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In March 1974, Philip Kindred Dick, a science fiction writer, went through a series of
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extrasensory experiences that remain unexplained to this day.
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The subject himself later referred to these events as an encounter with God and used
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it as a storyline for some of his novels. You have been entrusted to determine the
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true nature of these events. At present day, the writings of Philip K. Dick have
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reached considerable levels of popularity for what was considered a cult
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writer and many of his stories have been adapted to films such as Blade Runner,
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Total Recall, and Minority Report. Gentlemen, the future circulation of his
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work will be based on the results of your investigation. We will start at the beginning.
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The subject of this speech is a topic which has been discovered recently and which may not
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exist at all. I may be talking about something that does not exist, therefore I'm free to say
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everything or nothing. He was born in 1928, which was really in the middle of not quite the end of
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the big depression in this country, so his mother was poor, lucky to have a job, and of course the
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death of the little girl was certainly had a tremendous effect on Dorothy too. They had been
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born about two months early and they were both very small and at the time Phil was one of the
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smallest premature babies to survive, but his sister was even smaller and she simply did not
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make it. He thought that she should have lived and he died. He thought that he was living at her
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expense. Dorothy couldn't afford very much milk for them and Phil was always so hungry that she
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gave him more than she gave to Phil's sister, so Phil felt in some ways that it was his fault that
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his sister died. And at the same time he developed a personality in his mind about how she would be
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if she had lived and into that personality he injected all sorts of things from what we'd
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called his the feminine side of his personality. He actually drew her picture several times for me,
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but the pictures they looked a lot like him. It was like him on a diet. He felt a connection
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with what might have been and since a lot of his writing has to do with the nature of reality,
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I think that had a very strong effect on it. You know what might have been.
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The changing information which we experience as world is an unfolding narrative. It tells about
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the death of a woman. This woman who died long ago was one of the primordial twins. The purpose
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of the narrative is the recollection of her and of her death. The mind does not wish to forget her.
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I can see him in my mind's eye. I can see him as he was then. Sick quite a lot of the time. He was
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a sickly boy. We went to grade school together at Hillside School in Berkeley. I wasn't aware of any
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mental problems, but I was aware that he was quite a strange boy and I liked that.
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He lived with his mother. Dicks were divorced. The father lived in San Mateo and Mrs. Dick. I
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don't think I ever saw her fully clothed and vertical. She was always resting in bed early
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evening. I only remember seeing his mother in the kitchen once and she was making a
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melted cheese sandwich. And think of it, I never saw him eat anything. And that's strange because
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you know kids that age are eating all the time and drinking all the time. And then I saw her
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feed the cat sometimes, but never got into a good conversation with him.
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In the early 1930s, young Philip and his mother Dorothy settled in Berkeley, California. It is
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said that his mother encouraged Philip's early interest for literature, but it is also undeniable
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that the intellectual environment of the city of Berkeley had an impact in the child's development.
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I know that Philip was writing in high school and that he wrote short stories and early on
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he had a little story published in the local newspaper which had a column for kids stories.
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I have never seen that story. I would love to see it. I don't know anything about it except
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it was a science fiction story. I started having a lot of anxiety attacks going to high school.
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Sweats, palpitations, shortness of breath. They considered it anxiety. Now we probably would
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think more panic disorder, panic attacks, and those are different. He started to write
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science fiction to disassociate. That was his word, to escape. The question of when Phil and I
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discovered fantasy, I think we first discovered it in comic books.
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Here's a classic.
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We were all comic book collectors and we went quite quickly from comic books to pulp magazines.
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At that time there were a great many cheap fiction magazines and Phil and I were both collectors.
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Oh we were both nerds. We were both sort of like classical music so much and he had this
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great advantage of living in a strange arrangement with his mother. His mother lived upstairs
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and the downstairs the living room with a huge Magnavox and we had that to ourselves every
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afternoon and into the night where we could listen to Beethoven, Brahms. When Philip was in high
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school he got his first regular job at university radio. University radio at that time was strictly
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radios and then as time went on they sold television sets too. The owner of university
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radio also owned Art Music. Art Music, the other store that Herb Hollis owned, was closer to the
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campus, the university campus, and was all records. And since Philip was mostly interested in the
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and since Philip was mostly interested in the music, after his high school days he and Hollis
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had a good relationship, almost a father-son relationship, and Philip was moved up to Art
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Music where he knew what he was talking about and was interested in what he was doing selling the
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music. And then when he really blossomed out and got to know people when he started working at the
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record store, just taught him how to deal with people. I always had the feeling he must be
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working in the basement because he was so afraid of other people. But no, he was a good salesman,
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he liked people, he could pick up girls there. You know he was married once before me. It lasted
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just a few months. Oh he told me that story that was the first girl he slept with and then he
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thought he had her pregnant and that's why he got married. But I didn't believe that because it
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sounded too good to be true as a story. His story about why that marriage broke up was that his
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wife Jeanette, who nobody's been able to trace since, I have no idea if she's still alive or
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nobody ever heard of her after that in his circle. The story was that Jeanette had a brother
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who came to visit the apartment and Philip had a huge record collection and Jeanette's brother
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had objections to that and he didn't think a real man should be that hung up on music
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and that Philip felt that the collection was actually threatened, physically threatened,
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and that's why they broke up. Now you know I doubt that that was really the whole story
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but that's the story he told.
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He started at the University of California and didn't stay a full semester and he was
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virtually self-taught. You know he loved literature and he was very interested in psychology and
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science and you name it. So he really gave himself a pretty good education which stood
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in a good stead I think later on and in any case whatever happened he dropped out of the university.
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So here he was on his own living in his own apartment by this time in the middle of a university
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setting with university kids coming by all the time, myself, to the music store and that was our
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major connection initially was through the music. He would recommend things that he thought I would
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like to hear and it was a very musical courtship. They had listening booths which were very private
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and we had musical discussions, actually musical discussions often, but at any rate it was the
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music that drew us together. After about a year and a half we got married and that's substantially
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how we got together. On June 14th 1950 Philip K. Dick married Cleo, his second wife, and together
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they lived in a modest house at 1126 Francisco Street. It was at this time that Philip decided
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to become a professional writer. His wife was very supportive and his marriage created a perfect
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working environment. He felt that somebody would buy his stuff. He knew the magazines very well
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and he knew he was writing very well and we both knew that he would be
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published at some point. And Phil at that time he wrote a lot of short stories one right after
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the other real fast and they all sold because they were pretty good. Some of them the very
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first story he saw he wrote in the science fiction style sold. Anthony Boucher was the editor of the
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magazine of fantasy and science fiction and he had been publishing stories for years and Philip
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sent him some stuff and he was very encouraging and in fact bought the first story, the story
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that they called Friday Morning which was originally called Ruge.
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Spiffer was an Australian shepherd probably at least eight or nine years old and you know black
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and white beautiful dog and the dog would run across here. So in Philip's story
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there was a dog very much like Spiffer who realized that what people called garbage men
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were actually Rugs, R-O-O-G and that's what he was calling. He wasn't just barking see he was saying
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RUG, RUG. So and he tries to protect the family from the Rugs. He doesn't know if the Rugs intend
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to eat everybody or if they are only eating the garbage. All he knows is they're taking the
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garbage away and storing it somewhere and that's Spiffer's story, wonderful dog, gosh.
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I would say that the main theme in Phil's fantasy writing is the uncertainty of reality.
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That's something he comes back to time and again there are people who believe one thing is to
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be true and that occurrence that discovery usually an unpleasant discovery of the reality
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being other than we think it is. That is the big fat thread that all of the other threads are
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attached to I think. What's real and what's not is the big fat thread that all of the other threads
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attached to I think. What's real and what is unreal is the basis of course of Philip's stuff
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and is the basis I think of any decent fiction writers stuff. One thing that puzzled Phil Dick
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throughout his life he never quite trusted reality. He was never sure this table was
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going to be a table in the next minute. And he was also a pioneer in having a deep skepticism
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about the nature of reality and that's the aspect of Dick's work that I think makes him
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seem so peculiarly contemporary. How do I know that my internal view of reality is real? Then
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you have a Philip kind of situation. There are many realities maybe or are we like flies and we see
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with a lot of different lenses maybe it's all the same thing we're seeing and maybe it isn't.
