Aspects of Philip K Dick stories pepper the Memoirs, from Eye In The Sky and Time Out of Joint to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and A Maze of Death. More about these in future posts. Let us begin with the characters of Nicholas Brady in Radio Free Albemuth and Horselover Fat in VALIS. Both characters are, of course, versions of Dick himself. The following come snipped from various parts of the Memoirs;
“…having heard similar noises innumerable times since then, and still hearing them around me every day in day-time and at night, I have come to recognise them as undoubted divine miracles – they are called ‘interferences’ by the voices talking to me…”
“…I laboured under the delusion that when all attempts at cure had been exhausted, one would be discharged – solely for the purpose of making an end to one’s life either in one’s own home or somewhere else.”
“Divine rays above all have the power of influencing the nerves of a human being in this manner; by this means God has always been able to infuse dreams into a sleeping human being.”
“This process frequently ended with the souls concerned finally leading a short existence on my head in the form of ‘little men’ – tiny figures in human form, perhaps only a few millimetres in height – before finally vanishing…On these occasions I was frequently told the names of the stars or groups of stars from which they had emanated…”
“I realise that such a conception, according to which one must think of my body on our earth as connected to other stars by stretched out nerves, is almost incomprehensible to other people; for me however as a result of my daily experiences over the last six years there can be no doubt as to the objective reality of this relation.”
“…I have definite factual evidence for all these assumptions (that is to say for the expression ‘a distant God’), for instance at the time when the genuine basic language was current, every anterior leader of rays used to speak of the divine rays or of the representatives of the Divinity in his train as ‘I Who am distant’.”
Dick’s 1974 experiences appear in both Radio Free Albemuth and VALIS; the ‘information-rich’ pink light which apparently saved his young son’s life. Ancient Rome suddenly becoming visible ‘through’ the apparent reality of the street outside his house. Becoming ‘invaded’ by another mind, of a first century A.D. Christian. All can also be seen in Schreber’s documentation of his own, actual, illness.
Schreber talks of being able to see the rays stretching away from his head towards the horizon as they make their way towards the distant star of their origin. He sees buildings rise up from the ground. And his head is constantly full of the chatterings of many, many minds – berating him, telling him what to do and what not to do, what to think, asking him questions, etc, etc. Brady and Fat have similar experiences but unlike Schreber, they are proved to be correct, at least in the context of the novels. Brady is, indeed, a modern-day persecuted ‘Christian’. Fat is, indeed, receiving information in the form of pink light.
Sigmund Freud diagnosed Schreber from reading the Memoirs. Am I doing the same for PKD? Possibly, although I agree with David Gill and others who say there’s not much point in trying to answer the question ‘Was PKD crazy?’ In the case of finding these parallels with Schreber’s memoirs, I guess I’m struck by the many coincidences but also I’m confronting the classic Dick-ism – asking not the age-old Sci-Fi question ‘What if..?’ but rather ‘My God! What if…?’
Memoirs of My Nervous Illness - Initial PKD Parallels
