Philip K Dick

I am really excited this morning. I am in the process of writing a chapter of my new book The Daemon Of Creativity. Central to this book will be that certain creative people are motivated and guided by their Daemon. I will argue that this is why many writers, artists, poets etc seem to show signs of temporal lobe epilepsy and even schizophrenia. The chapter is on the American Science Fiction writer Philip K Dick. This guy lived a life in which he experienced almost all the elements of the Ferryman Thesis - he was a living example of how credible the theory is. However one thing that I have only been able to get from secondary sources is that he was able to see the future - and these are questionable and open to interpretation. Well today, and quite by chance, I have found a series of letters that PKD wrote to a pen pal in 1974 on a really obscure personal website set up by the lady in question herself. I have most of the biographies of Dick and I regularly check out most of the websites on him and I have never heard of these letters. They seem virtually unknown. Imagine my excitement when I came across a zeroxed copy of one particular type-written letter that he sent to her on May 9th 1974. This date is very important because Dick had just encountered his Daemon in mid March of that year (he called it various names including AI, Sophia and VALIS). The letter is not that unusual but there is a hand-written note at the bottom that reads "P.S. What really scares me most, Claudia, is that I can often recall the future." Now what excites me about this is not just that he claims to see the future but his use of words (and Phil Dick was always very specific about his word use). He says that he 'recall(s) the future'. This implies that he senses that this is a re-experience of an already lived event. If you have read my first book you will be aware that this idea is absolutely central to my theory. We are all living our lives again in an inwardly generated illusion. Deja Vu (Vecu) is a short-term remembering of the last time you lived this moment. I argue that those with TLE and schizophrenia have uncontrolled access to these 'memories' and that is why they experience regular deja vu and precognitive feelings. It has long been argued that PKD had TLE and he himself claimed that he had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. I rest my case!