Imaginary Worlds - Visions of Philip K. Dick

Episode Date: April 5, 2018

Philip K. Dick is best known for his fiction that have been adapted to movies and TV shows like Blade Runner, Minority Report and Man in the High Castle. He wrote about multiple realities and fantastic worlds beyond the scope of our mundane everyday lives. But he also believed that he experienced one of those alternate realities in the winter of 1974. The problem is, he couldn't figure out which paranormal experience he had. Professor Richard Doyle, author Erik Davis and playwright Victoria Stewart discuss how one of the most influential science fiction authors of all time became a character in one of his own novels.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The guest of honor, Philip K. Dick. Now today, I mean, Philip K. Dick is considered one of the most important science fiction writers ever. There have been two dozen adaptations of his work. Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Scanner Darkly, Man in the High Castle. There's a new show that just came out, Electric Dreams of Philip K. Dick. But when he was alive, only hardcore science fiction readers and writers knew who he was. And like a lot of American artists that were ahead of their time, Philip K. Dick was appreciated first by the French.

In fact, he didn't think his career would have been possible if it weren't for the support of his French readers and publishers. So this conference in France in 1977 meant a lot to him. And the room was packed. He walked in wearing a silver button-down shirt and a wide yellow and brown tie. He had a robust beard that was white on the sides and brown in the middle, making him look a little bit like Ernest Hemingway. And he sat down at the table and said,

The subject of this speech is a topic which has been discovered recently and which may not exist at all. I may be talking about something that does not exist. That day, he talked about parallel universes, past lives, artificial intelligence coming from other planets, the kinds of things you'd expect to hear about in a Philip K. Dick novel. But he was not talking about his novels. We are living in a computer programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed and some alteration in our reality occurs. We would have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present. Deja vu.

I submit that these impressions are valid and significant. And I will even say this, such an impression is a clue that at some past time point, a variable was changed, reprogrammed as it were, and that because of this, an alternative world branched off. The audience was confused. This is not a joke. Then he came to this conclusion. Eric Davis teaches at UC Berkeley, and he's an expert on Philip K. Dick. And I think that the general reaction, at least in France, was confusion and a bit of rejection. It was not a home run.

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky, and today we are looking at one of the biggest mysteries in the history of science fiction. What happened to Philip K. Dick? Did he lose his mind? Or had he discovered something about the universe which is both profound and disturbing. So this whole story of what happened to Philip K. Dick begins in the early 1970s. He was living in Berkeley. He'd been there for a long time. His life was getting intense.

He had let his house become a hippie drug den, although he wasn't as much of a user as people think, considering how trippy his fiction was. But then somebody broke into his house and tried to blow up his safe, which contained all of his writing. Dick was, I think it's safe to say, just totally bewildered by this act. Richard Doyle teaches Philip K. Dick at Penn State, and he says Dick became obsessed with this break-in. He couldn't figure out were they drug dealers looking for cash? Was it the FBI? He just couldn't figure it out. And so he took a really rational move, which is he moved. In fact, he left the Bay Area completely. He was also in his mid-40s,

ready to settle down a little bit more. So he moved down to sunny, suburban Orange County. So he moved down to sunny, suburban Orange County. His life was pretty stable again. Until February of 1974. He had to get oral surgery. He was in a lot of pain afterwards. So he called his local pharmacy, which had a delivery service. And the pharmacy sent a young woman to his house.

And the delivery woman showed up at the door with, you know, I imagine one of those neat folded stapled bags that came from pharmacies in the 1970s. And he noticed the girl had a necklace with a fish symbol on it. He asked what it was, and she said it was a Christian symbol. And when the light reflected off of that fish necklace, Dick describes in various terms being momentarily blinded by a flash of pink light. And he had the experience of what he'd later call anamnosis or a deep remembering that he suddenly remembered enormous amounts of information about the world. And then as this continued on for a couple of weeks where he kept on having these visions where he was actually an apostle right after Christ had died. That is the writer Victoria Stewart.

