his house in 1971, occurred in the worst depths of his speed addiction and his wildly inconsistent accounts of the event cannot be taken at face value. ²⁵

The pressure cooker of Dick’s life appears to have approached a peak in 1973, when he rushed ambivalently into marriage with his young girlfriend Tessa because he had gotten her pregnant. He was then faced with the added stress of an infant son and a marriage that became increasingly strained and untenable (as they all did). It was in this context that Dick’s famous “2-3-74” mystical experience occurred. Triggered initially (he said) by light glinting off a Christian fish-symbol pendant around the neck of a girl delivering painkiller to his home after oral surgery, ²⁶ this experience is central to the Dick legend. What layers of mythmaking have overlooked is how stressful this period in his life was. Poverty and lack of recognition are one thing when you are a young brilliant artist, but when a man finds himself in the middle of his fifth decade with little to show for it but a string of failed marriages, estranged children, loneliness, continued poverty and substance problems, and increasing serious health issues like high blood pressure, things begin to feel desperate. (“Desperate” is precisely how one of the many college girls he attempted to date in 1972 described him. ²⁷ )

Dick’s own Jung-inflected mythologizing framed “2-3-74” as a “metanoia,” a transcendence that results in a greater integration of the personality and thus healing. Biographer Arnold argues persuasively that it was nothing of the sort. His “intoxicating taste of radical wholeness and connectedness to the world” gradually slipped from his grasp, leaving him with the same sufferings and problems as well as a brand-new emptiness, a brand-new abandonment to add to his list. Over the following eight years until his death, Dick wrote thousands of pages of analysis to try and understand what had happened to him, and it does not lessen the value or genius of this text, the Exegesis , to say that it was the product of a nervous breakdown. “The Exegesis is the embodiment of Dick’s psychospiritual nostalgia,” Arnold writes. ²⁸ It may be that many of the world’s greatest spiritual texts have been produced in such a state of crisis.

Fortunately for later students of precognition, this period in Dick’s life also produced some striking precognitive experiences that the writer recorded in fascinating and compelling detail thanks to a new pen pal—and muse—that entered his life just a month after his “2-3-74” visions and dreams began.

“Dear Claudia”

In early April, 1974, Dick received a short letter from a young woman named Claudia Bush who was planning to write about Ubik for her master’s degree at Ohio State University; she wrote him humbly asking for a bibliography of his works. ²⁹ Dick wrote her back from the hospital, saying that they were about to replace his insides with plastic radio parts, and promised to write further. Over the following years, they carried on an intense correspondence, in which Dick chronicled his evolving interpretations of his fading mystical experience and in other ways opened up about his life and feelings with considerably more openness and authenticity than he seems to have shown any other mail correspondent during this period.

It is easy to read into his affectionate, avuncular-yet-flirtatious tone a kind of crush or transference. Claudia clearly represented another Oedipal fantasy: a young, obviously intelligent, suitably admiring girl who had none of the baggage and issues that his real-life relationship with wife Tessa was already (inevitably) assuming. For Claudia’s part, she felt special to be the object of so much attention by a writer she so admired; she describes that their letter-writing was, for her, “an extremely intense personal experience.” ³⁰ Claudia went on to get a doctorate in Educational Testing and Measurement, and later, as Dr. Claudia Krenz, she attempted to make scanned hypertext of all of Dick’s letters available on the internet but was prevented from doing so by copyright laws. On her website, ³¹ Krenz downplays her own importance in this early “virtual” relationship (which began, she notes, the same year the word “internet” was coined), and she has not made her side of the correspondence available. But it is clear from the tone of Dick’s letters to her that she became something of a muse during that most intense and dark period of his life—even though they never met in person.

