Time Loops
Page 38
The Lincoln container, when Pris and Maury brought it into the office, flabbergasted me. Even in its inert stage, lacking its working parts, it was so lifelike as to seem ready at any moment to rise into its day’s activity. …
To Pris I said, “I have to hand it to you.”
Standing with her hands in her coat pockets, she somberly supervised. Her eyes seemed dark, deeper set; her skin was quite noticeably pale—she had on no make-up, and I guessed that she had been up all hours every night, finishing her task. 15
In the interview, Dick made no allusions to details like this in his novel—only to the larger fact of his having seemingly precognized “the Lincoln.” But if there was a precognitive inspiration for Dick’s story, it may not have been merely a news story about Disney’s Lincoln, or even his visit to the park to see it in person. It may have been precisely his astonishing encounter in his apartment building at least a decade later, with a woman responsible for making a fake Lincoln seem real, after hours. If so, it would be yet another causal loop: Dick’s shock at the coincidental encounter with the woman who applied makeup to Disney’s Lincoln was due to his having written a decade or more earlier about precisely such a person. Much like Morgan Robertson’s Futility or Norman Mailer’s Barbary Shore , Dick’s novel seems like a literary-presentimental butterfly trapped in amber; its literary merits or lack thereof are less interesting than its “prophetic” qualities. 16
There are so many examples of this kind of coincidence in Dick’s life and published (and unpublished) writing that exploring the writer’s mystical and prophetic side has become almost a cottage industry. Peake lists numerous other examples in his biography, some of which, such as Dick’s claimed precognitive awareness of his infant son’s life-threatening hernia in 1974, are well-known parts of Dick lore but may have more mundane explanations—at least, cryptomnesia cannot be ruled out. 17 Others can be explained as the writer consciously or unconsciously fulfilling his own myth after the fact. But in some cases, the priority of Dick’s writing to the putatively precognized meme or event is clear from publication dates, adding up to a compelling case that this author was either more precognitive than most people or else simply more aware of and interested in a faculty that we all share but are generally oblivious to. 18
In fact, Dick and his precognitive experiences fit very well into the pattern elucidated by Jule Eisenbud. Like Morgan Robertson, Dick was a deeply ambivalent, tortured writer gripped by an addiction, lifelong guilt, and unresolved Oedipal feelings. Precognition seems to have answered much the same need for absolution in Dick’s case that it did for Robertson, even if the roots of Dick’s guilt were different and even though Dick seems to have been much better aware of his own complexes.
Like Freud himself, Dick had survived the loss of a sibling in infancy—a twin sister named Jane. He was nowhere near old enough to form a memory of Jane or her death, but his mother repeatedly told the story, and how she could not produce enough milk for both babies, who had been born six weeks premature. Dick had a lifelong obsession with his twin. Dominating his psyche was his guilt at having survived where she did not, and his anger toward his mother whose insufficiencies, he thought, starved her but whose narrative implicitly blamed Phil for “getting all the milk.” “[I]f there can be said to be a tragic theme running through my life,” he told one biographer, “it’s the death of my twin sister and the re-enactment of this over and over again … My psychological problems are traceable to the loss of my sister .” 19 Again, in the psychoanalytic framework, trauma resides not in an event as such—which may not even be remembered—but in the thoughts formed about it afterward. The story of his origins, surviving Jane’s death, became the total framework for Dick’s self-understanding.