She wrote a play about Philip K. Dick and the existential crisis that he went through. He was seeing visions of Rome superimposed on the street outside. He'd be walking by a school and he would see these children, you know, playing in the schoolyard, but he was seeing these Christian children who were being persecuted. And that, you know, in many ways, the empire never ended.

That ancient Rome, really, we've adjusted the details in the meantime, but sort of structural truths of the human condition and the stories that we live within are remarkably similar. And Philip K. Dick wasn't thinking metaphorically. I mean, he actually thought the Roman Empire never ended. It was just disguising itself as the American Empire. But he would experiment with the idea that he was experiencing a past life as an early Christian who was involved in essentially a Christian mystery cult that possessed the secret of immortality,

achieving such extraordinary self-knowledge that you would dissolve into the consciousness of God and then you would manifest out of that pure consciousness into another being as another being. And he heard voices too, but they weren't telling him to do crazy things like jump out the window. They're actually telling him to do very practical things like find out if he was owed a lot of back royalties from publishers. It fired my agent. It fired my publisher.

Here he is talking about that voice in a 1979 interview. It was very practical. It decided that the apartment had not been vacuumed adequately or not recently enough. It decided that I should stop drinking wine entirely because of the sediment. And it turned out I had abundance of uric acid in my system, and it switched me to beer. It made elementary mistakes. It kept calling the dog he and the cat she, which annoyed my wife, since I knew and she knew that the dog was a female and the cat was a male.

It kept calling her ma'am, and it would lapse into what turned out to be Koine Greek. She recognized it as Koine Greek because she'd taken some Attic Greek in school. I didn't even recognize it as a language. I thought it was just nonsense. Now, Philip K. Dick was actually on his fifth marriage. He had a young wife named Tessa and a young son. At one point, supposedly this voice that became known as Thomas was one of the people talking to him. And he said, there's something wrong with your son. There's something wrong with the stomach and gave him actually it was in Greek. And he's like, I don't know Greek.

And then they took his son who was a baby to the doctor and he had an undiagnosed hernia and they operated and his son was fine. So he always took that as a piece of evidence that somehow he was receiving some kind of information that he wouldn't normally have known. Why would he know that his son had a hernia? His friends and his wife, Tessa, were deeply concerned about him. And he was concerned too, but for different reasons. He was obsessed with trying to figure out what happened to him in February and March of 1974, the events of which he started calling 2374. And for the rest of his life, he wrote down his

theories into a book called the Exegesis. Exegesis is a religious term for an interpretation of scripture. And he didn't expect it to be published. But a version was published after he died. It was curated by a group of experts, including the novelist Jonathan Lethem and Eric Davis. Before we did the project, there had only been very small portions of the exegesis that had been published. So it's this massive amount of paper, you know, well over a million words, you know, sitting in a garage basically for a long period of time with people going, what are we going to do with this thing? And so it took a long time for Jonathan to convince Phil Dick's daughters to let us try to edit a portion of it. And that big fat book that you can buy is a,

you know, an abridgment of a document that if it was published in full would be about 10 times that long. So it's an enormous amount of writing and a great deal of it is bonkers, is hard to read, bonkers, is hard to read, is impossible to read, is pathological, paranoid, endlessly recursive, very difficult to grapple with. So what conclusions did Philip K. Dick come to about 2374? Well, as Richard Doyle mentioned earlier, one option was reincarnation. He thought maybe even the spirit of his friend, who was a bishop, was trying to contact him. But option number two was more like a Cold War thriller. He wondered if the KGB was experimenting on him with brainwave technology. His evidence for this is that when he had his visions in the winter of 1974,

he was seeing animated Kandinsky paintings, and Kandinsky was a Russian painter. He also got a strange letter in the mail with certain words circled, and he worried that they were trigger words meant to activate him like a sleeper cell. And he was attempting to understand it, and he said, oh my gosh, this is some sort of attempt

to enlist me into some sort of, you know, Soviet blackmail scheme. And the flip side of that theory, according to Richard Doyle, was that the FBI was trying to entrap him. He was worried living in Berkeley in the 1970s. He was worried that he had gone to some Communist Party meetings, and he was worried variously that either that the FBI was tracking him because of his anti-war countercultural activities, which was not an unreasonable concern for him to have. Option number three, aliens. Or more specifically, artificial intelligence built by aliens.

