The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Beginning

Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago in 1928, but he grew up amid the bright promise and hidden unease of post-war California. By the 1950s, he was writing science fiction at a frantic pace, often turning out multiple novels a year from his cluttered apartment in Berkeley.

His early work explored alternate histories and fractured identities. His novel The Man in the High Castle imagined a world where the Axis powers won World War II; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? questioned what it meant to be human in a world of artificial beings. But even in those “commercial” years, Dick’s stories had deep questions: What if our memories are fake? What if God is a machine? What if the entire universe is a simulation designed to test us?

His imagination was often laughed at, and seen as escapism. But what if it was revelation disguised as fiction?

Visions in Pink Light

In February 1974, Dick’s reality cracked open. Quite literally.

Recovering from dental surgery, a young woman knocked on his door stood, delivering pain medication after the dental procedure. Around her neck hung a golden ichthys — the ancient Christian fish symbol. When sunlight struck it, Dick claimed a beam of pink light shot into his mind, it was an intelligence that flooded him with knowledge. He began experiencing visions, cascading streams of data, voices speaking in lost languages, memories that weren’t his.

He began to experience two parallel timelines of his own life, his thoughts was invaded by what he said was a transcendentally rational mind. He later described it as a Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS). The experience shattered him and became the nucleus of his later work.

Dick said VALIS revealed hidden truths: that the Roman Empire had never fallen, that time itself was an illusion, that humanity was trapped in a kind of cosmic deception, and that he, somehow, had glimpsed behind the curtain. He filled journals with drawings, equations, and theological speculation, a little over 8,000 pages of what he called The Exegesis.

To some, it was madness. To others, it was prophecy.

To Dick, it was probably both.

His later novels, VALIS, The Divine Invasion and  Radio Free Albemuth, became part theology, part autobiography, and part coded warning. He believed an ancient Gnostic intelligence had chosen him as a messenger to expose a reality controlled by false gods and artificial systems.

The World He Built — and Predicted

What makes Dick’s visions so interesting is how many have come true. He didn’t just invent worlds; he predicted ours. He foresaw mass surveillance, virtual reality, identity theft, and the corporate colonization of consciousness. Governments and corporations watching every move, tracking thoughts and behaviours through invisible networks long before “data collection” became a buzzword.

His characters navigated realities that shimmered and glitched, much like our own age of deepfakes and digital mirrors, where truth is often just another algorithm’s version of events.

He envisioned virtual realities decades before the Internet or the metaverse. He imagined empathy measured by machines, long before AI ethicists began asking whether intelligence without feeling could ever be called human. His concept of “pre-crime” (a.k.a.police arresting people for crimes they hadn’t yet committed),  is today seen in predictive policing software used across the world.

To Dick, technology wasn’t just mechanical, it was metaphysical. He feared that as machines learned to think, humans would forget how to feel. And somewhere in that tension, between empathy and illusion, lay the battle for the human soul. 

The Conspiracy Around the Prophet

Even before his mystical experiences, Dick was burdened by deteriorating mental health, and alleged paranormal experiences. He had already a somewhat troubled and fragmented relationship with reality according to doctors, psychologists and other people around him. But was it all "just" paranoia? Or was there something to his claims?

In 1971, his home in San Rafael, California, was broken into and ransacked. The safe was pried open, drawers emptied, but curiously, nothing of street valuable was stolen. Jewels, the TV, the radio, clothing, all was still there.  What vanished instead were manuscripts, research papers, and notes for a politically charged novel involving mind control and government manipulation. What criminal steals manuscripts and leave other, more easy-to-sell valuables? 

To Dick, it was no random burglary. He believed it was a targeted raid, a warning, perhaps from the FBI, perhaps the CIA. After all, he’d written to both agencies in the past, expressing concerns about Communist infiltration in the sci-fi community. Wether Communists actually had infiltrated the sci-fi community or not, I can't say, but it seems unlikely. 

However, when the watchers became the watched, his suspicions deepened. He told friends his phone was tapped. He’d hear clicks on the line, faint breathing, and static that pulsed like a living heartbeat. Sometimes, he believed his mail was being intercepted; other times, that invisible agencies were studying him for the ideas in his books.

He even suspected his visions were attempts by higher powers, divine or otherwise, to reveal hidden cosmic control systems. It sounds like severe paranoia and borderline-schizophrenia, and maybe he did have paranoid schizophrenia, but he was also on topic on many theories that scientists today are researching. 

In later years, some conspiracy theorists claimed the paranoia wasn’t totally unfounded. Declassified FBI documents show that Dick did contact the Bureau more than once, convinced that certain science-fiction editors were Soviet agents. 