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You know maybe there are as many realities as lenses in a fly's eye. He had a rather complex
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psychological life. He had numerous nervous breakdowns whatever that means. He went to see
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a psychiatrist as a teenager. He had various phobias agoraphobia, eating phobias and so forth.
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And he also himself felt and worked out in his fiction a profound sense that the boundary
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between his inside psychological life and the exterior world was not altogether clear cut and
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unambiguous. That that boundary was a shifting boundary and to some extent maybe even indeterminate.
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And then the hallucination if it was that happened. He saw the personal manager in a new light.
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The man was dead. He saw through the man's skin his skeleton. It had been wired together.
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The bones connected with fine copper wire. The man's voice issued from a tape through an amplifier
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and his speaker system. That was when panic overtook him.
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One of the most stunning days in our lives at that time
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was Philip sent out stories all the time to all kinds of magazines not only science fiction but
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all over. And they'd come back you know and we'd send them out again. The post office is right down
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the street and one day there were 17 manuscripts returned in the mailbox in and around the mailbox
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and it was a a real blow. So we solved it by picking them all up, marking which ones had gone
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to what place you know and when they'd been returned and just you know we put them in new
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envelopes and sent them all out again. That was hard. That was hard. They were poor. Phil
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was very poor for most of his life. It was it was funny at one point I think was when he was
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married to Cleo. He was so poor that he couldn't afford human food. He had to go to a pet store
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and buy what was it called happy dog dog food. They had a capital P in front of the word poor.
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I think that Philip always had a feeling
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unfounded I believe
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that he might never be able to live off his writing. When he started to sell stuff
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it was of course wonderful but the early stories he got I believe as little as $80 for one. Not
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very much money to appear in some of these magazines. And his agent told him that he wasn't
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ever going to make any money no matter how many short stories he sold. He should write novels. So
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Phil obediently got started writing novels. In the back of Phil's head was the idea that this was
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just a stepping stone to becoming a great novelist in the general sense of the word known to the
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general public because he was known a lot by science fiction fandom. In 1955 Philip K. Dick's
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first novel Solar Lottery was published. The city of Berkeley was thriving with student demonstrations
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and the politically left-wing ideas of Marxism and communism. Although Dick tried to distance
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himself from these more radical political views the atmosphere contributed to his already existing
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paranoid tendencies. Phil had contact with the FBI early in his college career because he joined
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a communist student club and this was the McCarthy era when communists were evil and they were going
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to take over the world. At least that's what we thought. So the FBI came to him not knowing that
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he was a member of this club but asking him to spy on his wife Cleo because she belonged to a
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communist student group. When the FBI showed up on our doorstep wanting information about the
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political meetings at Sathergate which I always went to on any side of the political line
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that was that was pretty scary except that they were so inept and you tended to laugh at them.
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These FBI men on their spurious investigations I mean to come to our house and ask me why political
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orientation was absurd. You know that they visited us two or three times they said who they were
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started bringing out pictures to show me did I know this one that one this one that one
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and each time after they left we would be shaking our heads about how
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klutzy they were and when George Scruggs the main guy turned out to be such a nice man
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and taught Philip how to drive it lessened the effects a little bit.
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He seemed to take an almost fatherly role with Philip which was great because he
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always was able to use a good father figure but he was a very nice man and nothing ever came of
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it after that except that Philip used that situation in writing a few times. And now a lot
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of his biographers have said Phil was paranoid and all these were fears that were groundless
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fears in the 60s they were not groundless fears there were federal agents who were taking pictures
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of people later came out that that wasn't a delusion they really were doing that and they
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really were compiling dossiers on people like me and Phil even though we were not prominent
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in the peace movement and Phil was one of those people and I don't think was a delusion at all.
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I think he really was what they call an object of interest to the FBI. At that point Philip
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had been working at a different music store and there was no reason to stay in Berkeley so
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we sold the house in Berkeley and moved to the Point Ray station. One day this lady appeared at
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the door who had been married to a poet who turned out actually was a wonderful poet
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and the poet had died and she had heard this kind of literary type had moved into the neighborhood
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and she wanted to make a connection which sounded great to us.
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From there a different kind of relationship developed between Philip and her and one day
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he announced that he was going to move over to her place.
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I had heard this writer had moved to town and I wanted to was interested in meeting him
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and his wife and we just hit it off we had instant communication and the next thing you know
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we were involved with each other. During the first years of his marriage to Ann Rubinstein
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Philip K. Dick temporarily abandoned science fiction writing to concentrate on his mainstream
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novels. He rented a small cabin in the country that he named the Hovel and there he spent months
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writing hoping to achieve literary success. During the period when he was writing his
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mainstream novels and living with Ann he took amphetamines every day and he did that so that
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he could write a lot. He thought that he didn't want to waste his time sleeping and he did
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waste his time sleeping and these things would keep him from sleeping and they also apparently
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accelerated his inspiration. Towards the end of our marriage he was taking tons of stuff
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and again I didn't find that out until after he left and I got a bill from the druggist
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for all these strange things but he could always talk some doctrine to giving him whatever he
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wanted to have and he knew more about the drugs than the doctors did. I know that he had a lot of
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prescriptions in our home like tons of them and so I remember seeing those and I think I remember
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him taking prescriptions yeah. At night he would take amphetamines and he would write. In the daytime
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he would help Ann with her jewelry business. She was setting up a jewelry business. Ann made
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jewelry and Phil made some of the jewelry himself and so he would write and he would work on the
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jewelry business night day night day and then he would collapse and he would sleep for 24 hours
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or longer and start over again. He came home from riding at the Hubble and he'd seen this
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said he saw this face in the sky. Gentlemen this is critical to your investigation. For weeks Dick
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was tormented by the sight of a giant metallic face in the sky. An image that would become the
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basis for his novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge. But was it merely an hallucination
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or was it something more? I don't know what was happening. He was writing The Three Stigmata of
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Palmer Eldridge and I think he was trying to work out in that book an enormous conflict
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he had in his own life. That's about an evil god. Palmer Eldridge is an evil god but he's like
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Christ in that he manifests through stigmata and that he controls the universe. He controls
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reality to a certain point. He started out by being an evil creature coming from outer space
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and everyone he touched became a Palmer Eldridge. He sort of was like an infection, a horrible
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infection. Phil himself didn't like that book because it was a fearsome view of reality. He
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was almost convinced that God was evil or indifferent to human suffering. Phil had a
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strong belief in God the creator of this world but he believed as many offshoots of Christianity
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do believe that this world was created by an evil or inferior god and that the actual one god is
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trying to save us from this imperfect world. Well here we were going to the church and he's
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writing a book that's basically sacrilegious and it was shocking to see the two I guess I was seeing
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these two sides of Philip that I wasn't really aware of in everyday life. He was very passionate
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about going to church and he got all dressed up in his suit and we all had to be dressed up.
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It was something he took really seriously. Phil joined the Episcopal Church when he was married
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to Anne and they attended the Episcopal Church quite regularly up in Marin County. We decided
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to go we were trying to patch our marriage up which was falling to pieces and decided to go
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to the church and he seemed to really like it and he seemed to stay interested in religion for the
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rest of his life. You were wrong Eldritch said I did not find God in the prox system
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but I found something better. God Eldritch said promises eternal life. I can do better I can
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deliver it. What's that? Eldritch asked a King James Bible. I thought it might help protect me.
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Not here Eldritch said this is my domain. He gestured at the Bible and it vanished.
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Phil liked Anne particularly because she was the ex-wife of the editor of a magazine that was
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published in New York and they were the first publishers of Allen Ginsberg and it was a highly
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respected magazine and this guy who was Anne's ex-husband was a highly respected literary figure
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and Phil's idea was that some of that would rub off on him and while he was living with her
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he wrote a whole series of mainstream novels that were basically intended to please her.
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You know he had this woman in the novels over and over and over that was a murderess and an
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that was a murderess and an adulteress and they were all based on me
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these novels of the 60s and I did find that a little disturbing and then Confessions of
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a Crap Artist which he wrote on our honeymoon. I mean I read that and I couldn't believe my eyes.
