Philip Dick - The Complete Stories of Philip K. Dick Vol. 5 - The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Stories

Anyhow, my composition was considered very good by the principal of the school, Mr. Bill Gaines, after I wrote in that Jill wore something above her waist at all times, and later I decided to be a writer.

One night I had an odd dream. I was maybe in junior high school, getting ready to go to Berkeley High next year. I dreamed that in the deep of night – and it was like a regular dream, it was really real – I saw this person from outer space behind glass in a satellite of some kind they'd come here in. And he couldn't talk; he just looked at me, with funny eyes.

Two weeks or so later I had to fill out what I wanted to be when I grew up and I thought of my dream about the man from another universe, so I wrote: I AM GOING TO BE A SCIENCE FICTION WRITER.

That made my family mad, but then, see, when they got mad I got stubborn, and anyhow my girlfriend, Ysabel Lomax, told me I'd never be any good at it and it didn't earn any money anyhow and science fiction was dumb and only people with pimples read it. So I decided for sure to write it, because people with pimples should have someone writing for them; it's unfair otherwise, just to write for people with clear complexions. America is built on fairness; that is what Mr. Gaines taught us at Hillside Grammar School, and since he was able to fix my wristwatch that time when no one else could, I tend to admire him.

In high school I was a failure because I just sat writing and writing all day, and all my teachers screamed at me that I was a Communist because I didn't do what I was told.

"Oh yeah?" I used to say. That got me sent up before the Dean of Boys. He told me off worse than my grandfather had, and warned me that if I didn't get better grades I'd be expelled.

That night I had another one of those vivid dreams. This time a woman was driving me in her car, only it was like an old-time Roman style chariot, and she was singing.

The next day when I had to go see Mr. Erlaud, the Dean of Boys, I wrote on his blackboard, in Latin:

UBI PECUNIA REGNET

When he came in he turned red in the face, since he teaches Latin and knows that means, "Where money rules."

"This is what a left-wing complainer would write," he said to me. So I wrote something else as he sat looking over my papers; I wrote:

UBI CUNNUS REGNET

That seemed to perplex him. "Where – did you learn that particular Latin word?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. I wasn't sure, but it seemed to me that in my dreams they were talking to me in Latin. Maybe it was just my own brain doing reruns of my Latin 1-A beginners class, where I was really very good, surprisingly, because I didn't study.

The next vivid dream like that came two nights before that freak or those freaks killed President Kennedy. I saw the whole thing happening in my dream, two nights before , but more than anything else, even more vivid, I saw my girlfriend Ysabel Lomax watching the conspirators doing their evil deed, and Ysabel had a third eye.

My folks sent me to a psychologist later on, because after President Kennedy was assassinated I got really weird. I just sat and brooded and withdrew. It was a neat lady they sent me to, a Carol Heims. She was very pretty and she didn't say I was nuts; she said I should get away from my family, drop out of school – she said that the school system insulates you from reality and keeps you from learning techniques to handle actual situations – and for me to write science fiction.

I did so. I worked at a TV sales shop sweeping up and uncrating and setting up the new TV sets. I kept thinking that each set was like a huge eye, though; it bothered me. I told Carol Heims my dreams that I had been having all my life, about the space people, and being in Latin, and that I thought I'd had a lot more I'd never remembered when I woke up.

"Dreams aren't fully understood," Ms. Heims told me. I was sitting there wondering how she would look in a belly dancer costume, nude above the waist; I found that made the therapy hour go faster. "There's a new theory that it's part of your collective unconscious, reaching back perhaps thousands of years… and in dreams you get in touch with it. So, if that's true, dreams are valid and very valuable."

I was busy imagining her hips moving suggestively from side to side, but I did listen to what she said; it was something about the wise kindness of her eyes. Always I thought of those wise snakes, for some reason.

"I've been dreaming about books," I told her. "Open books, held up before me. Huge books, very valuable. Even holy, like the Bible."

"That has to do with your career as a writer," Ms. Heims said.

"These are old. Thousands of years old. And they're warning us about something. A dreadful murder, a lot of murders. And cops putting people into prison for their ideas, but doing it secretly – framing people. And I keep seeing this woman who looks like you but seated on a vast stone throne."

Later on Ms. Heims was transferred to another part of the county and I couldn't see her any more. I felt really bad, and I buried myself in my writing. I sold a story to a magazine called Envigorating Science Fact, which told about superior races who had landed on Earth and were directing our affairs secretly. They never paid me.

I am old now, and I risk telling this, because what do I have to lose? One day I got a request to write a small article for Love-Planet Adventure Yarns , and they gave me a plot they wanted written up, and a black-and-white photo of the cover. I kept staring at the photo; it showed a Roman or Greek – anyhow he wore a toga – and he had on his wrist a caduceus, which is the medical sign: two coiled snakes, only actually it was olive branches originally.

"How do you know that's called a 'caduceus'?" Ysabel asked me (we were living together now, and she was always telling me to make more money and to be like her family, which was well-to-do and classy).

"I don't know," I said, and I felt funny. And then I began to see violently agitated colored phosphene activity in both my eyes, like those modern abstract graphics which Paul Klee and others draw – in vivid color, and flash-cut in duration: very fast. "What's the date?" I yelled at Ysabel, who was sitting drying her hair and reading the Harvard Lampoon.

"The date? It's March 16," she said.

"The year !" I yelled. "Pulchra puella, tempus -" And then I broke off, because she was staring at me. And, worse, I couldn't recall her name or who she was.

"It is 1974," she answered.

"The tyranny is in power, then, if it is only 1974," I said.

"What?" she answered, astonished, staring at me.

At once two beings appeared on each side of her, encapsulated in their inter-system vessels, two globes which hovered and maintained their atmosphere and temperature. "Don't say a further statement to her," one of them warned me. "We will erase her memory; she will think she fell asleep and had a dream."

"I remember," I said, pressing my hands to my head. Anamnesis had taken place; I remember that I was from ancient times, and, before that, from the star Albemuth, as were these two Immortals. "Why are you back?" I said. "To -"

"We shall work entirely through ordinary mortals," J'Annis said. He was the wiser of the two Immortals. "There is no Sibyl now to help, to give advice to the Republic. In dreams we are inspiring people here and there to wake up ; they are beginning to understand that the Price of Release is being paid by us to free them from the Liar, who rules them."

"They're not aware of you?" I said.

"They suspect. They see holograms of us projected in the sky, which we employ to divert them; they imagine that we are floating about there."

I knew that these Immortals were in the minds of men, not in the skies of Earth, that by diverting attention outward, they were free once more to help inward, as they had always helped: the inner World.