Another recent biographer, Kyle Arnold, traces Dick’s visionary imagination and his obsession with unreality to this trauma:
Because of his mother’s repeated retellings of the story, Jane was an intensely present absence in Dick’s childhood, bridging the real and the imagined. Thoughts of Jane were thoughts of someone who had never been fully real for Dick. Like science fiction, they were thoughts of what might have been, what should have been, and what was not. They were intimations of possibilities, of stifled alternative universes. Jane was a window onto other worlds. Yet, for the most part, Dick could only gaze through the window, unable to pass through it. His creativity was catalyzed by longing. He compulsively reenacted his origin story throughout his life, repeatedly running afoul of authorities, chasing his deadly muse-twin in destructive relationships with women, and seeking salvation through a kind of desperate spirituality. As he writes in his journals, “the ultimate problem confronting me all my life has been the senseless injury to and neglect of my sister.” 20
A Freudian would see Oedipus as the subtext in all this, and Dick would have agreed. He even admitted to his third wife, Anne, that in his teens he had had a dream in which he slept with his mother—“I won my Oedipal situation.” 21 His adult romantic life was a roller-coaster of obsessive and needy relationships to increasingly younger women, the “dark-haired girls” who seemed to represent fantastic versions of his lost sister and who (in his accounts) always somehow turned very quickly into his cold and unloving mother. 22 Dick’s fifth wife, Tessa, was 18 when they met in 1972, 26 years his junior. When these relationships failed, it was always somehow his partners’ fault, their baggage, their craziness. Like one of the two patients who first pointed Freud toward formulating the Oedipal theory, Dick also suffered a debilitating agoraphobia. In Freud’s patient’s case, fear of being in public represented a fear of his own murderous impulses toward his father. 23 Dick’s agoraphobia too may have been a fear of his own hostility—he had a pattern of behaving badly or embarrassingly in public (even violently on a few occasions). And as we will see, a typically Oedipal un-stuck-ness in time was essentially the template for his spiritual experiences in his last decade.
The question of Dick’s mental state has always cast a shadow over his reliability as a narrator of events in his life. There is no question that he sometimes exaggerated, sometimes lied, and wildly shifted his interpretations of events in his letters and conversations. As Arnold puts it, “It is as if he were saying ‘I will be whomever you need me to be to take me seriously.’” 24 At times, his perception of reality was seriously distorted by paranoia almost certainly brought on by decades of amphetamine use and abuse. An ephedrine prescription at age six for asthma led to lifelong medical and nonmedical use of various stimulants. (Contrary to common belief, he was not a frequent user of hallucinogens.) Some of his most storied experiences, such as the notorious break-in of his house in 1971, occurred in the worst depths of his speed addiction and his wildly inconsistent accounts of the event cannot be taken at face value. 25
The pressure cooker of Dick’s life appears to have approached a peak in 1973, when he rushed ambivalently into marriage with his young girlfriend Tessa because he had gotten her pregnant. He was then faced with the added stress of an infant son and a marriage that became increasingly strained and untenable (as they all did). It was in this context that Dick’s famous “2-3-74” mystical experience occurred. Triggered initially (he said) by light glinting off a Christian fish-symbol pendant around the neck of a girl delivering painkiller to his home after oral surgery, 26 this experience is central to the Dick legend. What layers of mythmaking have overlooked is how stressful this period in his life was. Poverty and lack of recognition are one thing when you are a young brilliant artist, but when a man finds himself in the middle of his fifth decade with little to show for it but a string of failed marriages, estranged children, loneliness, continued poverty and substance problems, and increasing serious health issues like high blood pressure, things begin to feel desperate. (“Desperate” is precisely how one of the many college girls he attempted to date in 1972 described him. 27 )
Dick’s own Jung-inflected mythologizing framed “2-3-74” as a “metanoia,” a transcendence that resul
ts in a greater integration of the personality and thus healing. Biographer Arnold argues persuasively that it was nothing of the sort. His “intoxicating taste of radical wholeness and connectedness to the world” gradually slipped from his grasp, leaving him with the same sufferings and problems as well as a brand-new emptiness, a brand-new abandonment to add to his list. Over the following eight years until his death, Dick wrote thousands of pages of analysis to try and understand what had happened to him, and it does not lessen the value or genius of this text, the Exegesis , to say that it was the product of a nervous breakdown. “The Exegesis is the embodiment of Dick’s psychospiritual nostalgia,” Arnold writes. 28 It may be that many of the world’s greatest spiritual texts have been produced in such a state of crisis.