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I didn't know what to say because it's a portrait of this woman that I didn't feel it was me but
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she she wore my clothes. She had my appearance. You know it was a halfway autobiographical book
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somebody said that book should have been a warning to you. I don't want to play amateur
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psychologist but I think she was part of a dream that failed to come true. That dream that he had
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of being with Anne on his elbow and signing autographs at the big bookstores in New York
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that never came true and it was really hard for him to accept that. What happened was that we
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fought a lot and yelled and I threw things and then we were both going to a psychiatrist who my
30:03.620 --> 30:11.380
first husband had gone to for a marriage therapy and Philip just charmed that psychiatrist. He
30:11.380 --> 30:16.740
thought Philip was he loved him. He was not in love with him. He wasn't gay or anything but he loved
30:16.740 --> 30:22.340
him and so Philip wove his little web and the next thing I know the sheriff came and took me
30:22.340 --> 30:28.020
off to the mental hospital. You know I think he just said your mother needs help you know she
30:28.020 --> 30:34.740
needs to go someplace where she can get help but obviously we lived in a small town and ambulance
30:34.740 --> 30:39.780
came to get her at that time when you were committed it was against your will and you know
30:39.780 --> 30:46.660
had no say. For me it was just totally crushing I mean it was a terrible stigma even though it was
30:46.820 --> 30:52.740
sort of an interesting experience. However my mother could act pretty crazy and he act just
30:52.740 --> 30:58.180
as crazy so they probably both should have been there together and Philip kept saying it's me
30:58.180 --> 31:03.780
who's nuts I'm the one that should be in there well maybe that was true. My mother's really
31:03.780 --> 31:11.140
eccentric a really strong person and liked to have her way he was a really strong person and had his
31:11.220 --> 31:17.860
very strong beliefs and ideas but I know that when they were having a disagreement like you
31:17.860 --> 31:24.660
wanted to run and hide because it was like the house was going to fall down and then he started
31:24.660 --> 31:31.220
running off and going to uh he going to stay at his mother's and then he'd come back or I'd go
31:31.220 --> 31:37.540
get him and he'd come back and he must have come back and run off about 17 times he was going
31:37.540 --> 31:43.060
through a period of great turmoil. And he was teetering back and forth he was on the phone with
31:43.060 --> 31:50.660
Ann he was off the phone he was calling her a grunk and then he was rhapsodizing about how
31:50.660 --> 31:57.620
sophisticated she was and finally he phoned her and said he wanted to be reconciled with her
31:57.620 --> 32:04.900
would she come to Oakland so she said sure I'll come and she came. Ann turns up the front door
32:05.860 --> 32:14.580
Phil pulls the revolver and said go away go away I never want to see you again.
32:15.300 --> 32:22.740
And Ann runs away crying. He had this little gun he was pointing at me it was very frightening
32:23.620 --> 32:29.460
he says that he was having the major nervous breakdown of his life later on but I think also
32:29.540 --> 32:34.340
he felt like he was a danger to me and the girls and that was really maybe
32:35.060 --> 32:40.260
the main reason that he left he he condemned himself sort of. I was very angry at him for a
32:40.260 --> 32:47.220
long time I don't know if I hated him no I don't think I hated him I was angry at him for leaving
32:47.220 --> 32:56.100
me it's a terrible thing to do to your wife and children you know I mean it really everyone was
32:56.100 --> 32:59.620
very hurt.
33:10.980 --> 33:20.180
He met a family hack I believe that was their name and he formed a big crush on the elder of
33:20.180 --> 33:26.260
two sisters but the elder of the two sisters thought he was nuts and wouldn't have anything
33:26.260 --> 33:36.420
to do with him so he as a second choice he took Nancy Hackett and married her. Nancy oh Nancy
33:36.980 --> 33:44.180
came out here with her she was 19 years old she came out here with her her stepmother who was our
33:44.180 --> 33:52.260
friend from from St. Columba's church very brilliant woman and later on Nancy was he was
33:52.260 --> 33:59.060
going to marry Nancy. 64, 65 the woman of the hour is Nancy who had just been discharged from
33:59.060 --> 34:06.580
a mental hospital he describes her as scared brittle 21 and schizophrenic she became pregnant
34:06.580 --> 34:13.380
he married her. 19 years old didn't say anything didn't do anything I don't know whether she was
34:13.380 --> 34:19.540
on some kind of drugs or what but she she you know she had a very hard life very difficult life
34:20.580 --> 34:27.780
she had a real mental illness. In July 1966 Philip K Dick marries Nancy Hackett
34:28.660 --> 34:35.140
while living in San Rafael their daughter is sold as born with a growing religious interest
34:35.140 --> 34:39.220
he forms a close relationship with Bishop James Pike of the Episcopal Church.
34:39.700 --> 34:44.740
He was in the process along with the rest of the Bay Area of searching for a new religion
34:46.020 --> 34:54.500
he and and Jim Pike the bishop they were both looking for something that even unbelievers can
34:54.500 --> 35:01.220
believe in. I think that Phil got a lot of his ideas about religion from Bishop Pike
35:01.780 --> 35:09.620
about religion from Bishop Pike and Pike had a lot of unorthodox ideas. Jim Pike was you know on
35:09.620 --> 35:14.500
the cover of Time magazine and you know very significant you know big connection with the
35:14.500 --> 35:25.300
anti-war movement and things like this. Bishop Pike was tried for heresy himself for trying to
35:25.380 --> 35:33.620
prove that Jesus did not die on the cross. Jim was in deep trouble with his church for that
35:33.620 --> 35:43.460
and then I guess it was 1966 that he quit the church or was forced out depending on how you
35:43.460 --> 35:49.220
look at it because of being too heretical. Phil knew him so that he knew personal things about
35:49.540 --> 35:55.620
Jim Pike. He knew about Jim Pike's mistress that Jim Pike paid out of the bishops discretionary
35:55.620 --> 36:01.380
fund you know the apartment where she lived and things like this. And he was getting very
36:01.380 --> 36:09.060
heretical at that point because the thing between Phil and him was Phil had this idea of an evil god
36:09.060 --> 36:13.860
and Jim had this idea of a good god and then
36:16.500 --> 36:18.500
Jim's son committed suicide.
36:20.740 --> 36:29.860
What kind of a universe is it when the bishop's son the bishop's son kills himself? Is Phil right?
36:30.820 --> 36:41.220
Is there really an evil god just waiting to destroy us? I in my stories and novels often
36:41.220 --> 36:48.420
write about counterfeit worlds, semi-real worlds, as well as deranged private worlds inhabited often
36:48.420 --> 36:53.780
by just one person while meantime the other characters either remain in their own worlds
36:53.780 --> 37:00.180
throughout or are somehow drawn into one of the peculiar ones. This theme occurs in the corpus of
37:00.180 --> 37:06.580
my 27 years of writing. At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious explanation for my
37:06.580 --> 37:13.860
preoccupation with these pluriform pseudo worlds but now I think I understand. What I was sensing
37:13.860 --> 37:20.340
was the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most
37:20.420 --> 37:27.620
actualized one, the one which the majority of us by consensus gentium agree on. It was his
37:27.620 --> 37:37.540
karma that the world was stacked against him and that if he could be put into an embarrassing
37:37.540 --> 37:46.580
position fate would put him there. I think what I was most sensitive about the fact was that he'd
37:46.580 --> 37:52.420
gone off on this trajectory of sort of I thought it was sort of self-destructive
37:52.420 --> 37:58.420
because when he was in our family home he was had family dinners and went to church and sort
37:58.420 --> 38:05.860
of had a semblance of a more average life and then he just went off on this trajectory of
38:06.500 --> 38:14.660
sort of extreme behavior. Nancy had a lot of friends who were involved in drugs and gang
38:14.740 --> 38:22.660
activities. There was one guy who was a poet and had a magazine and he was also a drug pusher
38:23.620 --> 38:32.820
and Phil was telling him about how much money he made and the pusher says why I make more money
38:32.820 --> 38:43.780
in a week than you make in a year why don't you come over in my racket and Phil said yeah maybe
38:43.860 --> 38:52.740
so and Nancy didn't like that and so as he became more and more involved with the criminals
38:53.780 --> 39:00.900
Nancy became more and more upset. In August of 1970 Nancy takes their daughter and leaves the
39:00.900 --> 39:06.900
house in Santa Venetia. Depressed and driven by destructive behavior Philip opens his house to
39:06.900 --> 39:11.300
the social outcast and the debauchery of young writers bohemians and junkies.