Many but not all of Dick’s lengthy “Dear Claudia” letters—Krenz says she received three a day, on a few occasions—have been published as part of his collected letters; and a few also appear in his published Exegesis . ³² Especially when read in isolation from his other correspondence during this period, these letters provide particularly valuable insight into Dick’s thought processes, and because he wrote her so regularly about his dreams, they give us especially valuable and unique insight into Dick’s precognitive habit. At the bottom of a typed letter to Claudia dated May 9, 1974, in which he speculated he had multiple personality disorder, Dick penned a handwritten postscript: “PS: What scares me most, Claudia, is that I can often recall the future .” ³³

Although many of Dick’s claims and speculations about himself may not hold up under scrutiny, his claim of sometimes recalling the future, for instance in his dreams, is actually somewhat verifiable. Dick’s “Dear Claudia” letters are as valuable as any other dream corpus I know of for the study of dream precognition in vivo. In them, we have a dense, and in a few cases, daily record of Dick’s unfolding dream life, enabling us to construct an anatomy of dream precognition as an orienting function unfolding over a span of time. In a way that J. W. Dunne would have immediately recognized, Dick’s dreams oriented him toward a series of imminent, exciting learning experiences—specifically, interesting information latent often in his own sprawling, disorganized library, which in turn provided valuable strands to be woven into his most enduring spiritual and fiction writings over the coming years. These dreams also oriented and reoriented him toward that important “virtual” human connection to Claudia during a period when his marriage was in turmoil and the mystical presence that had given his life new meaning at the beginning of 1974 seemed to gradually abandon him.

On July 5, 1974, Dick wrote to his pen pal to describe the culmination of a series of dreams spanning the previous three months. All of them seemed to be pointing him toward a specific large blue hardback book whose title terminated with the word “Grove” preceded by a longer word starting with B, and that had been published in 1966 or 1968. “I had the keen intuition that when I at last found it I would have in my hands a mystic or occult or religious book of wisdom which would be a doorway to the absolute reality behind the whole universe.” ³⁴ Bibliophiles who pay attention to their dreams will recognize this immediately (discovering a rare or overlooked book of great value) as a common dream theme. In one dream, the book was burned around the edges, suggesting an ancient manuscript. Although Dick thought he may need to go to a library or bookstore to find this volume, his dreams ultimately hinted he would find the book in his personal library, and thus he describes spending a day scouring his house in search of a big blue book with a title terminating in “Grove.”

Amazingly, he found what he was looking for, and the denouement of this weeks-long quest is as funny as anything in his novels:

As soon as I took down the volume I knew it to be the right one. I had seen it again and again, with ever increasing clarity, until it could not be mistaken.

The book is called THE SHADOW OF BLOOMING GROVE, hardback and blue, running just under 700 huge long pages of tiny type. It was published in 1968. It is the dullest book in the world … It is a biography of Warren G. Harding. ³⁵

This too is a common experience for anyone who has engaged with their dreams in any consistent and serious way. Like a trickster, dreams often dangle a promise of sublimity, only to pull banal switcheroos that would be depressing if they weren’t so funny. It is Dick’s willingness to confront this bathetic pole in his own dream life—for instance, dreams promising a book of high wisdom, only to lead him to a dull 700-page biography of Warren Harding that a book club had sent him years earlier—that makes Dick such a valuable chronicler of precognitive phenomena. He is able to find comedy in his own errors and misunderstandings, and thus readily shares them with his young admirer and, via her, with us. ³⁶

We do not have Krenz’s side of this literary conversation, unfortunately, but a week after reporting his discovery of the Harding biography, Dick wrote several long letters to her in quick succession (two on July 13^th alone) in which he mentions her great amusement at his story. He goes on to describe subsequent vivid dreams over the intervening week, including a dream of a woman Cyclops sitting amid the conspirators who killed the Kennedy brothers and Dr. King; when he takes a second look at the dream woman, she is a pretty, two-eyed sibyl (prophetess). The narrative that unfolds from this is particularly interesting from the standpoint of Dunne’s observations on precognition’s relation to reading experiences.

The Cyclops-sibyl dream, he wrote, led him to look up “sibyl” in his encyclopedia. He does not notice that there is likely a precognitive element in this, if we take Cyclops as a dream-pun on encyclopedia —and that the reference work yielded a description of the Cumaean Sibyl. He quoted to Claudia a description of how the sibyl offered to sell her prophetic writings to the Roman king Tarquin the Proud; when he refused her high price, she began burning her books, until at last he paid the full price for the only three left undestroyed. This recalled to Dick the earlier dream of a burned manuscript in the lead-up to finding the book about Harding. The passage also mentioned that a description of the Cumaean Sibyl appears in Virgil’s Aeneid . After Dick mailed this letter, he wrote Claudia a second letter as a “footnote,” describing how he had gone ahead and looked up the Aeneid in another source he had at hand, Will Durant’s Caesar and Christ , where he learned that Virgil’s poem also contained a description of the Cyclops and, most strikingly, where he found the following sentence: “Then the Sibyl takes him through mystic passages of the Blissful Groves where those who led good lives bask in green valleys and endless joys.” ³⁷