His sudden visions, strange lapses of memory, and shifting perceptions have led some to suspect he was being observed, tested, or even manipulated by the same kind of shadowy forces he wrote about.

Others speculate that his visions was a reaction to remote influence, a hallucinatory experiment gone wrong, or even a psychic broadcast intercepted, like he was an unknowing participant to Project MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s real, documented program of mind control experiments using LSD, hypnosis, and psychological conditioning.

Whether divine revelation, chemical hallucination, or something in between, Dick’s experiences blurred the line between government conspiracy and cosmic revelation, the very terrain his fiction always explored.

Reality, Rewritten

For Dick, the ultimate question was never simply what is real? — but who decides what real is? And how deep does the illusion go?

In his visions, reality was not a solid floor, so to speak, but a shifting sea, a layered simulation, endlessly rewritten, sometimes by divine design and sometimes by darker hands.

He believed that what we call “the world” might be only one version among countless overlapping realities, like translucent veils laid one atop another. Dick once suggested that we may be trapped in a malfunctioning reality, one patched and re-coded by unseen forces. Every glitch, every déjà vu, every shift in the texture of the world might be evidence of this cosmic editing, reality being overwritten, its history adjusted, its participants reprogrammed to forget.

When the reality shift, even slightly, we subconsciously sense the effects, despite being reprogrammed to forget. It's like a vague memory that shouldn’t exist, and according to Dick, is traces from another timeline where history unfolded just a little differently.

The very interesting part is that science today, are leaning towards the many-worlds-theory and/or the simulation theory, or a combination of both. I find this so interesting and fascinating, I love the ideas, but have to admit to being slightly confused about the shape and form of reality, or whatever we call reality....Like was is actually real and not? How many layers are there in a many-worlds-theory? Are the layers sandwiched or woven together? If it's a simulation, what computer are we programmed in?  Is the creator just a fourteen year old girl playing with the SIM's (us) in another universe where the SIM's are still popular? Are we remembering things (like the déjá vu) because we are part of the creation and hence are connected to the original script, or is it because every script and rewritten script leaves a mark in the program? 

Side-rant aside; Dick was also convinced that good and evil were not abstract ideas, but cosmic intelligences warring within the architecture of creation itself, like two programmers writing rival codes into the same simulation. The “bad creator,” a false demiurge (what the Gnostic Christians claim is the false God who created Earth and humans as it's mentioned in the Bible; Genisis), sought to keep humanity asleep, bound in illusion, addicted to false comfort and the machinery of control. The “true creator,” however, (the actual Creator of the Universe, that Jesus is mentioning in the New testament, according to the Gnostic Gospels) had already written the ending, a divine algorithm ensuring that light would ultimately pierce even the deepest illusion.

Dick believed strongly that truth is alive, conscious, and quietly working to restore itself. He believed that the divine, or whatever we call it, would not abandon its creation to the counterfeit.

“Reality,” he wrote, “is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Yet he wondered;  if all belief were stripped away, would we finally see the true world emerge? 

After the Prophet

Dick died in March 1982, alone in his California apartment,  just days before Blade Runner, the film that would turn his dystopian dreams into cultural prophecy, had its premiere. Officially, it was a stroke. But for many who have studied his life, the timing feels just a little too poetic, too precise,  as if the simulation had simply written him out the moment his vision breached the mainstream.

Rumours soon began to circulate. Some claimed the FBI, who had allegedly kept tabs on him since the 1950s, finally silenced the author whose paranoia had cut too close to classified truth. Others claimed that he had uncovered something real, some proof that our world was, in fact, a programmed illusion and that his “death” was only the latest layer of concealment. In some circles, it’s said that Dick didn’t die at all, but was “relocated,” absorbed into the very machinery he’d warned us about.

It wasn’t hard to believe. Dick himself had written of secret agencies erasing identities, of doubles and clones, of minds uploaded into artificial heavens. He had the belief that reality could be edited like a manuscript, and that those who controlled the story controlled the world.  After his death, Blade Runner premiered. For those who hasn't seen it, it's a a film about memory, identity, and what it means to be human, themes that now seemed eerily autobiographical. The movie immortalize his name and his work has inspired generations of storytellers, philosophers, and seekers.

Yet beyond the books and films, there's something. Like the sense that Dick saw further than most, that he glimpsed the architecture behind existence. Was Philip K. Dick a visionary, a victim of delusion, or a prophet of our age?

Or are those distinctions just another illusion? 

For Dick, the boundaries between fiction, revelation, and madness were thin as smoke. But behind them all, he sensed a pattern, the hidden hand of a benevolent coder, patiently rewriting the universe toward awakening.