39:13.060 --> 39:22.020
At the end of the 1960s in Santa Venetia, Santa Rafael, Philip K. Dirk found himself very directly
39:22.020 --> 39:28.980
influenced by the young people he was meeting around his home and in fact it started to be that
39:29.460 --> 39:37.700
that people would come by. It was a place to hang out or even a so-called crash pad which meant that
39:37.700 --> 39:44.180
young people knew that they could sleep there if they needed a place to go and sleep. After high
39:44.180 --> 39:53.220
school I left home and became reacquainted with Dennis and he was staying at Philip K. Dicks house
39:54.100 --> 40:00.500
and I needed a place to stay at the time and so he suggested that I stay there and so then
40:00.500 --> 40:08.500
when I got over there the atmosphere was I was kind of like an open house people coming and going
40:08.500 --> 40:16.500
and it just seemed comfortable though and but I was also very young I wasn't even yeah I guess
40:16.500 --> 40:23.140
I was I was just 18 and it was kind of refreshing to be around an adult that didn't have any rules
40:23.700 --> 40:27.380
you ate when you wanted you ate what you wanted you went to bed when you wanted
40:28.020 --> 40:33.780
you stayed up all night if you wanted oh yes I heard a lot of things I mean I just heard
40:33.780 --> 40:41.700
what a demise he was in and how he lived in a in a pig's die and had really bad you know criminal
40:42.260 --> 40:50.260
not criminal but drug addict friends and you know hell's angels 70 71 street drugs he lost his house
40:50.740 --> 40:56.580
hospitalized three times drugs and danger to self or others which is called a 51 50
40:56.580 --> 41:04.100
72 hour involuntary psychiatric hold so Phil was going through some tough years in the 70s
41:04.660 --> 41:10.180
he wasn't writing I know he wasn't writing at the time he would just sit and entertain these
41:10.180 --> 41:16.900
people when they would come and go I think that because Philip K. Dick was an amphetamine user
41:17.860 --> 41:24.180
his contact with the youth subculture probably came about partly because he was trying to buy
41:24.980 --> 41:32.260
amphetamine and pretty soon he made friends in that world and then he started getting kind of
41:33.220 --> 41:40.180
uh paranoid about people like spying on him and you know there was some instance of someone
41:40.260 --> 41:45.220
breaking into his home and um maybe that had to do with drugs it probably did
41:47.700 --> 41:54.340
early in 1971 Philip K. Dick's house in Santa Venetia was broken into by somebody who was
41:54.340 --> 41:59.140
looking for something he doesn't he doesn't know according to Phil there was evidence
41:59.140 --> 42:05.460
that explosives had been used uh to try to break into his locked file cabinets that he
42:05.460 --> 42:10.660
kept his manuscripts in everything that went on in that house seemed to make no sense to me
42:11.620 --> 42:19.540
it was so different from what I thought of as reality I wasn't used to seeing people
42:20.100 --> 42:26.500
doing drugs and I wasn't used to all these you know break-ins and weird things that happened and
42:27.380 --> 42:32.420
just every every day was bizarre I remember the big window here it seemed like there were a lot
42:32.420 --> 42:37.940
of plants kind of covering it yeah well with that covering it made it so much darker
42:38.740 --> 42:45.300
were you aware of all that his worries about FBI and yeah things like that I always wonder what
42:45.300 --> 42:53.780
room was broken into oh it was this this room back here there was a twin bed against the window
42:54.580 --> 42:59.940
and then there was a bookcase against this wall and there was a file cabinet you know one of
42:59.940 --> 43:10.020
those taller ones yeah right there yeah and there was a before you were here right no I was here
43:10.740 --> 43:17.140
I was here I wasn't here when it got broken into but I came over after and I saw dust on the floor
43:17.140 --> 43:24.660
and footprints in the dust and so then when I came back um all the doorknobs had been removed off
43:24.660 --> 43:33.140
the doors in the house and and there was plastic explosives he said at the in the room that was
43:33.140 --> 43:38.980
his office and he said his file cabinet had been blown up and somebody had taken manuscripts and
43:40.020 --> 43:41.860
all this crazy stuff had happened
43:45.460 --> 43:51.620
we know that at the time of the break-in Philip K Dick thought thank god I'm not crazy I have real
43:51.620 --> 43:57.940
enemies it is a tremendous relief to discover that somebody really is after me at this time
43:57.940 --> 44:04.260
he became obsessed with discovering who his real enemies were he gave a lot of interviews saying
44:04.260 --> 44:09.620
that he thought the federal government maybe hit his house or maybe it was this or maybe it was
44:09.620 --> 44:15.780
that there was a big article in Rolling Stone that Paul Williams uh edited that was all these
44:15.780 --> 44:20.740
different theories about what happened in his house when I interviewed Phil Dick for Rolling
44:20.740 --> 44:28.820
Stone it was uh 1974 and um Phil would talk about his many theories as to what had happened
44:29.860 --> 44:37.140
he often guessed that the government was looking for information about him he wasn't simply making
44:37.140 --> 44:44.500
it up out of whole cloth he did have the evidence of his house being broken into in an almost
44:44.580 --> 44:53.700
paramilitary style his safe and a filing cabinet had been blown open by apparently very sophisticated
44:53.700 --> 44:59.060
explosives and very selective things had been taken he suggested for example and I quoted in
44:59.060 --> 45:04.660
my Rolling Stone article that there were things that he'd written in his science fiction novels
45:06.020 --> 45:11.780
that were too close to the truth or they were frightening to the government in some way
45:12.420 --> 45:18.820
and they wanted to know how did he know how do you know about that he also was very aware
45:19.540 --> 45:24.340
of the black panthers who lived in the neighborhood he went through all these theories it was the feds
45:24.340 --> 45:28.980
it was the government it was this it was that it was a drug altogether there was really a fairly
45:28.980 --> 45:40.340
substantial group of people that he could suspect you know uh might be malignantly after him um
45:40.340 --> 45:48.820
um so it wasn't paranoia you know here's a minor American writer you know a little genre guy
45:48.820 --> 45:53.140
getting published in these crappy little pulp magazines next thing you know he's you know
45:53.780 --> 45:58.580
telling people about how the FBI is breaking in through his window and you know some some book
45:58.580 --> 46:04.740
he wrote uh somehow contained something real in it that the FBI was trying to to cover up I mean
46:04.740 --> 46:13.860
that's been kind of a a science fiction uh writers legend for a long time and then he tells that the
46:13.860 --> 46:20.740
police theory was that he did it himself he thought that was very funny and so he made a big joke out
46:20.740 --> 46:28.420
of the police theory that uh Philip K. Dick had somehow brought in explosives and blown up his
46:28.420 --> 46:36.820
own files for some obscure reason well years later he told me that he was pretty sure it was just
46:37.620 --> 46:44.500
because he was taking drugs at the time that it was a drug hit as you know in the late 1960s
46:45.060 --> 46:50.340
experimentation with mind-altering drugs became common among artists who sought new forms of
46:50.340 --> 46:57.700
expression Philip K. Dick was no exception to this his activity with psychedelics may have contributed
46:57.700 --> 47:04.500
to his extra sensory experiences the connection between drugs and what I was saying earlier about
47:04.500 --> 47:12.100
his skepticism about reality really finds um expression in the LSD culture people like
47:12.100 --> 47:19.380
Timothy Leary the feeling that the experience one had under drugs was revealing that this is
47:19.380 --> 47:26.500
all an elaborate play being staged for our benefit to keep us politically quiescent and drugs allow
47:26.500 --> 47:34.340
you to see behind behind that facade and realize that there is another reality but Phil only took
47:34.340 --> 47:43.940
LSD twice and both times I gave it to him and the first time he had quite a good experience
47:44.500 --> 47:51.780
the second time he had a very bad experience in which he thought he was a gladiator an ancient
47:51.780 --> 47:57.060
Rome and what happened to Phil was that even though he had never studied Latin
47:57.620 --> 48:03.300
I studied Latin in high school so I could understand Latin but he began speaking Latin
48:03.860 --> 48:13.060
when he was that gladiator he was speaking good Latin grammatically correct but easy going as
48:13.060 --> 48:20.500