Dick delves in subsequent letters into the possible Jungian meaning of all this, the significance of ancient Rome in his mystical experiences, and the sibyl as representing his “anima,” the inner source of his own prophetic capacity. Recall here Morgan Robertson’s belief that his own muse was likewise a feminine spirit of some sort. We can observe Dick here beginning to weave these dream images into his evolving self-mythology and what became a major metaphysical strand in his Exegesis , as well as the novel VALIS that was based on his experiences.

In his search for a meaning behind all these coincidences—an answer to the question “why me?”—Dick understandably gropes in many different directions for an explanation and attaches great, mostly Jungian significance to the symbols. Yet he does not go down the path of thinking he is simply accessing archetypes in the collective unconscious. Rather, he is drawn to the conclusion that somehow the ancient world is still present, only camouflaged—or indeed, that we are still in it. It all seems to confirm a dream remembered from his youth that was much like the “B___ Grove” dreams, in which he had searched for a story in Astounding Stories called “The Empire Never Ended.” That story, he had felt certain, contained all the mysteries of existence. As a result of some of his visions and experiences in 1974, Dick came to believe he was possibly a reincarnated Christian from ancient Rome. ³⁸

We are rewarded best by bracketing the various interpretations, the Exegesis per se, and looking at Dick’s project as a making of something, a creation of meaningful narratives to be read by other people, a reaching out. The term “cry for help” may sound a bit extreme, but it is not. It was during this black period of his life, most specifically in February 1976, when Tessa left him and took their son, that he attempted suicide via drug overdose, slitting his wrists, and carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage, all at the same time. Fortunately, all three plans failed. Setting aside the metaphysics and cosmology, what was Dick trying to say in his writing during this period—to Claudia, to Tessa, to his readers, and to posterity? And what whispered message was he straining to hear from his own precognitive unconscious? Arguably, he wanted to hear the same thing Morgan Robertson managed to hear, loud and clear, when news of the Titani c’s fatal collision with an iceberg splashed across the front page of The New York Times on April 15, 1912.

Both in his Exegesis and in his private correspondence with friends like Claudia, Dick flickered between two basic stances on his experience: the secret persistence of the ancient world underneath the veneer of mid-1970s Orange County, and the idea that he was haunting himself from his own future. These are not incompatible ideas in the sense that they both point to our old friend Mister Block Universe, where the past still exists and the future already exists—and by implication, nothing is subject to alteration . Kyle Arnold attributes Dick’s living in a science-fictional world of endlessly shifting possibilities and uncertainty to his origin story and the death of Jane. But if his origin story propelled him to perpetually fabulate new possibilities for himself and for humanity, it was counteracted by his frequent precognitive experiences, which could have provided him with a needed sense of im possibility, a sense that there was no contingency, that history couldn’t just as easily have turned out differently, but that events are inscribed like an indelible record groove in the fabric of time and space. This, I believe, is the real latent meaning, the “unconscious” so to speak, of Phil Dick, the latent meaning that is obscured by the incessantly “shifting realities” for which he is so famous.

In the deterministic block universe that Dick so often indexed in his Exegesis , it is not his fault that he got all the milk and that helpless little Jane perished, that he became addicted to speed and ruined five marriages, or that he was stuck in literature’s “trash stratum” while so many of his less brilliant, less talented, less original peers prospered. The constant slipping and sliding reality and uncertainty that so characterizes Dick’s fictional and interpersonal universe was not the reality he wanted; it was the one he wanted to escape. He wanted the unfreedom and thus absolution brought by radical determinism. In the block universe, none of the unfolding train wreck of Phil Dick’s life was his fault, and in the eternal record groove of history, like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence , those tragedies and disasters would keep being replayed and repeated, no matter what. In other words, his escalating precognitive experiences across the 1970s, as well as his growing sense (or true awareness) during this time that his works in the previous decade had been precognitive, may have secured from the universe exactly what Morgan Robertson’s prophecies did—a sense that “it is out of my hands.”

