Handbook for Those Obsessed with PKD

I love being obsessed! Careening around the dark corners of the mind looking for the absolute. Nothing like it!


And you? Don’t know what it’s like? Try this. Imagine descending late at night down swirling stairs into your castle keep, imagine sweeping everything off a table in a dark room where ancient manuscripts, maps, reference books, travel guides, letters, novels, and poetry lie everywhere, imagine planting a blazing light inches from your face and focusing your eyeballs so intensely that they become a single eye, like a gigantic robot-eye surging with power and purpose, forgetting everything else—food, family, friends, work, science, religion, all the “isms,” drugs, alcohol, sex, money, stars and the infinitude of Blake and Whitman in a blade of grass. For fire and death and truth and madness, wouldn’t you, like Macbeth, “jump the life to come?” And the books of PKD!

I would rather have this literary madness than a sharply honed intellect that can slice a thought into a thousand pieces and architect them up like a house of cards. With notes. (God bless the soul that can walk the middle way with the Buddha! Alas, not me. I prefer the cliff!) From youth on, I have skulked like Gollum through literary obsessions—Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Josef Conrad, Ray Bradbury, J. R. R Tolkien, Arthur Conan Doyle, Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, H. P. Lovecraft, Faulkner, Dostoyevski—and now, in the white beard of my days, Philip K. Dick!

I didn’t know it was obsession until Dick came along; till then the madness was normal. Now I recognize the heat in the brain and nod secretively when I think of what the white rooms down the hall are for. I must have known when I read all of King Lear every night for six months! If not then, I do now. It’s all coming into focus . . .  down the spiral stairs . . . into the castle keep:

Imagine a room full of computers manned by individuals each controlling a human killer in a sequence of random moments so that the killer can assassinate the embodiment of perfect predictability who was chosen at random but not really. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in Solar Lottery.

Imagine a guy hit by a beam of energy and sucked into the realities of those around him one at a time and foregoing a chance to ascend to heaven by merely hanging off the handle of an umbrella in order to find the truth and return to his own world which may be his alone and not so hot after all. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in Eye in the Sky.  

Imagine life and death and time being so ambiguously each other that God can talk through an aerosol spray can while the world crumbles backward in time which can’t be stopped because the aerosol spray which is supposed to stop it is also crumbling back in time making it less and less possible that God can do more than spray messages on a bathroom wall. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in Ubik.

Imagine a drug-saturated human monster turning the entire universe into his own likeness and it’s all okay with those being corrupted as they sit beside him and quietly chat. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Imagine a man who is reluctantly waging nuclear war upon lunar colonies over mineral rights and redeems himself by engaging in psychotic time travel. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in Time Out of Joint.

Imagine a planet where sanity is most concentrated in an autistic child and a schizophrenic handy man and where land speculators insanely try to get a leg up by having the autistic child peer into the future to see what happens to a piece of land that only the indigenous people can traverse. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in Martian Time-Slip.

Imagine God flying to Earth from Mars and having a hard time getting through customs. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in Divine Invasion.

Imagine a man living in a totalitarian state getting messages from God through a satellite sent to earth from a distant star which is destroyed by the nation’s arch enemy which is furtively its best friend and never mind because another satellite is on its way but won’t be there for a hundred years and meanwhile never mind—you’re dead.  What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in Radio Free Albemuth.

Imagine a Christ-figure laboring up a mountain mind-linked to human beings seeking hope while being stoned by others not seeking hope and being fake and real at the same time on TV. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Imagine a moon far away being governed successfully by people beset by every kind of insanity and supported by a race of giant insects. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in Clans of the Alphane Moon.

Imagine a man who thinks he can think an atomic war into reality and does it and survives long enough to see it all being put back together again better than before. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up?  —Philip K. Dick in Dr. Bloodmoney.

Imagine moving backward in time in order to move forward in time and having a robotic cab give you the skinny on what it all means while a war rages on in which the allies are really the enemy and the world leader keeps things going by collaborating with himself in different timelines. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in Now Wait For Last Year.

Imagine suddenly waking up in a strange world where you do not exist except inside the psychedelic hallucination of the daughter of the top cop in the totalitarian state you are dreaming who cries tears of compassion at the end. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up?  —Philip K. Dick in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

Imagine a land conquered by two totalitarian states but which may actually be governed by an ancient oracle. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in The Man in the High Castle.

Imagine a man who descends into madness as he unwittingly spies on himself through a police scanner and at the end outside the government asylum he’s committed to finds a blue flower from which the stuff that made him insane is made and now that he’s in there he’s supposed to be a spy. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in A Scanner Darkly. 

Imagine the daughter-in-law of an Episcopal priest who died in the desert with a couple of coke cans looking for Jesus finding freedom from all that by tricking her spiritual advisor into giving her a record of Japanese koto music. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

Imagine a reality so saturated with despair that only a perfect illusion can hold insanity at bay and then only temporarily. Again and again. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in Maze of Death.

Imagine an insane man dealing satisfactorily with his affliction by splitting himself up into three people, tracking down God and finding her to be a little girl, who quickly dies, then sending a piece of himself on a journey throughout the world looking for the 5^th messiah, all with the support of loyal friends and his writer self who stays at home and is up all night every night taking notes. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in VALIS.

Imagine reality wrestling endlessly with itself without resolution whipping the tail of a crazed writer who is obsessively thinking himself into oblivion. What mad dreamer could have dreamed this up? —Philip K. Dick in Exegesis.   

So you want try out obsession? Ready to take it on? There’s lots to work with in these books and it’s a ride you may never want to get off of. Like you have a choice. Pulling yourself back together, you walk back up the spiral stairs and you wonder why you never knew the sun was so bright. Want to try it out? So, let the man teach you. 

Stretch your life to the chalky edge! Ravage the world with the fire of your mind! Rub the ink off the page as you parse every phrase! Descend the secret stairs late into the night! Again and again and again.    --John Lentz