if he'd spoken it as a native tongue and that was spooky in November of 71 he said my house was hit
48:20.500 --> 48:25.940
and he thinks it was the FBI that broke in and trashed his house and so he fled to Canada
48:26.500 --> 48:32.820
living in Vancouver where he made unfortunately his first suicide attempt Phil Dick had um gone to
48:34.020 --> 48:39.220
Vancouver in Canada in order to be guest of honor for a convention and then when the convention
48:39.220 --> 48:46.420
ended he just didn't come home later I found out of course that he um had attempted suicide in
48:46.420 --> 48:54.340
Canada and in order to sort of be living in a secure and monitored environment had checked
48:54.340 --> 49:03.220
himself into a place called Excalé which was in fact a heroin rehab uh compound he said that's
49:03.220 --> 49:10.180
where the books that's scanner darkling you got the idea for it back then um the idea of drugs
49:10.180 --> 49:17.380
you know came from that and in fact they did seem to have done him some good uh they sort of
49:17.380 --> 49:26.580
closely monitored uh very very intensive care uh does seem to have been what he needed and he
49:26.580 --> 49:35.460
eventually in effect outgrew the need for it uh recovered and was ready to sort of step back into
49:35.460 --> 49:43.540
civilization again now and then a dealer realizing he was about to be busted took refuge in one of
49:43.540 --> 49:51.380
the drug rehabilitation places like synanon and center point and Excalé a new path posing as an
49:51.380 --> 49:59.060
addict seeking help once inside his wallet his name everything that identified him was stripped away
49:59.700 --> 50:07.540
in preparation for building up a new personality not drug oriented then later on when the pressure
50:07.540 --> 50:17.060
was off the dealer emerged and resumed his usual activity outside I only got partial details about
50:17.060 --> 50:23.620
how Phil wound up down in Orange County uh Phil had wanted to get out of that drug rehab uh place
50:23.620 --> 50:29.460
up in Canada and uh will us you know help make it possible when Vancouver stopped being
50:30.420 --> 50:37.860
uh feasible as a new place to live he wrote to a professor at Cal State Fullerton and said
50:39.060 --> 50:44.500
I have nowhere to live uh my home back in California has been blown up um
50:45.460 --> 50:54.100
I'm virtually homeless and the professor uh read Phil's letter to the class and a couple of students
50:54.100 --> 51:01.460
said we just lost a roommate uh we we could use another roommate and they said would you like to
51:01.460 --> 51:07.540
come to the airport to pick up Philip K Dick and I said yes of course you know when I first met him
51:07.620 --> 51:14.180
he was very you know he was you know uh very friendly very warm uh very enthusiastic he had
51:14.180 --> 51:22.420
incredible enthusiastic uh bubbling uh personality and I believe Tim was one of uh Tim Powers was
51:22.420 --> 51:29.540
one of Willis McMilley's uh students who actually uh met Phil at the airport well when he stepped
51:30.180 --> 51:35.780
through the gate we were waiting for him in the gate area of the airport there uh
51:36.100 --> 51:44.980
uh he looked desperate he uh was wearing a sport coat that was too short for him and too short in
51:44.980 --> 51:51.540
the shoulders his luggage was held together with a electrical extension cord and he was carrying a
51:51.540 --> 51:57.700
copy of the bible which later he said was to mollify customs and of course his old life in
51:57.700 --> 52:04.660
the bay area was really no longer an option since his marriage had broken up his house had been
52:06.260 --> 52:14.980
melodramatically uh broken into and robbed uh and even the police had I believe implied that
52:15.940 --> 52:18.500
they thought it would be a good idea if he went away and never came back
52:21.380 --> 52:27.860
before I met Phil I was simply trying to escape from my dysfunctional family
52:28.820 --> 52:33.220
I was trying to decide whether to go to college or join the navy
52:35.060 --> 52:44.180
and I had no plans to get married or have children but I went to this 4th of July party with
52:45.140 --> 52:52.740
people and when I saw Phil I just instantly fell in love with him and we started talking
52:53.460 --> 53:03.860
and we basically never separated after that until several years later when our marriage fell apart
53:05.780 --> 53:13.220
in 1973 Christopher Kenneth Dick is born gradually Dick returns to his writing and in a letter to a
53:13.220 --> 53:20.340
friend describes his marriage to Tessa he writes we are living in a Philip K Dick novel only a few
53:20.340 --> 53:29.620
months later in February of 1974 fiction would become fact because Phil didn't like to drive
53:30.340 --> 53:37.620
he started having the pharmacy deliver his prescriptions he had had dental surgery and
53:37.620 --> 53:43.700
he was in a lot of pain and when the woman came to deliver his his pain medication from the drug
53:43.700 --> 53:50.660
store the light flashed off her Christian fish symbol that she was wearing and when Phil saw that
53:50.660 --> 54:01.620
little gold necklace it caught the light probably sunlight and he was hit between the eyes with a
54:01.620 --> 54:09.540
beam of light only it was no ordinary beam of light it was I don't know a penetrating ray of
54:09.540 --> 54:20.420
some kind although it did not hurt him and he saw this as a pink beam that initiated a
54:21.380 --> 54:29.220
fairly long period several weeks at least of what he mostly concluded most often thought was
54:31.300 --> 54:35.940
contact with God and during this vision he was given a
54:35.940 --> 54:45.060
a knowledge that his infant son Christopher had a very serious hernia and could die from it if the
54:45.060 --> 54:51.140
doctors did not treat it what happened in real life was that I noticed a problem when I was
54:51.140 --> 54:57.220
changing his diapers so I took him to the doctor and the doctor told me that I was not cleaning
54:57.220 --> 55:04.660
him well enough between diaper changes and I knew that wasn't it but about a month later Phil had a
55:05.460 --> 55:11.460
vision while napping and he came out to the living room and told me exactly what was wrong with
55:11.460 --> 55:18.580
Christopher and I called up the doctor and made another appointment and Phil was right and I was
55:18.580 --> 55:24.420
right the doctor did indeed find a very severe inguinal hernia that could have been fatal had
55:24.420 --> 55:31.780
it not been treated and the baby had immediate surgery this exact diagnosis of Christopher's
55:31.780 --> 55:37.220
illness causes some witnesses to believe that Philip K Dick could have acquired information from
55:37.220 --> 55:42.980
outside his normal consciousness encouraged by these recurring visions he now believes that
55:42.980 --> 55:49.300
reality is a projection that hides or conceals the ultimate truth this theme is constant
55:49.300 --> 55:53.780
throughout his novels but now in his real life he believes this to be true
55:54.500 --> 56:00.980
in late February of 1974 I was given sodium pentothal for the extraction of impacted wisdom teeth
56:00.980 --> 56:06.500
later that day back home again but still deeply under the influence of the sodium pentothal
56:06.500 --> 56:18.260
I had a short acute flash of recovered memory then in mid-march month later the total body of memories
56:18.900 --> 56:26.980
the total body of memories intact an entire began to return
56:28.340 --> 56:34.500
you are free to believe me or to disbelieve but please take my word on it that I am not joking
56:34.500 --> 56:39.860
this is very serious a matter of importance for the rest of his life after that
56:39.940 --> 56:48.660
the main concern of all his research was was that God if not what else might it have been
56:49.620 --> 56:57.380
and it resulted in some of course tremendous books mainly I think valis was probably the most
56:58.180 --> 57:03.700
significant result of that experience the things that he talked about at the time I mean yeah there
57:04.260 --> 57:10.900
was this theory he came up with about the valis entity you know that was that was a theory that
57:10.900 --> 57:16.340
his mystical experiences have been somehow a result of an encounter with this with this valis thing
57:16.820 --> 57:23.220
at that time I had no idea what I was seeing it resembled nothing that I had ever heard described
57:24.020 --> 57:33.460
it resembled plasma energy it had colors it moved fast it collected it was a very very
57:33.460 --> 57:40.820
very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very
57:40.820 --> 57:46.820
very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very
57:46.820 --> 57:52.820
very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very
57:52.820 --> 57:58.820
very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very
57:58.900 --> 58:07.780