It is necessary to add: This need of his, this bias, doesn’t lessen the possible truth or accuracy of his intuition about reality.

“Shy and Gentle Creatures”

Dick’s precognitive experiences may have also secured a sense of his own survival. Interestingly, some of his dreams in the aftermath of his “2-3-74” experience pointed distinctly toward things he would read or be exposed to in 1977 or later—creating a kind of bridge across the darkest year of his life, 1975 and early 1976, when the spirit had abandoned him and during which he made the aforementioned suicide attempt.

In a letter to Claudia on December 9, 1974, Dick records a dream about being the “other world” associated with his “2-3-74” visions and being introduced to a race of “lovely creatures which man hadn’t yet destroyed, very shy and gentle creatures” ³⁹ and being shown a piece of futuristic technology. “At one point in the dream I was reaching to take a plate on which was a piece of cake, but a small child, in a position of authority, told me firmly, ‘No, that belongs to Mrs. Fields.’” After awakening, Dick recalls wondering who Mrs. Fields was, and then “remembering” that she was a woman who had been abducted by a UFO with her husband one night in the early 1960s on a remote road and shown a star chart corresponding to Zeta Reticuli. Dick is wrong here: The woman’s surname was Hill (Betty Hill), not Fields. Mrs. Fields in fact was the name of a popular, widely advertised brand of cookies and brownies—a company that was not founded until a little over two years after this dream, in 1977. That his dream cake belongs to Mrs. Fields is certainly an interesting coincidence (skeptics will certainly call it that) if it is not a precognitive and typically “PhilDickian” conflation of the sublime and the “trash stratum” of consumer culture. But his misassociation of this cake with UFOs becomes odder, given another detail: “In my dream, the cake was all grooved, as if worked over by a fork…” He felt that the cake was really a kind of relief map, possibly of Florida.

The same year Mrs. Fields began advertising her line of popular sweets, Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters featured a famous scene in which the main character, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfus), trying to capture an obsessive dream vision implanted by a UFO encounter on a lonely rural road (like Betty Hill’s experience with her husband Barney), piles mashed potatoes on his dinner plate and works them over with a fork to create grooves, and then does the same with a pile of mud in his living room—creating a grooved sculpture of what he will later learn represents Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. It is literally a kind of map in relief. (Neary then desperately attempts to reach this location despite authorities’ attempts to turn back civilians.) The film culminates with a spectacular UFO landing, where Neary is introduced to a race of beautiful, childlike, graceful creatures and is lastly taken away in their spaceship, not unlike what Dick encountered earlier in his dream. ⁴⁰

Was Dick’s reading, moviegoing, and TV viewing (i.e., ads for cookies and brownies) in 1977 refluxing a little over two years into his past to appear in a dream he would excitedly share with his pen muse during his most intensely visionary-slash-psychotic period? There is no proof of anything here, yet this single dream from late 1974 seems like a constellation of ideas and images Dick would almost certainly have encountered and been excited by in 1977, specifically during a time of his life when, according to Tessa, he had become actively interested in the UFO phenomenon. ⁴¹ I have suggested elsewhere that in 1974 Dick also seems to have uncannily precognized a 1975 book by ufologist Jacques Vallee describing UFOs as a “control system,” which Dick probably read specifically during that bout of ufological interest in 1977. ⁴² This precognitive encounter with Vallee may have given Dick the name for his famous extraterrestrial control system, VALIS , which became the title of his autobiographical novel about his mystical experiences. ⁴³

Like Freud’s Irma dream, Dick’s December 9, 1974, dream gives every sense of representing interests and concerns from another, fairly specific point in his life—in this case, a happier point, over two years later. According to the fractal dream-logic we have seen before, the dream may have even represented its own precognitive nature. The piece of technology he had been shown by the “shy and gentle creatures” was something in or from the future that he was meant to bring back to the past. ⁴⁴ Precognitive dreams often contain some “time gimmick” representing time travel, clocks, rearview mirrors, or the act of looking back retrospectively (see the Postscript for an example of my own). Was Dick’s renewed interest in life in the late 1970s, including UFO topics, imbued with a relief at having survived a particularly dark period, and was this what rippled back in his “brain line” as prophetic jouissance to form a dream in late 1974?

