Philip K Dick & Brad Steiger

Please accept my apologies for re-visiting this theme but it was last discussed in February this year and I am sure that many new members of this blog are probably unaware of it. The reason I am referencing it again is that Brad Steiger has just had an article published on 'The Anomolist' and 'Coast To Coast' websites in the USA. This article has caused considerable interest with over 4,000 visits in the first few days. Brad was a close friend of the Great Man and I was honoured when he sent me a copy of this article before it was published. Brad and Brent Raynes of 'Alternative Perceptions Magazine' are very interested in something that I came across in my research on PKD for my next book. This is what I wrote in the February posting:

"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!"

It would be good to hear from any of you 'Dickheads' out there with regard to this fascinating bit of information.