I know a lot of the communications he got were in a woman's voice and uh he ascribed this to
58:08.660 --> 58:15.300
the holy spirit the third person of the trinity I think for Phil valis was a conduit to
58:16.340 --> 58:24.340
the information not exactly to God himself but to the information that would explain God
58:24.820 --> 58:26.820
in terms that he could understand
58:29.300 --> 58:34.580
because in our tradition you cannot stand face to face with God you would die
58:35.860 --> 58:44.580
so you need an intermediary and that would be the satellite voice or valis he told me that
58:44.900 --> 58:53.380
God had intervened into reality and talked to him then he told me that in fact that wasn't
58:53.380 --> 58:59.300
what happened it was simply an acid flashback that he was deluded to think it was God then he told me
58:59.300 --> 59:06.260
no it was probably soviet experiments with telepathy that had happened and then he'd say no I think it
59:06.260 --> 59:13.940
was God I thought that a lot of it was delusion um I'm sorry to say that but I did
59:14.740 --> 59:22.100
I mean he would get glimpses and he believed those glimpses he believed them with all his heart
59:22.100 --> 59:28.100
like that hernia meant something the girl with the fish sign meant something there I mean this
59:28.100 --> 59:36.500
was all significant I don't think he was sure how it fit together or what was going to happen
59:36.500 --> 59:43.940
or what he was supposed to do I think he believed more often than not that it was God
59:45.620 --> 59:52.740
that had happened to him and I think that it was God that had happened to him I don't think it
59:52.740 --> 59:58.580
was an acid flashback or soviet telepathy experiments I think that in fact what happened
59:58.580 --> 01:00:07.460
was that God leaned down and spoke to Phil Dick I've always felt and still do that if if these are
01:00:08.980 --> 01:00:14.820
things like this are the evidence that you base your convictions about reality upon
01:00:16.420 --> 01:00:23.780
you must have a very desperate need to to to to have some view of an alternate reality
01:00:23.780 --> 01:00:34.580
well if you believe as I do that people are aware of their impending deaths that on some
01:00:34.580 --> 01:00:40.820
deep level they know they may be coming to the end of their lifetime the need to find answers
01:00:40.820 --> 01:00:48.340
to lifelong questions in those circumstances becomes especially pressing and urgent and so it's no
01:00:49.300 --> 01:00:57.140
mystery I think why Dick would take this process of projection which has always been in his work
01:00:57.140 --> 01:01:04.820
and find some kind of ultimate affirmation in that that science fiction becomes the ultimate reality
01:01:04.820 --> 01:01:11.460
well what more validation would a science fiction writer need as far as whether these
01:01:11.540 --> 01:01:18.740
visions really happened they did really happen to Phil but as Phil would say what is reality
01:01:20.740 --> 01:01:28.660
or as a great Zen Buddhist once said am I the man dreaming he's a butterfly or the
01:01:28.660 --> 01:01:30.820
butterfly dreaming that he's a man
01:01:30.980 --> 01:01:43.300
and certainly it's accurate to say that from 74 until his death in 82
01:01:44.020 --> 01:01:53.220
he was trying to find an answer to what had happened to him in March of 74 Phil became more
01:01:53.220 --> 01:02:00.980
and more absorbed with trying to understand the meaning of that flash when that pink ray
01:02:00.980 --> 01:02:08.180
zapped him in the eyes and he began to write things based on his theories about the meaning
01:02:08.180 --> 01:02:13.620
of that flash for the rest of his life he was trying to understand what happened to him
01:02:14.340 --> 01:02:20.340
what God was trying to tell him and I think that's what that whole exegesis was about
01:02:20.340 --> 01:02:30.260
exegesis is a word for writings that attempt to explain the scriptures especially the Bible
01:02:30.260 --> 01:02:38.180
but also the scriptures of other traditions like Hinduism and Islam and Buddhism first he would
01:02:38.180 --> 01:02:43.300
examine possibility a that it was something that somehow was consistent with the the Buddhist
01:02:44.180 --> 01:02:49.300
view of reality and then he would see that something still didn't fit in with that and
01:02:49.300 --> 01:02:53.940
then he would go on to something that would be maybe the the Hindu version or something else
01:02:53.940 --> 01:02:59.540
and so you know instead of having one coherent whole you just had strata of different explanations
01:02:59.540 --> 01:03:04.900
that followed each other chronologically and in no particular order he turned philosophical in the
01:03:04.900 --> 01:03:16.500
end now either he went nuts or we just haven't got there yet we'll have to wait and see who's
01:03:16.500 --> 01:03:23.940
crazy him or us fat later developed a theory that the universe is made out of information
01:03:24.820 --> 01:03:32.500
he started keeping a journal had been in fact secretly doing so for some time the furtive act
01:03:32.500 --> 01:03:42.900
of a deranged person the term journal is mine not fats his term was exegesis a theological term
01:03:42.900 --> 01:03:50.100
meaning a piece of writing that explains or interprets a portion of scripture when phil
01:03:51.300 --> 01:03:58.500
explored the idea that someone was transmitting those visions to him he couldn't decide whether
01:03:58.500 --> 01:04:10.100
it might be our government or russian communists or whatever during like 74 and 75 he received some
01:04:11.060 --> 01:04:19.300
puzzling unexplained piece of paper in the mail and he said that he had taken one look at it
01:04:19.300 --> 01:04:27.300
and instantly said don't show it to me it's a disinhibiting signal and on one particular
01:04:27.300 --> 01:04:34.580
day phil ran up the stairs and handed me this letter and told me to open it and read it but
01:04:34.660 --> 01:04:40.820
not to let him see it because he was afraid that it would be like that queen of diamonds in the
01:04:40.820 --> 01:04:48.100
manchurian candidate and put him into a trance where he would perform whatever his handlers
01:04:48.100 --> 01:04:54.100
had programmed him to do when they brainwashed him he said he had gone to a socialist kindergarten
01:04:54.100 --> 01:05:01.780
and that all the kids there might have been sort of primed with hypnotic delayed bombs that they
01:05:01.780 --> 01:05:10.660
could be triggered to do something about later in life and this was a xerox of a book review
01:05:10.660 --> 01:05:17.700
from a left wing or communist newspaper but certain words were underlined some of them in
01:05:17.700 --> 01:05:25.300
red and some of them in blue and all the underlined words had to do with death destruction rotting
01:05:25.940 --> 01:05:33.540
and that sort of thing but he did apparently contact the fbi and said i have this thing i
01:05:33.540 --> 01:05:40.580
received in the mail i have reason to believe uh it's bad business well phil really was paranoid
01:05:40.580 --> 01:05:46.420
but on the other hand that xerox letter was very real so it's hard to say
01:05:47.140 --> 01:05:56.020
that paranoia is the only explanation for what happened to him because you can be paranoid and
01:05:56.020 --> 01:06:03.460
have enemies haunted by his ideas and theories regarding his mystical experiences once again
01:06:03.460 --> 01:06:09.860
philip k dick loses control of his domestic life his marriage to tessa starts to fall apart
01:06:10.660 --> 01:06:11.060
apart
01:06:13.620 --> 01:06:20.500
just in general we were not getting along so i left for one night and before that
01:06:21.540 --> 01:06:26.500
night was over phil was in the hospital for attempted suicide
01:06:29.060 --> 01:06:38.740
apparently he had tried to slash his wrists but that didn't work and he tried to swallow
01:06:38.740 --> 01:06:48.340
pills but they can't he vomited them up so he tried to run the car inside our garage
01:06:49.460 --> 01:06:56.660
with all the doors closed but the car would not run so he called the pharmacy trying to get a
01:06:57.220 --> 01:07:03.540
refill on one of his prescriptions and the pharmacist figured out what was going on and
01:07:03.540 --> 01:07:09.860
called the paramedics he knew doris prior and this is after after when valis came out
01:07:10.900 --> 01:07:14.660
in mid-20s had cancer wore a wig because she had lost her hair and chemo
01:07:15.220 --> 01:07:18.180
and he referred her as the greatest of my titanic errors
01:07:21.060 --> 01:07:30.500
he moved out to take care of doris solder a girl who had terminal cancer in 1980 and is probably
01:07:30.500 --> 01:07:36.100
still alive today they sent her home because there was nothing more they could do for her
01:07:36.100 --> 01:07:40.980
and they told her she would be dead in six months but last i heard she was still alive
