The three letters “PKD” have become an abbreviation for readers of Philip K. Dick’s work to identify themselves and find others. The man’s initials inspire admiration among fans and ridicule among detractors.

I had the great honor and privilege of spending ten years with a great genius. Those were the last ten years of Phil’s life.

Falsely branded a brain-damaged drug addict, Philip K. Dick continued to produce stories in which the ideas of the great philosophers were brought into concrete reality. The accusations of insanity hurt him, but he refused to engage in a futile argument with his accusers.

If you produce one of your best works, A scanner in the dark, did not prove that he had all his faculties, so any effort to prove his sanity was futile.

Yes, he was diagnosed with manic depressive and then bipolar (same thing, with a new label), but his tendency to experience big mood swings had nothing to do with drugs. His hyperactivity was simply a symptom of his premature birth. He also suffered from asthma and hypertension, having been born six weeks earlier. Phil and his twin sister were little babies. In fact, Phil was one of the smallest babies to survive and his twin sister did not survive. Medical science has advanced considerably since 1928; however, even today, premature babies experience a host of medical problems as they grow older and do not live as long as full-term babies.

When my husband began experiencing visions in February 1974, he could have been having minor strokes due to his high blood pressure, which kept getting out of control. At one point, he was hospitalized for ten days so that doctors could closely monitor his blood pressure while they adjusted his medication.

The minor strokes might explain the flashes of bright light that Phil saw, but they would not explain the content of his visionary experience. I was there and I know that he was not abusing any substance, so you can throw it out the window.

Also, there were some visible and tangible events. For example, one night the radio kept playing after I turned it off. One afternoon, a yellow van pulled up in the driveway and workers in white overalls carried half a dozen large unlabeled cardboard boxes to the empty apartment next door. We were curious, so when we found the door open, we went inside. We found all kinds of electronic equipment in the hall closet and a working telephone in the kitchen of that supposedly empty apartment. Strange cars started pulling up in the alley behind our apartment and stayed there for up to half an hour at a time.

The visions stopped when we moved out of that apartment, so I can’t help but think that the electronic equipment in the apartment next door had something to do with Phil’s experience.

Having said that, Phil viewed the phenomenon as an attack by unknown forces followed by a rescue by equally unknown forces. It began with voices coming over the radio by the bed and telling him to die, and it ended with a message of hope and healing.

I can’t help but believe that Phil experienced something very real, but that something defies explanation. He spent the last eight years of his life trying to explain it and wrote thousands of pages about it, but never found a satisfactory solution to the puzzle of his 1974 visionary experiences.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the experience was that people introduced themselves to him as time travelers. They said that someone had changed history, that they didn’t like the result, and that they were trying to repair our timeline to produce a more hospitable future. They introduced the idea of ​​orthogonal time, which appears prominently in Phil Exegesis. They explained that there are alternate timelines perpendicular to the timeline we experience, like a series of dominoes stacked over our world. Time travelers, or rather time meddlers, were able to punch gaps in our timeline and place one or more sections of alternate timelines in those gaps.

The time travelers warned Phil that America was in danger of becoming a police state much like the setting in George Orwell’s dystopian novel. 1984. Our televisions would watch us, indoctrinate and numb our senses to the reality of an increasingly restricted life. Our friends and neighbors would turn us over to the authorities for the slightest offenses, fearing that they would be punished if they did not report our smallest transgressions, such as taking out our trash cans on the wrong night or crossing the street in the middle. from the block instead of on the corner The government would control our thoughts, as well as our actions, down to the smallest detail. Orwell’s “Big Brother” was becoming a reality. Those predictions seemed possible, if unlikely, in the midst of the War on Drugs. Today, instead, that possibility is becoming a probability.

On the one hand, researchers are exploring ways to communicate directly with the brains of people with electronic devices, while others are looking for ways to receive messages directly from the brains of people with electronic devices. These efforts may seem in vain, your goals impossible, but you are trying to achieve positive results. In fact, with the miniaturization of electronics, it is possible to implant a small receiver in a person’s ear and transmit to him, in much the same way as making a call on a cell phone.

There is more and it is scary.

Since that tragic morning in September 2001, we have seen our personal freedoms stripped away, a seemingly insignificant part at a time. Older women are searched before boarding an airline flight, children’s toys are vandalized or confiscated, and we are not allowed to carry bottled water or nail clippers beyond the gate. We can’t even lock our checked luggage as that would prevent strangers from opening our bags to look inside. We are required to obtain passports to visit our neighboring countries, whereas in the past all we needed to cross into Mexico or Canada was a driver’s license or non-driver ID. Oh yes, you can still enter Mexico without a passport, but you cannot return to the United States without one. And did you know that all new passports contain tracking devices that allow the authorities to know exactly where you are? Is Big Brother watching you?

I’m scaring myself so I’ll stop here.

~~ Tessa B. Dick