The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (21 page)

Meanwhile, Dick’s life lurched from crisis to crisis: nervous breakdowns, suicide attempts, divorces, novels written at top speed to stave off debt, paranoid delusions – at one point he saw a great metal face, with slots for eyes, looking down at him from the sky. His sexual relationships were reminiscent of those of the Swedish playwright Strindberg; again and again it looked as if the lonely, fear-ridden writer had found peace when some attractive woman thought that she could give him the security he needed. But his fundamental instability wrecked every relationship. And his loneliness and paranoia brought about writer’s blocks. His biographer remarks, “If there is a dominant mood to his novels of the late sixties, it is that of a dark night of the soul”. The novels themselves usually have a stifling, airless atmosphere that contrasts strongly with the wind of reality that seems to blow through the best of Tolstoy or Hemingway.

A quarrel he had with the science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison seems to embody everything that was wrong with Dick. At a science-fiction conference in Metz, France, Dick bewildered and bored his audience
with a typically rambling speech entitled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others”, Audience members suspected he was drunk or on drugs. (He was, in fact, addicted to numerous prescription drugs.) Dick and Ellison had parted company before because Ellison felt Dick was unreliable and “possibly loony”. When they met in the bar they engaged in a bitter philosophical debate that was basically a quarrel. Dick’s girlfriend at the time gives a memorable word-portrait of the encounter:

Clearly, Dick
could
pull himself together and organize his ideas. Yet, as Ellison realized, he preferred to “have people support him rather than be master of his own ship”.

But on 2 March 1974, Dick experienced a “vision” that transformed his life. He later told an interviewer, Charles Platt, “My mental anguish was simply removed from me as if by a divine fiat . . . Some transcendent divine power, which was not evil, but benign, intervened to restore my mind and heal my body and give me a sense of the beauty, the joy, the sanity of the world”.

In February 1974 Dick was convinced that he was being persecuted by both American and Soviet authorities; he was also convinced that he was destined to die the following month.

One night, lying awake and wrestling with “dread and melancholy”, he began to see whirling lights. A week later he again had visions but this time of “perfectly formed modern abstract paintings” – hundreds of thousands of them replacing each other at dazzling speed. Then he experienced the “Bardo Thodol journey” (an after-death journey, as described in the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
) and found himself face to face with the goddess Aphrodite. After this he began hearing female voices as he hovered in hypnagogic states on the edge of sleep. On March 16 “it appeared – in vivid fire, with shining colours and balanced patterns –
and released me from every thrall, inner and outer”. Two days later “it, from inside me, looked out”. In other words, Dick now felt another being inside himself; he was “possessed”. But the entity seemed benevolent: “It denied the reality, the power, the authenticity, of the world, saying, ‘This cannot exist; it cannot exist.’” Two days later: “It seized me entirely, lifting me from the limitations of the space-time matrix; it mastered me as, at the same instant, I knew that the world around me was cardboard, a fake. Through its power I suddenly saw the universe as it was; through its perception I saw what really existed, and through its power of no-thought decision, I acted to
free myself
”.

All this sounds like the typical rambling of a psychotic. Yet what actually took place was by no means entirely in the realm of fantasy. Dick had a conviction that he would receive a letter that would kill him. His wife, Tessa, confirms that one morning he selected a letter from a large batch of mail, handed it to her unopened, and told her that this was what he had been expecting. In fact, it was a photocopy of a book review about the decline of American capitalism, and every negative word, such as
die
,
decline
,
decay
, and
decomposition
, had been underlined. Paranoid or not, Dick seemed to have a sixth sense that enabled him to detect the strange letter unopened.

Now, says Dick, he was taken over by the “intelligence”. “On Thursdays and Saturdays I would think it was God, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays I would think it was extraterrestrial . . . It set about healing me physically, [as well as] my four-year-old boy, who had an undiagnosed life-threatening birth defect that no one had been aware of”.

The “intelligence”, which Dick called Valis (
Vast Active Living Intelligence System
), fired information into his brain by means of pink light beams. It told him that his son, Christopher, suffered from a potentially fatal inguinal hernia. The Dicks checked with the doctor and found that the information was correct; the hernia was remedied by an operation.

Dick told Charles Platt:

His wife, Tessa, told Dick’s biographer, Lawrence Sutin, that she had no doubt of the genuineness of these “mystical” experiences. But she herself also had reason to believe that there was some basis for her husband’s paranoia. Dick thought that the radio was transmitting programs in which a popular singer called him names, told him he was worthless, and advised him to die. This sounds like a typical schizophrenic delusion. But Tessa herself verified that the radio would go on at two in the morning and play music (she did not hear the voice); the odd thing was that the radio was unplugged.

Dick goes on:

Sutin verifies that Dick galvanized his agent – the one he had fired for a time – into pursuing back royalties from Ace Books and that the agent was able to send him a check for $3,000.

