Philip K Dick Letters

As an advance taster to what you are likely to find in my next book I would like to discuss the subject of the last chapter ... a gentleman that you all know seems to have some peculiar link with both ITLAD and possibly even myself (viz the Anarch Peak character in "Counter Clock World").

Throughout his life PKD called his Daemon many names but the one that he settled on was the Vast Active Living and Intelligent System, or VALIS. However it was not until 1981 that he was to write a novel by that name. Driven by the fact that his precognitive skills were telling him that he did not have long to live – again a precognition that was to prove correct as he was to die a year later of a stroke – Phil was keen to get his theories down on paper. For years he had been writing a narrative of his philosophy that he was to call Exegesis. However this was virtually unpublishable so Phil decided that he would write a fiction around the facts of his life.

For those of you who have read my first book Is There Life After Death? - The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When You Die, (ITLAD), 'Valis' makes a simply fascinating read. Yet again we have Dick embroidering a state of consciousness that I argue is more real than reality itself into a barely disguised biography.

Right from the start Dick wants it made clear that he is two personalities. The main character is the curiously named Horselover Fat. Curious only if you don’t understand basic Greek and basic German in which case the pun is fairly clear. ‘Horse lover’ in Greek is translated as Philos Hippus and Fat is English for the German word Dick. So there you have it. Clearly Horselover Fat is Phil himself. However we soon discover that the narrator of this tale is a sober science fiction writer by the name of Philip K. Dick. We are already in the land of duality twins and doppelgangers that Dick was so fascinated post March 1974. However writer Phil expands on many of the other themes that had filled his life for seven years.

Horse Fat is convinced that reality is an illusion. He has come to this conclusion after years of reading Gnostic texts. Narrator Phil is not convinced of this belief but agrees to join Fat on a journey to Northern California to find a band called Mother Goose. Whilst there they meet a young girl by the name of Sophia. Clearly the name was picked by Dick to show that this girl is some form of Gnostic deity. Indeed this proves to be the case when she brings about the fusing of Fat and Dick into a single being. This is a clear reference to Dick’s belief that his personal amanuensis fused his Daemon and Eidolon in March 1974.

This fusing of his two personalities allows the narrator to perceive reality as having two versions;
Fat perceives the ‘Matrix’ whereas Phil has always existed within the confines of the ‘Black Iron Prison’ of the Demiurge.

Sophia brings about the joining together of the two aspects of Phil’s personality because she is the embodiment of a ‘VALIS’, as we have already seen this is an acronym for Vast Acting Living Intelligence System. This is a form of metaphysical DNA that can replicate itself inside the brain. Like a virus it can spread through the cortex and in doing so open up that persons consciousness to perceive the reality of the ‘Matrix’. Once this takes place the person becomes a ‘homeoplasmate’ or a unified being that perceives the Matrix as true reality.

In this way the real Philip K Dick explained to his readers what had happened to him in 1974. For Sophia/Valis read my Daemon. I contend that although involved in Dick’s life from a very early age the Daemon could only communicate with its Eidolon in a more directing way when Phil’s brain structures became open to the communication. This may have been brought about by the onset of temporal lobe epilepsy in his later years. It is possible that Phil’s contention that when a young man he was diagnosed with schizophrenia was why the messages were garbled and unclear until 1974.

If my theory is right then Phil Dick’s Daemon, under the pseudonym VALIS, made a concerted attempt to have its famous writer Eidolon set out in fictional format the philosophy of reality that I was later to describe in my book Is There Life After Death? Literally everything is there. However Phil was to misunderstand the message and confuse some of the elements. However a careful reading of his work in the light of mine may bring you to some startling conclusions.

But there is one really fascinating proof of Dick’s Daemon and its precognitive abilities. I believe that I have discovered evidence that his Daemon gave Phil an image of his own final moments.

As you may recall I have discovered a thus far unpublished treasure trove of letters sent by Phil to a pen pal in the early 1970s. As I was looking for a suitable ending to this chapter I came across one written on February 25th 1975. This letter carried the following fascinating postscript:

I was up to 5 a.m. on this last night. I did something I never did before; I commanded the entity to show itself to me – the entity which has been guiding me internally since March. A sort of dream-like period passed, then, of hypnogogic images of underwater cities, very nice, and then a stark single horrifying scene, inert but not still; a man lay dead, on his face, in a living room between the coffee table and the couch."*

On February 18th 1982 Phil’s neighbours become concerned that they had not seen him that day. They knocked on his door then forced their way into the apartment. They found Phil lying unconscious in the living room. This was a place that Phil in 1975 would not have recognised. It is likely that he would have been found in exactly the position and location described so clearly in Phil’s Daemon-evoked hypnogogic almost exactly seven years before. Phil was not dead at this time but clearly in his dream-vision Phil could not have known if the man was actually dead or unconscious. He was to die about a week later without really gaining consciousness.

Now please note that Phil was quite precise in his command to his Daemon – he requested that it show itself. I believe that that is exactly what the Daemon did. It showed a future Phil in the last few moments of his conscious awareness before the stroke severed his links with ‘reality’ as he perceived it. In doing so the Daemon implied that it was Phil himself in the final moments of his life – existing in the half-life described in Ubik and explained in my first book.

Could this be another Daemonic clue that we do, indeed, Cheat The Ferryman?

*Dick, Philip K Letter to Claudia Krenz - 25th February 1975.