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Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection

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The are two parts of this book that I particularly value, and a long section that I just let wash passed me.

The interview with Philip Dick is a great record to have - it's almost like me being with him and chatting to him. (Although I might have directed the discussions differently - if Philip had allowed it!) I also appreciated Robert Anton Wilson's essay at the end - it's provocative, informative and a credit to this book with its challenge to Mr Apel's personal experience with Philip Dick, after his death (i.e. after Philip Dick's death, not Mr Apel's - I know that neither of those options make much sense to twenty-first century people - imbued as we are with rationalism and scientific method). Mr Wilson's philosophy of believing nothing mirrors my own except that I believe EVERYTHING - or at least, everything that I personally experience.

So what of the remainder of Mr Apel's book? His own experiences of 'connection' with Philip Dick after Philip Dick's death. The wole idea of life after death - or at least existence after death - is so tantalising, so seductive, that it is easy to be absorbed in someone else's testimony. But to me, we have a mind to use and we should use it for our own evaluation of the cosmos we are embedded in. My 'faith' is based on my experience and I will be neither uplifted nor crushed by someone else's experiences or harangues - no person and no written text. Consequently Mr Apel's narrative is of interest but is essentially meaningless to me - I can neither believe nor misbelieve - it might just as well be a fantasy or the history of Atlantis or a theory about what wiped out the dinosuars.

But for all that I am not offended by Mr Apel telling his tale - we all have the right to speak and to hear. And in line with this I will tell a story of my own. My fascination with Philip Dick grew from the mid sixties. The puzzles the plots often present, the unique humour, the unexpected twists and so on are part of the appeal the novels have. But there is something else. I read and re-read the novels and short stories so that now I know the twists, I have some grasp of the puzzles, I've experienced the humour before - so it's not surprise that tantalises me. And yet each time I start re-reading I find myself engrossed beyond any rational explanation. I know that Philip Dick has technical skills as a writer (although some critics seem to like to decry certain aspects of Philip Dick's grammar or plotting as if language and the structure of stories are static things and alternative techniques cannot be used or accepted). But I'm sure it's not just technique that attracts me. One of the last of Philip Dick's book that I read (so late in publication) was 'The Broken Bubble'. I was startled by a paragraph in it. It seemed that I had written this - it was my voice that was speaking. How could Philip Dick - who I never had the privelege to meet - know these thoughts of mine?

And what of life after death - what does my experience tell me? I suggest a study of Mahler's last three great orchestral works is revealing (and Mahler was a composer who Philip Dick referred to at times). The eighth symphony is the traditional view of salvation (reward, not punishment - Mahler had excluded punishment in the Resurrection symphony - 'there is only God's heavenly love'); 'The Song of the Earth' is the resigned acceptance of separation; and the ninth symphony - well for me it contains a great outburst of a dying person looking back in their last gasp at the world they are leaving and connecting with those left behind. I have experienced that same gasp - not from dying persons - but as if it has been left at particular places in the fabric of the cosmos ready for any mind that passes that way and is so attuned to grasp, regardless of the time of their passing. But that is all my experince - make of it what you will.