01:07:41.620 --> 01:07:50.900
phil's apartment was mine was that one straight up and his was the one with the door facing this way
01:07:52.340 --> 01:07:56.020
phil and i were friends when i lived here and when i moved out
01:07:56.900 --> 01:08:02.180
so i would usually go over to his apartment and cook dinner for him and sit and watch tv with
01:08:02.180 --> 01:08:09.300
him until about 11 o'clock or so and then i would just walk over here and come home when you look at
01:08:09.300 --> 01:08:14.820
his history you know he he always was involved with women who needed rescuing and i think
01:08:15.460 --> 01:08:21.140
i fit into that you know because i was young i was broke i was sick i was struggling to get through
01:08:21.220 --> 01:08:29.780
school and he he liked being needed so when you didn't need him anymore it was like he had no
01:08:29.780 --> 01:08:38.100
reason to live he needed a cause phil's whole life has been a tragedy of women he was kind of the
01:08:38.980 --> 01:08:45.540
the damsel in distress sir gallagher he would always pick frail dying with cancer troubled
01:08:45.540 --> 01:08:51.220
schizophrenic women and love them and want to fix them he was very good at finding young
01:08:51.220 --> 01:08:58.100
ladies i think who needed rescue but he wasn't as good as at providing the rescue
01:08:59.140 --> 01:09:06.500
because really he often needed rescuing himself he had a unfortunate taste in in in women for
01:09:06.500 --> 01:09:13.460
women with mental problems you know and he would admit this one time when he lived in santa ana
01:09:13.620 --> 01:09:18.820
he had to take group therapy in fullerton i'd have to sit in the waiting room while he'd be
01:09:18.820 --> 01:09:24.660
in the room back there with these you know losers and and a woman came in a young woman came in
01:09:25.300 --> 01:09:29.220
and as soon as i saw her i thought oh my god that's that's the most psychotic looking woman i've
01:09:29.220 --> 01:09:36.260
ever seen in my life you know she she's like really thin real long dark you know witchy hair
01:09:36.260 --> 01:09:41.940
and she had this big bible clutch to her breast and her eyes were just you know completely psychotic
01:09:42.500 --> 01:09:46.980
and all of a sudden i realized phil is sitting next to me he's getting up out of his chair
01:09:47.940 --> 01:09:56.180
he's gonna go get up and go talk to her and i had i grabbed his arm and said for god's sake phil
01:09:56.180 --> 01:10:01.700
please please please don't go talk to that woman go don't don't don't i had dragging him back in
01:10:01.700 --> 01:10:05.940
his chair don't don't go talk to her she's obviously nuts and he was just wow she's the
01:10:05.940 --> 01:10:11.060
most exciting thing i've seen in yeah so uh yeah he he did unfortunately have a tendency to get
01:10:11.060 --> 01:10:20.340
involved with um less than stable personalities the uh sort of generic phil dick young lady would be
01:10:21.700 --> 01:10:31.140
18 years old not tall and of course with long dark hair um the long dark hair seems to have been
01:10:31.140 --> 01:10:41.540
a kind of totem uh emblem recognition almost and i don't think it's far-fetched to see that
01:10:41.540 --> 01:10:47.540
as an extension of his lifelong awareness of the fact that his twin sister died shortly after
01:10:47.540 --> 01:10:57.060
their birth he thought that jane would have had dark hair phil was a blonde and jane had died at
01:10:57.060 --> 01:11:01.220
one or two months but his mother told him that she had dark hair
01:11:03.300 --> 01:11:09.780
so he was looking for a dark haired girl to replace his lost twin in other words it's a
01:11:09.780 --> 01:11:18.980
common theme in my writing that a dark haired girl shows up at the door of the protagonist and
01:11:20.020 --> 01:11:24.340
tells him that his world is delusional that there's something false about it
01:11:25.220 --> 01:11:32.260
well this did finally happen to me i even knew that her hair would be black i had an actual
01:11:34.420 --> 01:11:41.540
complete sense of what she would look like and what she would say she did appear she was a
01:11:41.540 --> 01:11:51.620
total stranger and she did inform me of this fact that some of my fictional works were in
01:11:51.620 --> 01:12:01.780
a literal sense true my name is jones simpson and um i met philip k dick uh because through
01:12:01.780 --> 01:12:12.100
an introduction by my ex-boyfriend it developed into a friendship it was never a highly sexual
01:12:12.180 --> 01:12:19.780
relationship never but he was so smart and he had a good sense of humor
01:12:21.060 --> 01:12:30.820
and he was entertaining i loved listening to him talk and we did a lot we talked we walked
01:12:31.780 --> 01:12:33.060
we had a quiet fun
01:12:33.460 --> 01:12:43.940
and then uh he got a little too paranoid but that comes later down the line
01:12:48.740 --> 01:12:55.060
bill up k dick was and i believe still is very very popular with the french
01:12:55.780 --> 01:13:04.740
so they invited him to a huge um honorarium there um and science fiction convention and met
01:13:06.100 --> 01:13:16.820
um paid for the ticket for himself and myself and gave his speech his met speech which he
01:13:16.820 --> 01:13:24.980
worked on for a long long time and uh he was very happy with the speech
01:13:28.340 --> 01:13:35.860
and the speech was really quite horrible i wrote out these dreams in novel after novel story after
01:13:35.860 --> 01:13:42.260
story to name two in which this prior ugly present obtained most clearly i cite the man in the high
01:13:42.260 --> 01:13:49.460
castle and my 1974 novel about the u.s. as a police state called flow my tears the policeman said
01:13:50.420 --> 01:13:57.300
i'm going to be very candid with you i wrote both novels based on fragmentary residual memories of
01:13:57.300 --> 01:14:03.780
such a horrid slave state world people claim to remember past lives i claim to remember a different
01:14:03.780 --> 01:14:10.260
very different present life i know of no one who has ever made this claim before but i rather
01:14:10.260 --> 01:14:15.780
suspect that my experience is not unique what perhaps is unique is the fact that i'm willing
01:14:15.780 --> 01:14:26.100
to talk about it and people were shocked and uh at the same time they were pretty kind they really
01:14:26.100 --> 01:14:35.300
were i think it was so awful that people saw that something was really wrong we are living in a
01:14:35.300 --> 01:14:42.740
computer programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed
01:14:43.460 --> 01:14:49.940
and some alteration in our reality occurs we would have the overwhelming impression
01:14:50.900 --> 01:14:59.860
that we were reliving the present deja vu perhaps in precisely the same way hearing the same words
01:14:59.860 --> 01:15:05.060
saying the same words i submit that these impressions are valid and significant
01:15:05.060 --> 01:15:12.900
and i will even say this such an impression is a clue that at some past time point a variable was
01:15:12.900 --> 01:15:19.300
changed reprogrammed as it were and that because of this an alternative world branched off
01:15:19.940 --> 01:15:28.020
and i was sitting there just going oh i wish i wasn't sitting here i wish i didn't have to be
01:15:28.020 --> 01:15:40.340
here and at the same time i felt so terribly terribly sad really really sad because it was
01:15:40.340 --> 01:15:51.860
apparent that something really really spectacular something really great had probably gone missing
01:15:52.500 --> 01:15:53.700
and wasn't there anymore
01:15:56.260 --> 01:16:04.580
to my way of looking at things at my present age the stuff when he started to get off on the
01:16:04.580 --> 01:16:12.420
the messiah from you know outer space i found the entertainment value of the work suffered
01:16:13.540 --> 01:16:20.180
the fact that he had that he had a bone to pick i think hurts the literary quality of it that
01:16:20.180 --> 01:16:30.260
creativity that big mind that depth that exciting brain dynamic that he used to have in writing the
01:16:30.260 --> 01:16:41.860
novels and they were deep they were new they were a bauble of new thought they were stretching the
01:16:41.940 --> 01:16:51.380
boundaries and that was lost couldn't do that anymore in philip k dick's later years he calls
01:16:51.380 --> 01:16:56.420
upon his mystical experiences as a plot line for the novels valis and radio free albumeth
01:16:57.220 --> 01:17:02.660
according to your reports it is impossible for us to determine whether these events were the result
01:17:02.660 --> 01:17:11.540
of a delusional mind or not 78 to 81 he just says i wrote and wrote and wrote then in 81 came sandra
01:17:12.580 --> 01:17:18.820
um came out of his shell that's when phil came back into treatment with me he was depressed
01:17:18.820 --> 01:17:25.220
it was the end of sandra so phil's relationship with therapists always were in between women and
