Philip Dick - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

Within a system that must generate an enormous amount of veiling, it would be vainglorious to expostulate on what actuality is, when my premise declares that were we to penetrate to it for any reason, this strange, veil-like dream would reinstate itself retroactively, in terms of our perceptions and in terms of our memories. The mutual dreaming would resume as before, because, I think, we are like the characters in my novel Ubik ; we are in a state of half-life. We are neither dead nor alive, but preserved in cold storage, waiting to be thawed out. Expressed in the perhaps startlingly familiar terms of the procession of the seasons, this is winter of which I speak; it is winter for our race, and it is winter in Ubik for those in half-life. Ice and snow cover them; ice and snow cover our world in layers of accretions, which we call dokos or Maya. What melts away the rind or layer of frozen ice over the world each year is, of course, the reappearance of the sun. What melts the ice and snow covering the characters in Ubik , and which halts the cooling off of their lives, the entropy that they feel, is the voice of Mr. Runciter, their former employer, calling to them. The voice of Mr. Runciter is none other than that same voice that each bulb and seed and root in the ground, our ground, in our wintertime, hears. It hears: "Wake up! Sleepers awake!" Now I have told you who Runciter is, and I have told you our condition and what Ubik is really about. What I have said, too, is that time is actually as Dr. Kozyrev in the Soviet Union supposes it to be, and in Ubik time has been nullified and no longer moves forward in the lineal fashion that we experience. As this has happened, due to the deaths of the characters, we the readers and they the personae see the world as it is without the veil of Maya, without the obscuring mists of lineal time. It is that very energy, Time, postulated by Dr. Kozyrev as binding together all phenomena and maintaining all life, that by its activity hides the ontological reality beneath its flow.

The orthogonal time axis may have been presented in my novel Ubik without my understanding what I was depicting: i.e. the form regression of objects along an entirely different line from that out of which they, in lineal time, were built. This reversion is that of the Platonic Ideas or archetypes: A rocketship reverts to a Boeing 747, then back to a World War I "Jenny" biplane. While I may indeed have expressed a dramatic view of orthogonal time, it is less certain that this is orthogonal time undergoing an unnatural reversion : i.e. moving backward. What the characters in Ubik see may be orthogonal time moving along its normal axis; if we ourselves somehow see the universe reversed, then the "reversions" of form that objects in Ubik undergo may be momentum toward perfection. This would imply that our world as extensive in time (rather than extensive in space) is like an onion, an almost infinite number of successive layers. If lineal time seems to add layers, then perhaps orthogonal time peels these off, exposing layers of progressively greater Being. One is reminded here of Plotinus's view of the universe as consisting of concentric rings of emanation, each one possessing more Being -- or reality -- than the next.

Within that ontology, that realm of Being, the characters, like ourselves, slumber in dreams as they wait for the voice that will awaken them. When I say that they and we are waiting for spring to come I am not merely using a metaphor. Spring means thermal return, the abolition of the process of entropy; their life can be expressed in terms of thermal units, and those units have left. It is spring that restores that life -- restores it fully and in some cases, as with our species, the new life is a metamorphosis; the period of slumbering is a period of gestation together with our fellows that will culminate in an entirely different form of life than we have ever known before. Many species are this way; they go through cycles. Thus our winter sleep is not a mere "spinning of our wheels," as it might seem. We will not simply bloom again and again with the same blossoms we produced each year before. This is why it was an error for the ancients to believe that for us, as for the vegetable world, the same year returned; for us, there is accumulation, the growth of an entelechy for each of us not yet perfected or completed, and never repeatable. Like a symphony of Beethoven, each of us is unique, and, when this long winter is over, we as new blooms will surprise ourselves and the world around us. What we will do, many of us, is throw off the mere masks that we have worn -- masks that were intended to be taken for reality. Masks that have successfully fooled everyone, as is their purpose. We have been so many Palmer Eldritches moving through the cold fog and mists and twilight of winter, but now soon we will emerge and lift the war mask of iron to reveal the face within.

It is a face that we, the wearers of the masks, have not seen either; it will surprise us, too.

For absolute reality to reveal itself, our categories of space-time experiences, our basic matrix through which we encounter the universe, must break down and then utterly collapse. I dealt with this breakdown in Martian Time-Slip in terms of time; in Maze of Death there are endless parallel realities arranged specially; in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said the world of one character invades the world in general and shows that by "world" we mean nothing more or less than Mind -- the immanent Mind that thinks -- or rather dreams -- our world. That dreamer, like the dreamer in Joyce's Finnegan's Wake , is stirring and about to come to consciousness. We are within that dream; these manifold dreams are about to fold into themselves, to disappear as dreams, to be replaced by the true landscape of the dreamer's reality. We will join him as he sees it once again and is aware that he has been dreaming. In Brahmanism, we would say that a great cycle has ended and that Brahman stirs and wakes again, or that it falls asleep from being awake; in any case the universe that we experience that is an extension in space and time of its Mind is experiencing the typical dysfunctions that take place at the end of a cycle. You may say, if you prefer, "Reality is collapsing; it's all turning to chaos," or, with me, you may wish to say, "I feel the dream, the dokos , lifting; I feel Maya dissolving: I am waking up, He is waking up: I am the Dreamer: We are all the Dreamer." One thinks here of Arthur Clarke's Overmind.

Each of us is going to have either to affirm or deny the reality that is revealed when our ontological categories collapse. If you feel that chaos is closing in, that when the dream fades out, nothing will be left, or worse, something dreadful will confront you -- well, this is why the concept of the Day of Wrath persists; many people have a deep intuition that when the dokos abruptly melts they're in for a hard time of it. Perhaps so. But I think that the visage revealed will be a smiling one, since spring usually beams down on creatures rather than blasting them with desiccating heat. There may, too, be malign forces in the universe that will be revealed by the removal of the veil, but I think about the fall of the political tyranny in the United States in 1974 and it seems to me that the exposure to the light of day of that ugly cancer and its subsequent removal is the nature of high value in disclosure to sunlight; we may have to suffer such shocks as learning that during the Nacht und Nebel , during the time of night and fog, our freedom, our rights, our property, and even our lives were mutilated, deformed, stolen, and destroyed by base creatures glutting themselves in spurious sanctuary down there at San Clemente [the location of Nixon's mansion] and in Florida and all the other villas, but the shock of exposure was worse for their plans than it was for ours. Our plans called only for us to live with justice and truth and freedom; the former government of this country had arranged to live with cruel power of the most arrogant sort, while at the same time lying to us ceaselessly through all the channels of communication. Such is a good example of the healing power of sunlight; this power first to reveal and then to shrivel up the coarse plant of tyranny that had grown deep into the beating heart of a good people.