And the term he used to describe this life form was VALIS, which stood for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. And to make things more meta, or more Philip K. Dickian, he fictionalized that theory in a novel called VALIS, where a character named Phil Dick and his doppelganger named Horselover Fat are writing an exegesis of their own. In fact, his obsession with trying to figure out what happened to him on 2374 consumed his fiction for the rest of his life. Richard Doyle likes to joke that before 1974, most of Philip K. Dick's stories were about malevolent conspiracies, while after 1974, they were about benevolent conspiracies.

And Dick was aware that his theories in the exegesis resembled his fiction, which made him wonder if he actually wrote those stories. Maybe this alien artificial intelligence had beamed them into his head. By the end, I think he arrives at the idea that he wasn't writing his own novels. He said, it's not Ubik by Philip K. Dick, he writes this in the exegesis, but Philip K. Dick by Ubik. He also came to the conclusion that if all these theories resemble his own novels, then he was clearly making all of this up. that if all these theories resemble his own novels,

then he was clearly making all of this up. In other words, he might be going nuts. And honestly, that's hard to dismiss. I'm sure a lot of you out there are probably thinking the same thing. But that theory really bothers Richard Doyle. When we feel this kind of, eh, he's nuts. Well, you know, Van Gogh was nuts. Whitman was nuts. Emerson was nuts. Whitman was nuts.

Emerson was nuts. Steve Jobs was nuts. But I think what's concerning about it is that it points to a present moment where it feels like not only are we becoming increasingly incapable of disagreeing with each other and kind of tolerating a wide array of kind of viewpoints and experiences, but that when something extraordinary has happened to another person, we wish to discredit it through a kind of medical model. Eric Davis agrees it's just too easy to dismiss Philip K. Dick as crazy. He had been involved with psychotherapy from a young age. He was definitely not, as we say today, neurotypical. He was very, very, very well informed, at least from the 1950s, 1960s, not just with Jung, but also

existential therapists, and also a great deal about the neurological basis of psychosis. And actually at a time when most people in psychiatry were still thinking about psychosis. And actually at a time when most people in psychiatry were still thinking about psychosis as a, you know, a product of personality, of upbringing, of people were still really looking at a lot of the sort of family dynamics. He was pretty, also pretty early on saying, no, no, I think these things are, are biochemical and they can be therefore treated with drugs. So he had a, a very multi-layered view of where symptoms and underlying conditions came from. He relentlessly diagnosed himself, relentlessly, so much so that he kind of burned through

all the possibilities for everybody else. So when you get scholars or psychiatrists occasionally looking at his work and trying to diagnose him, he's like ahead of the game. But there was one possibility that Philip K. Dick couldn't shake. He was having a religious experience. And he was an observant Episcopalian. He had been going to church on a regular basis for decades.

And that theory inspired Victoria Stewart to write her play 800 Words, The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick. It's actually a very unique play for me. It's not. I tend to write a little bit more realistically, so it's fun to write something as crazy as that. Victoria sent me a recording of the play, and here's a scene where the character of Phil Dick talks to the audience. scene where the character of Phil Dick talks to the audience. People make the case that the Bible is science fiction, that God is science fiction, that taking a rib from Adam and making Eve cloning. The angels who sing the heralds? Aliens. They fly, they have knowledge of the future, unto you will be born a son. They make a barren woman fertile, a virgin a mother, and Jesus has knowledge of his death.