Tessa also confirmed that Dick normally refused to go to the doctor but that the “spirit” insisted and that the doctor immediately had Dick check into a hospital for treatment of high blood pressure. He came out physically much improved. His wife wrote, “It made Phil more fun to be with. Every day brought an adventure”. And his experiences culminated in this insight: “This is not an evil world . . . There is a good world under the evil. The evil is somehow superimposed over it . . . and when stripped away, pristine, glowing creation is visible”.

Dick’s life began to improve. He had always been poor. In 1974 he made $19,000, and in the following year, $35,000. As his reputation increased, so did demands for interviews, and an increasing number of his novels were translated into foreign languages. Several books were
optioned by Hollywood, and one of them, as mentioned earlier, became a classic movie,
Blade Runner
. When Dick died – of a stroke and heart failure – in 1982, he had achieved cult status among thousands of science-fiction fans and had become something of a legend.

How far can we accept Dick’s own estimate of his “possession” experience? His biographer, Lawrence Sutin, is obviously ambivalent about the subject. Yet the title of his book,
Divine Invasions
, indicates that he feels the experience to be the most important in Dick’s life. His ambivalence is understandable. Dick sounds like a paranoid schizophrenic, and paranoid schizophrenics have “visions”. Yet there is enough factual evidence to suggest that Dick may not have been suffering from delusions after all.

The problem, of course, is that a rational human being finds it practically impossible to believe in “possession” – except as a psychiatric label. Chapter 42 in this book argues that such an attitude may not be as reasonable as it sounds. It depends upon the assumption that disembodied “spirits” cannot exist, and while no one will disagree that this is a perfectly sensible
assumption
for a rational and practical human being, we cannot assume that it is
true
for that reason. And if we are willing even to admit the logical possibility of spirits, then we have also admitted the logical possibility of “possession”.

An American psychiatrist, Wilson Van Dusen, found himself in this position, simply as a result of his work with mental patients at Mendocino State Hospital in California. In a book entitled
The Natural Depth in Man
(1972), Van Dusen defined madness as “a turning in on one’s self that makes one a constricted uselessness that misses one’s highest potentials”. In other words, madness is a
limitation
of our natural potential – which inevitably raises the question: What is our natural potential? Van Dusen’s conclusion was that all human beings have the potential to undergo “mystical” experiences, in which consciousness seems to expand far beyond its normal limitations, and that therefore, in a certain sense, we are all “mad”.

He went on to describe how he managed to establish contact with one of his patient’s hallucinations. The girl had a phantom lover, and “just for the heck of it”, Van Dusen asked her to “report faithfully what [the lover] said and did”. Van Dusen was thus able to hold “conversations” with the hallucination, using the patient as a go-between. He then found, to his surprise, that he was able to give psychological tests to his patients
and
to their hallucinations, separately. He next made a startling and disturbing discovery: the hallucinations were sicker than the patients. That should have been quite impossible, since the
hallucinations
were
the patients. Yet “what was revealed of the hallucinations looked remarkably like ancient accounts of spirit possession”. There could be no doubt in Van Dusen’s mind that the hallucinations behaved like real people, and really replied to his remarks; for example, the patient’s eyes would sometimes flash sideways as Van Dusen was talking and the hallucination interposed some remark.

Patients often told stories of how they had come to “meet” their hallucinations: “One woman was just working in her garden and a kindly man started talking to her when no one else was around. One alcoholic heard voices coming up a hotel light well. Another man saw a spaceship land and green men getting out”. (This experience is worth bearing in mind, when one considers so-called contactees of flying saucers; if Van Dusen is correct, these may not always be hallucinations.) “It takes a while for the patient to figure out that he is having private experiences that are consequently not shared by others”.

There was evidence that the “hallucinations” were not entirely subjective and unreal. One of the patients was a woman who had “murdered a rather useless husband”. The Virgin Mary had come to her in the hospital and advised her to drive to the southern part of the state and stand trial for murder. The Virgin told her there would be an earthquake on the day she left for the south and another on the day she arrived. In fact, both earthquakes took place on cue.

Van Dusen soon noted that there seemed to be two types of hallucinations, which he termed “higher order” and “lower order”. The lower order were stupider than the patient. They would lie, cheat, deceive, and threaten. They might repeat the same word over and over again for days on end; they might tell the patient he was useless and stupid and that they were going to kill him. They behaved, says Van Dusen, like “drunken bums in a bar”.

The “higher order”, on the other hand, were more intelligent and talented than the patient, and far from attacking him, they respected his freedom. They were “helpers”. In one case, Van Dusen was introduced by his patient – a “not very gifted gas fitter” – to a “beautiful lady” who referred to herself as the Emanation of the Feminine Aspect of the Divine and who seemed to have an incredible knowledge of religious symbols: “When I or the patient said something very right, she would come over to us and hand us her panties”. One day Van Dusen went home and spent the evening studying Greek myths. The next day he asked the “hallucination” about some of the obscurer parts. “She not only understood the myth, she saw into its human implications better than I did. When asked, she playfully wrote the Greek alphabet all over the place. The patient
couldn’t even recognize the letters, but he could copy hers for me”. As the gas fitter was leaving the room, he turned to Van Dusen and asked him to give him a clue as to what the conversation had been about.