Philip K. Dick had spent twenty years writing novels in which reality turns out to be a set with something else behind it. In February 1974 he began to experience what he took to be exactly that, and he spent the last eight years of his life trying to work out what had happened. He referred to the whole episode by its dates: 2-3-74.
What happened
Dick was living in Fullerton, in Orange County, California, recovering from the extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth and from the sodium pentothal he had been given for it. On February 20, 1974, a delivery woman arrived at his door with a prescription of the painkiller Darvon. He noticed the gold pendant she wore, shaped like a fish, and asked about it; she told him it was a sign used by the early Christians. By his own account, something in the symbol triggered a recollection that was not his to have.
What followed, across February and March, was a sequence of visions, dream states and hallucinations. He described a beam of pink light that delivered information directly into his mind. He saw abstract geometric patterns, then what he read as technical diagrams and philosophical propositions. He felt that an intelligence was present and gave it names, most lastingly VALIS, for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, and also Zebra, for an entity he thought could inhabit and mimic anything around it. At times he believed he was in telepathic contact with a first-century Christian he called Thomas, and he reported that the California landscape around him was replaced for a while by Rome under the empire. He concluded that the Roman Empire had never ended, only disguised itself, and that Richard Nixon was its current Caesar.
One episode is cited more than the others because it had a verifiable outcome. Dick said the pink light told him something was wrong with his infant son Christopher. He took the boy to a physician, where an inguinal hernia was found and operated on. The diagnosis was real; whether the prompting was anything more than a worried father’s hunch is not something the record can settle.
The Exegesis
The visions faded. The attempt to explain them did not. From 1974 until his death Dick wrote, mostly by hand and mostly at night, a running commentary on 2-3-74 that ran to several thousand pages, which he called his Exegesis. He proposed and discarded explanations at an extraordinary rate: Soviet telepathic experiments, a satellite transmitting to him, the Thomas personality, a version of himself in another dimension, the spirit of Jane, the twin sister who had died weeks after their birth, and, repeatedly, his own mental illness. He never settled on one. Lawrence Sutin published a selection in 1991 as In Pursuit of VALIS; a much larger edition, edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem with annotations coordinated by Erik Davis, appeared in 2011. Reviewers have found it by turns brilliant, tedious and painful. The material also fed directly into his late novels, VALIS, The Divine Invasion, Radio Free Albemuth and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
The medical readings
Dick’s own list of candidate explanations included the clinical ones, and so does everyone else’s. His biographer Lawrence Sutin argued that temporal lobe epilepsy is the most likely physical explanation; seizures in that part of the brain are known to produce intense religious feeling, a sense of presence, visual disturbance and the conviction that something of enormous importance is being revealed. Others have pointed to his long use of amphetamines, which he took to sustain his output and which can produce paranoia and hallucination, and to the possibility of a psychotic episode. The dental surgery and the anesthetic immediately preceded the first event. Dick died in 1982 after two strokes at the age of 53, which has also prompted speculation about longer-running vascular problems, though nothing in his medical record has been published that establishes a cause for 1974.
No examination was made at the time. No scan, no electroencephalogram, no psychiatric assessment of the episode exists. Every medical account of 2-3-74 is therefore a retrospective diagnosis from a patient’s own written description, offered by people who never examined him.
Where it stands
The events are documented in the sense that matters least and most: Dick wrote them down at length, immediately and for years afterward, and his letters and journals from the period survive. What he experienced is not in doubt. What caused it cannot be established now, and the two leading readings, a neurological event and a genuine encounter with something outside himself, are not the kind of claims that can be tested against a record this thin.
Dick himself never resolved it, which is the most consistent thing about the Exegesis. He treated his own revelation as material to be argued with rather than a creed, and he kept supplying alternatives until the writing stopped.