Fortunately for later students of precognition, this period in Dick’s life also produced some striking precognitive experiences that the writer recorded in fascinating and compelling detail thanks to a new pen pal—and muse—that entered his life just a month after his “2-3-74” visions and dreams began.
“Dear Claudia”
In early April, 1974, Dick received a short letter from a young woman named Claudia Bush who was planning to write about Ubik for her master’s degree at Ohio State University; she wrote him humbly asking for a bibliography of his works. 29 Dick wrote her back from the hospital, saying that they were about to replace his insides with plastic radio parts, and promised to write further. Over the following years, they carried on an intense correspondence, in which Dick chronicled his evolving interpretations of his fading mystical experience and in other ways opened up about his life and feelings with considerably more openness and authenticity than he seems to have shown any other mail correspondent during this period.
It is easy to read into his affectionate, avuncular-yet-flirtatious tone a kind of crush or transference. Claudia clearly represented another Oedipal fantasy: a young, obviously intelligent, suitably admiring girl who had none of the baggage and issues that his real-life relationship with wife Tessa was already (inevitably) assuming. For Claudia’s part, she felt special to be the object of so much attention by a writer she so admired; she describes that their letter-writing was, for her, “an extremely intense personal experience.” 30 Claudia went on to get a doctorate in Educational Testing and Measurement, and later, as Dr. Claudia Krenz, she attempted to make scanned hypertext of all of Dick’s letters available on the internet but was prevented from doing so by copyright laws. On her website, 31 Krenz downplays her own importance in this early “virtual” relationship (which began, she notes, the same year the word “internet” was coined), and she has not made her side of the correspondence available. But it is clear from the tone of Dick’s letters to her that she became something of a muse during that most intense and dark period of his life—even though they never met in person.
Many but not all of Dick’s lengthy “Dear Claudia” letters—Krenz says she received three a day, on a few occasions—have been published as part of his collected letters; and a few also appear in his published Exegesis . 32 Especially when read in isolation from his other correspondence during this period, these letters provide particularly valuable insight into Dick’s thought processes, and because he wrote her so regularly about his dreams, they give us especially valuable and unique insight into Dick’s precognitive habit. At the bottom of a typed letter to Claudia dated May 9, 1974, in which he speculated he had multiple personality disorder, Dick penned a handwritten postscript: “PS: What scares me most, Claudia, is that I can often recall the future .” 33
Although many of Dick’s claims and speculations about himself may not hold up under scrutiny, his claim of sometimes recalling the future, for instance in his dreams, is actually somewhat verifiable. Dick’s “Dear Claudia” letters are as valuable as any other dream corpus I know of for the study of dream precognition in vivo. In them, we have a dense, and in a few cases, daily record of Dick’s unfolding dream life, enabling us to construct an anatomy of dream precognition as an orienting function unfolding over a span of time. In a way that J. W. Dunne would have immediately recognized, Dick’s dreams oriented him toward a series of imminent, exciting learning experiences—specifically, interesting information latent often in his own sprawling, disorganized library, which in turn provided valuable strands to be woven into his most enduring spiritual and fiction writings over the coming years. These dreams also oriented and reoriented him toward that important “virtual” human connection to Claudia during a period when his marriage was in turmoil and the mystical presence that had given his life new meaning at the beginning of 1974 seemed to gradually abandon him.
On July 5, 1974, Dick wrote to his pen pal to describe the culmination of a series of dreams spanning the previous three months. All of them seemed to be pointing him toward a specific large blue hardback book whose title terminated with the word “Grove” preceded by a longer word starting with B, and that had been published in 1966 or 1968. “I had the keen intuition that when I at last found it I would have in my hands a mystic or occult or religious book of wisdom which would be a doorway to the absolute reality behind the whole universe.” 34 Bibliophiles who pay attention to their dreams will recognize this immediately (discovering a rare or overlooked book of great value) as a common dream theme. In one dream, the book was burned around the edges, suggesting an ancient manuscript. Although Dick thought he may need to go to a library or bookstore to find this volume, his dreams ultimately hinted he would find the book in his personal library, and thus he describes spending a day scouring his house in search of a big blue book with a title terminating in “Grove.”
