This entre passage, including an extensive postscript, is a letter to Peter Fitting dated June 28, 1974. Dick had apparently received a visit from Fitting and others to discuss his revelations and has since been frantically trying to research his condition and subjects bearing upon it, including the ongoing nature of the revelations, which sometimes come to him as galleys [These are the proofs sent from the editor to the author, printed with extra wide margins for his inserted comments and corrections.] and printouts, an experience that had today might feel like a download from a higher consciousness. Dick was certainly experiencing portions of his revelations in terms associated with his writer’s perspective and reaches consciously into his writing history, wondering if he had previously been channeling input from a higher consciousness in the writing of is novels. This last item hints that, while deliberately constructed, Dick’s fiction may have been executed in a trance state. [1]

Having researched various scientific concepts, Dick is now trying to better explain himself to this man, who obviously taped an interview with the author about his experience. [2]

His feeling of his conscience having been entered from beyond is expressed neatly in the following passage:

“I was certain that those tens of thousands of lovely, balanced, quite professional and esthetic harmonious graphics could not be originating within my own mind or brain.”

Dick’s epiphany has broken down his inhibitions and opened his inner mind and he comes to the conclusion that humanity is bombarded with masses of unperceived information, offered by a reverse time “holy spirit” awaiting our souls even as an outer overmind or Logos floods us with knowledge, which only a handful of humans are capable of perceiving as on offer. Dick, partially through observing his cat, is convinced that animals are modified by such information bombardments and may indeed have a higher conscience in the form of their instincts as we conceive their behavior suites.

He provides an example of extremely scrambled information he receives, as well as out of time information concerning characters he had made up for novels who turned out to be doppelgangers of real existing people, strengthening his belief that he had been channeling aspects of his fiction.

“I do not wish to be in one of my own novels, by the way,” Dick relates, by way of pointing out that his settings were meant as dystopian, not predictive of the future, yet were already becoming predictive in his life time. He solidifies his point about having channeled his work with the chilling declaration—which would have been quite beyond many a Science Fiction writer of his stature, in terms of surrendered ego:

“I am not the true and actual source of my own fiction, and I’ve always wondered what that source was.”

Of bibliographical note, Dick mentions working on a sequel to The Man in the High Castle, one of his most highly regarded works. He closes by informing his correspondent, “…I value your opinion uniquely.”

Notes

1. I recall, after a year or two of writing fulltime and fielding phone calls at various times, including while writing, that all callers who contacted me when I picked up the phone while writing, apologized to me for awaking me, based on my voice. However, those who called while I was sleeping or napping [I worked nights at a supermarket] never seemed to be of the impression that I had been asleep. This finally, some 20 books into my writing career, informed me that I did indeed write in a trance or trance-like state.

2. I am reminded of interviewing a subject about being attacked who had no biomechanical terminology to explain the experience, compared to survivors of similar attacks with extensive athletic backgrounds who were able to more precisely describe their experience.