Phillip K. Dick, much like John Nash and James Angleton was a victim of paranoid persecutory “delusions” which closely parallel the organization responsible for modern day Targeted Individuals. Many of his stories center around themes that can be easily explained with mind control technology, and his personal experience seems to be one that closely parallels the persecutory belief system as existence of a hidden influence, much like the one he described in The Adjustment Bureau.
The timeline of his works serves to add to and verify the Orwell and Huxley time lines, complete with an entry to a school whose name is a loose allusion to Eden, John Eaton Elementary, in 1936-38. Exactly 26 years later published The Man in the High Castle and Martian-Time Slip, which may indicate a possible cause for the first book. 26 years later, posthumously, in ’88 VALIS was released as an Opera in English, and in ’90 Total Recall was released. The pattern mimicking the hidden synchronicity in Orwell and Huxley‘s works ends in the period between 2014 and 2016. (As does Orwell’s).
In a second pattern, in two equidistant 38 year blocks between Dick’s entry to John Eaton in 1936 and 2012, the beginning of the four year period indicated by Orwell’s re-titling of 1984, Dick had his religious epiphany, which he titled 2-3-1974.
In a second pattern, in two equidistant 38 year blocks between Dick’s entry to John Eaton in 1936 and 2012, the beginning of the four year period indicated by Orwell’s re-titling of 1984, Dick had his religious epiphany, which he titled 2-3-1974.
He was a religious visionary whose theology was articulated in his science fiction novels, a Gnostic thinker who doubted the reality of the world around him, a paranoid who believed the CIA was tapping his phone.
The early 1970s were a traumatic period for Dick, with all the personal problems of the sixties further complicated by his growing status as a cult figure. His third wife had left him, and his Northern California home had become a crash pad and commune for junkies and runaways. His fragile sanity fared no better than his relationships, and he became buried in his own paranoia, hiring hit men to protect his drug-addicted friends and becoming convinced that the FBI was watching his every move.
Eventually, there was a break-in at his home. His filing cabinet was forced open and many papers, including all his tax records and cancelled checks, were stolen. Later he had an interaction with a girl, which resembles somewhat the “Angelic touch” of Sirhan Sirhan, and resulted in a significant religious experience of which the understanding of it occupied much of the remainder of his life.
Whether or not Dick himself was both victim and perpetrator of the break-in, his mental state was becoming increasingly more unstable. Planning to attend an international sci-fi convention, he fled to Canada where he tried to fraternize with the science-fiction community, but he couldn’t escape his problems. After a suicide attempt, he was admitted to a drug rehabilitation center.
In the early months of 1974 Dick experienced hallucinations, dreams, synchronicities and Gnostic visions that he collectively referred to as “2-3-74,” shorthand for “February/March 1974.” Dick would spend the rest of his life attempting to unravel the meaning of these events in a thousand-page handwritten manuscript he came to call the Exegesis.
Dick came to believe that an alien intelligence/technology (that could quite possibly also be God) was communicating to him through an interface he called the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, or VALIS. This system took the form of a ship in outer space, delivering highly concentrated doses of information to him through beams of pink light. Dick himself described it as an “invasion” of his consciousness “by a transcendentally rational mind.”
Consider that the delusions suffered by Dick, much like the others, are not only related to the technology which Dick spent a significant amount of time writing about, but also on the same entity and loose group of humans assisting VALIS in order to artificially instill these beliefs.
So in a strange twist of wikipedia linking, I was reading this very humorous quote from PKD: "Well, once again we are invaded. And, humiliatingly, by a lifeform which is absurd. My colleague Tim Powers once said that Martians could invade us simply by putting on funny hats, and we'd never notice. It's a sort of low-budget invasion. I guess we're at the point where we can be amused by the idea of Earth being invaded. (And this is when they really zap you.)"Which lead me to this interesting gentleman, Tim Powers, who, uses actual, documented historical events featuring famous people, but shows another view of them in which occult or supernatural factors heavily influence the motivations and actions of the characters.I think he knows 🙂