And if you don't think Revelations isn't one of the trippiest pieces of science fiction, it's all mathematical information, you know? As Victoria delved further into Philip K. Dick's writing for inspiration, she realized the play had to be as surreal as his novels. Like in his fiction, often there's this dark-haired woman that shows up who's supposed to represent his twin sister that died when they were babies. And so, of course, she's a character in the play. His cat is a character in the play who talks to him thanks to a puppeteer. And at one point, an actress playing Victoria Stewart herself walks on stage and reveals to him that he is a character in her play. There's this idea of maybe there's, again, someone else who's in control of the narrative.

I mean, that's one of the things that Philip K. Dick is always questioning, is there someone else in control of your narrative? You have all these books where you appear as a character, like in Valis or Radio Free Album, I thought I should try it, see what it felt like. What do you think? It's disorienting. Do you ever get to like it? No.

Why do you do it then? You do it a lot. It gives me a much needed objectivity in my autobiographical mouthfuls. If you're inside your work, how is that objective? It works for me. So, how's it going? The plane. I'm having problems with the ending. Well, at this point, how does the plane end?

How does the plane end? You know, with your death. So, are you looking forward to it? The show was set on March 2nd, 1982, the day that Philip K. Dick died of a stroke at the age of 53. The timing of his death is a key part of the drama, because he died seven months before Blade Runner came out. That movie, of course, was based on his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And Blade Runner began the uptick in sales that would eventually make Philip K. Dick a household name and one of the most sought-after writers for Hollywood adaptations.

And for a guy whose career meant everything to him, who always felt like he was underappreciated and underpaid, it's a tragedy that he didn't live to see the promised land where his work would have this huge cultural impact. where his work would have this huge cultural impact. And that's one of the reasons why Victoria finds it so moving that he went on this rigorous, torturous journey to figure out what those visions meant and why he had them. And he said, I can't decide between all these different possibilities and that that's infinite, and so therefore God is infinite, so therefore I have found God. He chose to believe and chose that part of this doubt and this questioning was actually an act of faith, as opposed to a negation of the faith. And I find that actually really refreshing and beautiful. I think it's something where, you know, I don't like someone who doesn't question their faith. Those people usually are a little scary, personally.

I feel like for me, I feel like I'm glad he figured it out for himself, but I don't feel like he figured it out for all of us, too. Yeah, yes. I think he figured it out for himself and not necessarily for everybody else. But, you know, that's why he's not the head of a religious movement. I don't think he felt the need to figure it out for everybody else. He just felt the need to tell you about his vision so that you could then make your decisions. Now, personally, I find the exegesis compelling because we all struggle with these big questions

in life. But very few people decide they have the genius or hubris to try and figure out the whole universe. But, you know, I still imagine that some of you may be thinking, okay, fine, Philip K. Dick was a genius, but am I really supposed to take these theories seriously? And I asked Richard and Eric Davis and Victoria, why should people care about the exegesis? And they all said the same thing. They said, look, you may not think that Philip K. Dick was a literal prophet, but he was certainly a prophet of our age, the same thing. They said, look, you may not think that Philip K. Dick was a literal prophet, but he was certainly a prophet of our age, the information age. And for that reason, we should care about the way his mind works.

Again, Richard Doyle. On a daily basis, Eric, you and I are subjected to more flows of information by so many orders of magnitude than any human beings in the history of the planet that we would be puzzled if there weren't some symptoms that came out of that. So he seemed to be so sensitive to the changes that were about to be wrought technologically on the life world that we all find ourselves living in. And then when we read the novels, it feels very familiar to us to not be able to tell, for example, if somebody is listening in on our information when, in fact, now we live in like all the information that we, of course, share with each other is immensely leaky and is always about to manifest in some way that we can't predict. And so we read a novel like Ubik and we say, wow, that is so resonant, not only with the content of the present, but what I'm feeling. Eric Davis agrees.