Dick continued to correspond with Claudia Bush, although less frequently, for the rest of his life. It was in another letter to her dated February 25, 1975, a couple months after the “shy and gentle creatures” dream, that Dick reported possibly the most striking of his prophetic visions, although again he had no way of knowing it was prophetic. He describes trying to summon back the spirit that had left him, when he saw the following: “hypnagogic images of underwater cities, very nice, and then a stark single horrifying scene, inert but not a still: a man lay dead, on his face, in a living room between the coffee table and the couch.” ⁴⁵ This inert figure was, Dick said, clothed in the skin of a fawn, like some ancient Greek or Roman sacrifice. Apart from the detail of the fawn skin, “in a living room between the coffee table and the couch” precisely describes how his own unconscious body was found after the first of the strokes in 1982 that ultimately killed him, at age 53. ⁴⁶

Phil logocentrism—Dick and the Future of Prophecy

Because most of us mortals cannot accept or even imagine that we are ever seeing or feeling the future, we contort all our anomalous experiences to fit some version of commonsense linear causality. Dick, almost alone among writers, at least in his most lucid and insightful moments, saw through culture’s linear-causal mystifications, the no-saying of our cultural fathers. Just as he partly thought that ancient Rome was still alive behind the cheap-stage-set veneer of 20^th century Orange County, another part of him just as compellingly thought he was haunting himself from the future. Again, he needed to believe in the Minkowski block universe, to forgive himself for Jane’s death and the rest.

Jeffrey Kripal, in his study Mutants and Mystics , suggests that the connection between psychical phenomena and imaginative writing and art is a particularly close one ⁴⁷ —although which came first, a career in imaginative literature or the tendency to have science-fictional experiences, may be impossible to specify. I argue that all creative people are “psychic”—that some ability to hear and record the faint resonating string of one’s prophetic jouissance as it extends through the glass block is what creativity is . Writers being avid readers, they are constantly drawing from ideas latent in their libraries and other media. Those in more realistic genres (e.g., Norman Mailer) may less commonly notice their time-looping relation to culture because their reading experiences may not ordinarily be exotic enough to serve as tracers.

Resonances between future upheavals and present situations manifested in dreams and creative flow states may even be responsible for the very shape of culture, a constant cycling between precognition and confirmation. Kripal has argued that science fiction and comic books should be thought of as just our culture’s mode of expressing the same real, baffling, and socially distrusted dimension of human experience that in past ages produced the great spiritual classics of the world’s religions. ⁴⁸ He notes that the history of religions is really “a long series of science fiction movies.” ⁴⁹ It is no accident that the science fiction genre has been marginalized and rejected by most cultural gatekeepers for most of its history. As Dick’s alter-ego Horselover Fat remarks in VALIS , symbols of divinity initially appear in our world in the easily overlooked “trash stratum.” Science fiction is that trash stratum, and yet its power to shape society, in the long run, may be overwhelming. Indeed, Phil Dick may occupy a unique, special place at the juncture between the linear-causal classical worldview and the precognition-accepting landscape of the future. I think to understand his special role, we cannot shy away from considering the “accident” of his name. Remember, in psychoanalysis, there are no accidents.

In the brain’s associative search system, puns—not only verbal but also visual, aural, tactile, etc.—are probably the most characteristic form of coincidence, forming the nuclei not only of our memories but also of attractor phenomena in the symptom space of precognition. (In dynamical systems theory, an attractor is a set of values toward which a chaotic system tends to evolve; attractors are also central to the retrocausal “syntropy” theory of Ulisse di Corpo and Antonella Vannini as future states exerting a backward pull on living systems in the present. ⁵⁰ ) Dreams are practically built from verbal as well sensory puns—they are the real “bricks” of our dreams, and you might even call them the stem cells of synchronicity. But the individual unconscious is not the Jungian world of noble and poetic archetypes; it is a cringingly personal, Freudian world of low, schoolyard humor and wordplay. In such a world, there’s an awful lot in a name, especially one as suggestive as Dick’s. The associative networks in the brains of readers, and himself, will have made a special place for him because his name happens to be that of the Phallus. ⁵¹ I can’t help but feel that this is an important part of the Dick story, one that delicacy prevents most biographers and critics from touching.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Phallus does not simply denote the male member; rather it is an emblem of the possibility of castration, of being itself under the sign of erasure, da as contrasted with fort. It is the spool that young Ernst repetitively tossed from his crib to experience the jouissance of his own presence. The constantly flickering Phallus is also a symbol of the impossible trauma of sexual difference (i.e., what does it mean, what did I do wrong [or right], that I am only a _____ [boy/girl]?). It also “stands for” (pun maybe intended) the father’s name as traditional anchor in the Symbolic order. Consequently, it is a virtual/absent emblem of the Real, the black hole around which that order revolves, producing in its vicinity the same time distortions that black holes in space can generate.