Amazingly, he found what he was looking for, and the denouement of this weeks-long quest is as funny as anything in his novels:
As soon as I took down the volume I knew it to be the right one. I had seen it again and again, with ever increasing clarity, until it could not be mistaken.
The book is called THE SHADOW OF BLOOMING GROVE, hardback and blue, running just under 700 huge long pages of tiny type. It was published in 1968. It is the dullest book in the world … It is a biography of Warren G. Harding. 35
This too is a common experience for anyone who has engaged with their dreams in any consistent and serious way. Like a trickster, dreams often dangle a promise of sublimity, only to pull banal switcheroos that would be depressing if they weren’t so funny. It is Dick’s willingness to confront this bathetic pole in his own dream life—for instance, dreams promising a book of high wisdom, only to lead him to a dull 700-page biography of Warren Harding that a book club had sent him years earlier—that makes Dick such a valuable chronicler of precognitive phenomena. He is able to find comedy in his own errors and misunderstandings, and thus readily shares them with his young admirer and, via her, with us. 36
We do not have Krenz’s side of this literary conversation, unfortunately, but a week after reporting his discovery of the Harding biography, Dick wrote several long letters to her in quick succession (two on July 13th alone) in which he mentions her great amusement at his story. He goes on to describe subsequent vivid dreams over the intervening week, including a dream of a woman Cyclops sitting amid the conspirators who killed the Kennedy brothers and Dr. King; when he takes a second look at the dream woman, she is a pretty, two-eyed sibyl (prophetess). The narrative that unfolds from this is particularly interesting from the standpoint of Dunne’s observations on precognition’s relation to reading experiences.
The Cyclops-sibyl dream, he wrote, led him to look up “sibyl” in his encyclopedia. He does not notice that there is likely a precognitive element in this, if we take Cyclops as a dream-pun on encyclopedia —and that the reference work yielded a description of the Cumaean Sibyl. He quoted to Claudia a description of how the sibyl offered to sell her prophetic writings to the Roman king Tarquin the Proud; when he refused her high price, she began burning her books, until at last he paid the full price for the only three left undestroyed. This recalled to Dick the earlier dream of a
burned manuscript in the lead-up to finding the book about Harding. The passage also mentioned that a description of the Cumaean Sibyl appears in Virgil’s Aeneid . After Dick mailed this letter, he wrote Claudia a second letter as a “footnote,” describing how he had gone ahead and looked up the Aeneid in another source he had at hand, Will Durant’s Caesar and Christ , where he learned that Virgil’s poem also contained a description of the Cyclops and, most strikingly, where he found the following sentence: “Then the Sibyl takes him through mystic passages of the Blissful Groves where those who led good lives bask in green valleys and endless joys.” 37
Dick delves in subsequent letters into the possible Jungian meaning of all this, the significance of ancient Rome in his mystical experiences, and the sibyl as representing his “anima,” the inner source of his own prophetic capacity. Recall here Morgan Robertson’s belief that his own muse was likewise a feminine spirit of some sort. We can observe Dick here beginning to weave these dream images into his evolving self-mythology and what became a major metaphysical strand in his Exegesis , as well as the novel VALIS that was based on his experiences.
In his search for a meaning behind all these coincidences—an answer to the question “why me?”—Dick understandably gropes in many different directions for an explanation and attaches great, mostly Jungian significance to the symbols. Yet he does not go down the path of thinking he is simply accessing archetypes in the collective unconscious. Rather, he is drawn to the conclusion that somehow the ancient world is still present, only camouflaged—or indeed, that we are still in it. It all seems to confirm a dream remembered from his youth that was much like the “B___ Grove” dreams, in which he had searched for a story in Astounding Stories called “The Empire Never Ended.” That story, he had felt certain, contained all the mysteries of existence. As a result of some of his visions and experiences in 1974, Dick came to believe he was possibly a reincarnated Christian from ancient Rome. 38