This is captured in this wonderful scene in Ubik where Joe Chip tries to get out of his home. Everything, it costs a little bit. You know, everything in your, your toaster, everything you got to use, you know, you got to give it a little bit of cash because it's all demanding this little bit of cash and he can't get out because he doesn't have the coin to get out of the front door so he can't like get out of his own pile. Now we got the chips inside the toaster and the toaster breaks. You don't know what's wrong with it anymore and you can't figure it out. And, you know, everything is being increasingly licensed rather than owned. And there's there's

always these sort of corporate entities who are nibbling at little bits of all of our everyday transactions. And that creates a certain quality of unease, a sort of slightly paranoid sense or a sense of being crowded by these incorporeal entities. And Dick captured the vibe of that incredibly well. In fact, Eric Davis actually thinks that VALIS, the alien artificial intelligence that was filling Philip K. Dick's head with more information than he ever wanted to know, information he wasn't sure if it was accurate or not, bears a striking resemblance to the internet. And as Victoria pointed out, So much of pop culture now, and so much of science fiction has in fact been influenced by him.

You know, Westworld would not exist without Philip K. Dick. You know, obviously Blade Runner and the things are actually adaptations. But then, you know, the Truman Show, most people feel has, you know, Philip K. Dick had a thumbprint in that. Battlestar Galactica, they had to start referencing Blade Runner because it was just too obvious. Yeah, right.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of his ideas about what is human, what is reality, how is consumerism going to affect technology and how that's going to infiltrate everything we do? I mean, all those things are becoming more and more relevant. Even that speech we heard from the beginning in France in 1977, where he's saying we may be living in a computer simulation. And the only way to know if the computer glitches is if we have deja vu. He's describing the premise of The Matrix 22 years before that movie came out. But when I listen to these old interviews with Philip K. Dick, the thing that

I find most endearing is that after he talks about the pink light, the aliens, reincarnation, mind control, he's talking about the nuts and bolts of being a writer, how many copies his last novel sold, the deals he wasn't getting, the agents who weren't getting back to him. I mean, he just sounds like a guy trying to make a buck, doing the one thing that he knows he's really good at. I mean, he was very much working class, and he really had to worry about putting food on the table, which I think is one of the great things about him as a writer, is he's actually probably more grounded. You know, it's always these working class guys who are dealing with these extraordinary worlds, but they have to worry about making money and their nagging wife and doing the laundry.

Eric Davis says that is the thing that filmmakers often miss when they adapt the work of Philip K. Dick. And it's the thing that makes his work feel so real to us. And it's the thing that makes his work feel so real to us. If you hold up his wildest, craziest science fiction books in the right light, if you angle them correctly, you see that they're just filled with mundane, domestic drama, ordinary feelings of impotence and confusion, the decay of our plans and all the objects in our life that we can barely keep together just to get it through the day. But then they're filled with all of these marvels and wonders and nightmares and humor and absurdism that's much more visible from the get go. And that's the part that they want to make into, you know, a crazy Hollywood movie or whatever. I mean, the thing that I keep thinking about is how much Philip K. Dick's experience in 2374 and the exegesis resembles his own novels. But as the

writer of his novels, he was the god of his own universe. I mean, he already knew what conspiracies his characters were going to uncover. And, you know, he died suddenly, so it's not like he reached this big aha moment conclusion at the end of the exegesis. But towards the end, he did begin to find comfort in realizing that some of the biggest questions in life are not going to have answers. They're not supposed to. I mean, personally, I wish he'd come to that realization sooner. I wish he was less consumed with this obsession. But then again, I wish a lot of things for him. I mean, I wish he lived to see his works truly appreciated.

But, I mean, that was his life struggle. You know, he had this incessant drive to keep pushing forward without truly knowing if he was on the right path, which is another definition for faith. But that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Eric Davis, Richard Doyle, and Victoria Stewart. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. My assistant producer is Stephaniehanie billman you can like the show on facebook i tweet at eve malinsky and imagine worlds pod

my website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org