For Phil, his dead twin Jane, a “dead Dick,” was an all-too-real embodiment of all the traumas, concrete and abstract, that are contained in this one symbol indicated by his surname. And his given name would have been a constant reminder of Jane’s emptiness, the fact that he got his fill of their mother’s milk, leaving Jane to starve. All these facts, these stupidly real puns, may have been like nails in his flesh, constant reminders of his origin myth, and his guilt. As a living and dying pun, Dick was a martyr to his own name.

Again, life in America, and on Earth, becomes more PhilDickian by the year; and every year there is some new biography, some new account of Dick’s mysticism or his madness or just his quirks, and Hollywood continues to mine his books and stories for film—and more recently, TV—ideas. Could it be that history and culture converge more and more on Dick’s writings, increasing their prophecy quotient, precisely because of the associative attracting power of that name? In other words, while it may be Dick’s authentic precognitive abilities that contributed to his fame, it may be his name that made him so prophetic, in a kind of four-D feedback loop.

Only time will tell what spiritual use might be made of the Dick myth by future generations, or what influence his writings and life may yet have on the religious landscape of America. The literary critic Harold Bloom argued that the “American religion” is essentially Gnostic, having much in common with the numerous heresies Rome sought to extinguish in the first few centuries AD. ⁵² It is a worship of the innermost spiritual self, the uncreated spark seeking to free itself from the bleak material world in which an evil or stupid demiurge had long ago imprisoned it. Dick came to believe it was his life’s mission to “restore Gnostic gnosis to the world in a trashy form,” ⁵³ and indeed, readers of his fiction and especially his Exegesis may for the first time find their own hitherto implicit sci-fi Gnosticism articulated more clearly and directly than they have ever seen. ⁵⁴ Despite or because of its painful origins, the Exegesis is probably one of the greatest, and certainly one of the weirdest, spiritual works of the 20^th century. For one thing, as a spiritual text it uniquely satisfies our postmodern love of banality—Dick’s life fully embodied what might be called the banality of the spiritual . He was a visionary and a mystic, but also an ordinary, lonely, suffering guy in a cheap apartment with a crappy rug, trying unsuccessfully to date his college student neighbors. And in the end, he was slain not by the dark Gnostic forces of the Black Iron Prison or the conspiracies he so believed in and feared, but by high blood pressure.

Musings about sparking a new religion may have been at the back of Dick’s mind when he was writing his Exegesis . Various writers have drawn comparisons between Dick’s mystical revelations and the Gnostic visions of L. Ron Hubbard. ⁵⁵ Arnold points out that Dick would have been all too aware (and envious) of Hubbard’s weird success at turning science fiction into a religion with devoted followers. Dick’s mother had been a reader of Hubbard’s Dianetics , and living in California Dick would have encountered Church of Scientology members frequently. Fortunately, Dick lacked the money sense and guile to do much in the way of deliberate religion-founding. And his unreliability as a narrator notwithstanding, he was basically an honest chronicler of his experiences—he mainly wanted to understand them, not convince people of any single metaphysical picture that could provide the focus for a new belief system. Nothing in Dick’s writings suggests the easy answers that followers of new religious sects are often looking for.

But it is not hard to imagine some future society, maybe in a thousand years, after a nuclear holocaust perhaps, where the Bible has acquired a further testament, the Exegesis , and the iconography of Christ on the Cross has been replaced by some stylized representation of the 53-year-old Phil Dick sprawled unconscious on the crappy rug, next to his coffee table. In that future religion, God will be VALIS (or Ubik), a face and a voice—perhaps our own—speaking to us from our own future.