I finally got round to reading the Philip K. Dick piece which I linked to yesterday - actually it turns out it’s a transcript of a speech rather than an essay - or that’s how it reads anyway so I’m presuming that’s what it is (I could just check on Wikipedia but would rather continue writing).
Anyway, it’s the full story, straight from the horse’s mouth, of something that’s referenced at the end of Waking Life (where it first got my attention) - a series of coincidences in Dick’s life that compelled him to believe that time and reality as we commonly perceive them are illusions projected on top of - and thus obscuring - an entirely different scenario. However, this scenario isn’t unfolding parallel to the one that we perceive - it’s actually just one moment in time. Although we perceive time progressing, in reality we’re being distracted from the fact that we’re actually in one specific period of time. Dick believed, due to an unsettling set of overlaps between his book Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, the book of Acts, and real-life experiences, that the real date is 50AD and that the present-day illusion which we travel through is an emulation created by Satan (who likes to ‘ape’ God) to prevent us from realising that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is imminent.
If you read the piece, you’ll probably feel inclined to pick apart Dick’s reasons for believing in such a scenario - and in an argument of logic you would almost certainly win. But I like to think that it’s really more of a discussion about to what extent reality is ‘real’ and to what extent reality is a story - a different story for each individual that is built from experiences and beliefs derived from those experiences. Dick believed that the present-day reality of television and Disneyland is ‘real’ enough that he’s willing to participate in it - but specific experiences in his life suggested to him that there was another dimension to the objects and events around him - not a verifiable dimension, but one that he suspected was present.
There’s a quote from Waking Life that I enjoy:
Before you drift off, don’t forget, which is to say remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting… …as one realizes, that one is a dream-figure in another person’s dream: that is self-awareness!
I like the idea that remembering, in comparison to forgetting, is a mental activity most bizarre - if it is psychotic, then I think that creating a story to apply to one’s life in order to make sense of experience and memory must be equally if not more so. My life is a narrative, populated by characters and ideas of my own creation. My friends and family are real, with feelings and thoughts - but they can only communicate approximations of those feelings and thoughts, and in turn I am only able to interpret what is communicated to me. As Aldous Huxley wrote in The Doors of Perception:
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves… …Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
So other people are only capable of being characters in my story - the plot is influenced by their existence, but it’s still me that decides how the plot should be best expressed. And the last sentence from the quote from Waking Life reminds me that it’s important, for my own level of self-awareness, to appreciate that I am also someone else’s interpretation of me in their story; I’m an approximated character in a story which is being played out on a completely different ‘island universe’ to the one I inhabit.
I like to advise people (and myself) to “keep up the narrative” - I work in a bit of a vacuum at the moment, making images (and songs) with only self-established deadlines and briefs - and it’s easy to lose track of what you’re doing and lose the enthusiasm to keep doing it if you don’t remind yourself what you did yesterday and how that affects what you’re doing today - and what you’re doing today, and how that affects what you’ll do tomorrow.
