Did Philip K. Dick dream of a message from God?

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a newly published, 1,000-page book devoted to a religious – or perhaps psychotic – episode in February and March of 1974, when a pink beam of light sent by God explained the nature of reality to a pulp science fiction writer.

It was the Exegesis, the posthumously published journal from Philip K. Dick, who was prolific enough when he was alive, turning out more than 40 novels and some 120 short stories. During all but the last year or so of his life, however, Dick made little money and received little attention from outside the world of science fiction.
    
But something strange has happened since his death almost 30 years ago: PKD, as he’s known to his numerous admirers, has become the subject of widespread admiration, and dozens of PhD theses. He has been acknowledged as a visionary philosophical writer, and likened to figures such as Borges, Baudrillard and Blake. Oddest of all, he has become the most successful writer in Hollywood.
    
Dick died in 1982, shortly before the release of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s classic film adapted from the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Since then Total Recall, Screamers, Imposter, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly, Next and The Adjustment Bureau, all based on his work, have been released and generated well over $1billion in box office revenue and other sales.
    
Next year, Disney will release The King of the Elves, based on an early PKD story. Principal photography has been completed on a remake of Total Recall, with Colin Farrell. And a film of Radio Free Albemuth is awaiting a release date. Several other adaptations, including a TV miniseries based on the alternative history novel The Man in the High Castle, to be directed by Scott; a film of Dick’s odd religious allegory, Ubik, and a biopic of the writer are also in the works.
    
All this is before considering the numerous films that owe a huge and obvious debt to Dick’s works. The Truman Show, Being John Malkovich, Vanilla Sky, eXistenZ, Inception, Memento and, above all, The Matrix all draw on the ideas he presented in his fiction.

Dick asked a number of awkward questions: ‘Why is there clearly something wrong about reality, and what is it that’s wrong?’ ‘What does it mean to be human, and how can we be sure that we are?’ And, most persistently, ‘Why are all these people telling us lies?’ Perhaps it’s not that surprising that he came to be recognised as writer emblematic of our age.

But in one respect, PKD is out of step with the times. The Baudrillardians are happy to have him point out that time is an illusion; that the authorities are out to get us; that God can talk through cheesy television advertisements; and that, with the endless refractions of different media playing the same message back and forth, nothing is quite as it seems. But they are happy for him to do so just as long as it is a fun metaphor making an important point but not to be taken seriously.
 
Judging by these journals, however, what Dick thought was much more dangerous. He maintained that, in 1974, he had received a message from God telling him the modern world was a fraud, a simulacrum laid over a reality that had not changed since the first century AD. He understood, or came to understand as he wrote about his experience, that this might be a delusion, and that it might be understood as a metaphor – but, uncomfortably for modern sensibilities, only in the way that St Paul or St John the Divine might have been regarded as deluded, or that the Gospels should be read only metaphorically.

Dick’s theology, though not quite orthodox, is not noticeably more odd or problematic than that of Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena or St John of the Cross. He came, in his last years, to worship as an Episcopalian, and I imagine he’d have been happiest as a liberal Anglo-Catholic in the C of E.

The oddest thing of all is that a man who perfectly described the world in which we all now live, who predicted the anxieties that would affect the citizens of the 21st Century, can – on the basis of these journals – be dismissed as a nutcase.

Sceptics say that, while most of what PKD wrote is now admired as insightful, prophetic and astute, these metaphysical writings mention God, so they can be dismissed. No doubt they were prompted by temporal lobe epilepsy or some similarly traumatic neurological event.
     
The trouble is that the Exegesis doesn’t read like that. It reads like a clever man trying to come to terms with the world around him, a world that he had always distrusted, and that gave him reasons to distrust it.
     
The force of what he believed has conquered Hollywood since his death, because people instinctively know that what Dick believed in was the world as it really is. No one would bat an eyelid if Benedict XVI or the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose descriptive and predictive powers have been less impressive, made similar points.

But the unfashionable truth is that Philip K. Dick believed in an old-fashioned story: this world is an illusion, and the world that matters, the one which can be relied upon, was revealed by Jesus Christ.

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