01:17:25.220 --> 01:17:31.460
when he was saving these women you know he was in his way less symptomatic because he'd devote
01:17:31.460 --> 01:17:35.620
all his energy outward and you know just fixing them then they would leave him all the symptoms
01:17:35.620 --> 01:17:45.620
would return his whole life had been very chaotic and unhappy until about
01:17:47.380 --> 01:17:55.300
75 76 and then he got his apartment which became a condominium which gave him a lot of
01:17:56.340 --> 01:18:04.660
stability and he was finally making what to him was infinite money from uh for example the blade
01:18:04.660 --> 01:18:13.460
runner movie and from a lot of books selling better domestically and overseas and in the time
01:18:13.460 --> 01:18:21.540
that i knew him he never was rich he never was rich and just before he died he suddenly started
01:18:21.540 --> 01:18:29.140
to get rich starting with a lot of options on his books to be made into movies and the first one was
01:18:29.140 --> 01:18:36.820
blade runner the book was called do androids dream of electric sheep and he died just as
01:18:36.820 --> 01:18:42.740
blade runner was being finished but he saw the rushes on that movie he really liked the way
01:18:42.740 --> 01:18:49.780
that movie had been done he was very proud of his accomplishments and somewhat vain about it um
01:18:49.780 --> 01:18:56.020
you know that that he had become this this kind of notable genre writer uh and uh and he was making
01:18:56.020 --> 01:19:01.300
good money i'm getting much more critical attention now especially abroad and especially
01:19:01.300 --> 01:19:06.900
in france i'm evidently discussed there now and then on french intellectual tv programs
01:19:07.540 --> 01:19:13.940
in articles this is true too in england and so forth i am sort of a campus figure but overshadowed
01:19:13.940 --> 01:19:20.420
by ray bradbury in a lot of objective ways and personal and emotional ways uh he was coming out
01:19:20.420 --> 01:19:26.420
on top money in the bank a fully paid for condominium friends who loved him and took
01:19:26.420 --> 01:19:33.620
care of him and protected him uh relationships that he was involved with uh books being published
01:19:33.620 --> 01:19:40.900
uh a movie being made everything like this so in some ways he kind of went out on top
01:19:40.900 --> 01:19:46.820
the last session i had with phil it was in february of 82 the 11th he was going to go to
01:19:46.820 --> 01:19:51.620
amsterdam that was the last time i saw him you know and then he called me on the phone
01:19:52.420 --> 01:19:57.140
about five days later the 17th told me he was being interviewed and his eyes were failing he
01:19:57.140 --> 01:20:02.660
couldn't see and he wanted a psychological interpretation and i said phil i don't think
01:20:02.660 --> 01:20:07.940
that you can't see i think your eyes are going go to the emergency room and he reluctantly finally
01:20:07.940 --> 01:20:12.980
said okay i'll go and i guess whoever was interviewing him i think it was greg rickman left
01:20:12.980 --> 01:20:21.220
a couple hours later he stroked and my memory of it is is that tim came over and the door was
01:20:21.220 --> 01:20:26.420
unlocked and came over with i think one in superres and they found phil on the carpet
01:20:27.060 --> 01:20:34.820
and he had had a stroke and had laid there they thought for about uh 12 hours or so
01:20:37.380 --> 01:20:42.900
this is western medical center where phil spent the last week or so of his life in the intensive
01:20:42.900 --> 01:20:49.220
care unit i sat in the waiting room a large part of the day and went in during the times when i
01:20:49.220 --> 01:20:56.660
could go in and visit i visited him in the intensive care you know felt i could do magic
01:20:56.660 --> 01:21:04.660
wake him up but uh now didn't work had a second stroke on the 25th and i guess on march 2nd
01:21:04.660 --> 01:21:09.620
he was flatlined and they unplugged him i heard about his death reading a new yorker review
01:21:09.620 --> 01:21:18.900
of i think it was the uh first of his novels that was made into a film at one point in the review
01:21:18.900 --> 01:21:29.620
in the new yorker magazine the review referred to the film as based on a science fiction novel
01:21:29.620 --> 01:21:36.580
of the late writer philip k dick and that was the first i knew that philip had died
01:21:36.980 --> 01:21:42.500
died gentlemen this investigation has been suspended until further notice
01:21:43.700 --> 01:21:48.420
was philip k dick a chosen one who had a visionary perception of an ultimate revelation
01:21:49.220 --> 01:21:55.700
or was he simply a writer with a unique imagination this is a question that will for now
01:21:55.700 --> 01:22:01.940
remain unanswered i think phil had a lot of doubts about his own sanity at times um
01:22:02.740 --> 01:22:09.700
his own track record he was um a lot more introspective than you know than i realized
01:22:10.660 --> 01:22:18.900
i think he used a lot of his experiences to create you know storylines um he knew he was
01:22:18.900 --> 01:22:23.540
not stable from an early age because he's you know i think his first psychiatrist was around the age
01:22:23.540 --> 01:22:29.940
of six so phil knew he was different you know you have to feel like for phil the search was
01:22:29.940 --> 01:22:36.820
worth something you know the the the reason for the search was the search itself it wasn't the end
01:22:36.820 --> 01:22:42.820
it was the process and i think maybe that's what kept him going and fueled that you know
01:22:43.620 --> 01:22:47.780
just like the little you know the joke about disneyland you know it's more fun to imagine
01:22:47.780 --> 01:22:53.540
going to disneyland than it is to be there you know it's kind of like it was more fun for phil
01:22:53.540 --> 01:23:01.300
to think about the process of getting the answer than the answer itself phil preferred to ask
01:23:01.300 --> 01:23:10.180
questions in his writing rather than offering answers and his major question was what makes
01:23:10.180 --> 01:23:19.300
us human but he couldn't ever find just what it was so he just kept on searching his whole life
01:23:20.100 --> 01:23:25.460
i think he was first of all just concerned to know what was real at all for starters i think
01:23:26.180 --> 01:23:32.260
all of his ideas about what might be behind reality were he considered them educated guesses
01:23:32.260 --> 01:23:37.620
a lot of people who are very much into the you know alternate reality thing about phil's books
01:23:37.620 --> 01:23:41.220
the one book they really don't like to talk about very much is the last one trans migration of
01:23:41.220 --> 01:23:49.060
timothy archer you have this portrait of this guy who lost himself in bizarre weird theories
01:23:50.020 --> 01:23:58.260
and totally lost touch with reality that guy is kind of a self-portrait of phil himself
01:24:00.020 --> 01:24:05.940
only a critical self-portrait where he realizes that yeah okay maybe something incredibly strange
01:24:05.940 --> 01:24:12.420
did happen to me maybe but at the same time i still have a a grasp on on reality and i read
01:24:12.420 --> 01:24:19.060
it and when i put it down i said thank god thank god he didn't die crazy he didn't die crazy
01:24:19.060 --> 01:24:24.020
he wasn't a lunatic when he died
01:24:24.260 --> 01:24:30.980
so
01:24:44.260 --> 01:24:49.380
the changing information which we experience as world is an unfolding narrative
01:24:49.380 --> 01:24:56.660
it tells about the death of a woman this woman who died long ago was one of the primordial twins
01:24:57.620 --> 01:25:04.100
she was half of the divine syzygy the purpose of the narrative is the recollection of her
01:25:04.100 --> 01:25:13.860
and of her death the mind does not wish to forget her the question of what happened to jane why she
01:25:14.340 --> 01:25:23.380
died is the answer is not very clear to my mind the most logical thing is that she was not strong
01:25:23.380 --> 01:25:31.700
enough to survive but she was her little body was buried in colorado at the maternal grandmother's
01:25:31.700 --> 01:25:40.100
place and of course when philip died you know 50 some odd years later he was buried next to her
01:25:40.100 --> 01:25:46.660
he was buried next to her in that same place i'm sure he would have liked that
01:25:48.820 --> 01:25:55.940
she wasn't exactly completely dead to him you know she was in his mind a lot in some way
01:25:57.460 --> 01:26:00.740
not you know not a very tangible way but she was there
01:26:10.100 --> 01:26:17.940
so
01:26:40.100 --> 01:26:47.940
so
01:26:56.260 --> 01:27:05.940
so
01:27:10.100 --> 01:27:19.940
so
01:27:40.100 --> 01:27:49.940
so
01:27:53.620 --> 01:28:03.940
so
01:28:10.100 --> 01:28:19.940
so
01:28:24.580 --> 01:28:33.940
so
01:28:40.100 --> 01:28:49.940
so
01:29:02.980 --> 01:29:03.460
you