Because of Christ’s intervention Dick believes he has cheated death. Christianity is the only Greco-Roman mystery religion to achieve what it promised which is life instead of a predetermined death. Dick imagines a “death strip” in our DNA that has been programmed with our time to die, but in 3-74 Christ activated something in his brain which was able to bypass that programming and afterwards Christ was resurrected in him. He could still die but not on the previous schedule. Instead of dying like he was supposed to he spent the last five years with financial security and critical recognition. He wonders if the voice that has been speaking to him is his later self who died and returned. 

The madness of combining trash (his sci-fi writing) with the divine has resulted in sanity and created a new language he calls the “hieroglyphs of God.”

He questions who truly won, Christianity or the Empire. He views what happened to him in 3-74 as a sacred ritual and mythic re-enactment that ended with him becoming Christ. He decides to let any extra-terrestrial explanations for what happened to him go and embrace the theological. 

He has a late-night insight that our brains are locked in a feedback loop and the holy power is trying to wake us. A cosmic, divine mind (Hagia Sophia) inhabited him and generated his writing. Valis was projected in his mind rather than the outer world.

He says he has it all figured out and now he can quit. Through child-like belief in the Christian universe a miracle occurs and it all becomes real, including the symbols, much like transubstantiation. 

He entertains the possibility of alternate worlds that are not entirely separate, but instead superimposed, and relates this to the world depicted in Flow my Tears. 

In 3-74 Dick came to understand that reality could be tweaked through subtle interactions to be anything you want it to be due to the mimicking nature of whatever reality really is. He calls it a push-pull relationship.

Charles Platt interviewed Dick for his book Dream Makers, a collection of interviews with science fiction authors. Afterwards, based on that conversation, Dick suspects Valis must have come from his collective unconscious, which meant he went through a psychotic breakdown. Dick follows this with a long series of questions and answers to probe this idea like:

• Q: What about external events?
  A: Coincidence
• Q: Why were his senses enhanced?
  A: Drug-induced psychosis
• Q: What about the perceived time dysfunction?
  A: Nothing but disorientation

He eventually admits to himself he must be a manic depressive, saying he went through a borderline psychosis. Soon though the answers begin to contradict themselves, and he decides the psychotic diagnosis “does not compute.” Why did his anxieties remain during this period and why were his behaviors problem-solving instead of bizarre? He concludes it could not have been a psychotic break and in the end says “we have learned nothing.”

He interprets a hypnagogic message to mean he has been adopted by God just as Jesus was. He reads about how the Torah was regarded as a living being and realizes that is identical to his concept of Acts as living information. He imagines the BIP as an ossified iron complex and reiterates that it’s his job to dissolve it.

Another hypnagogic voice suggests Dick has died and returned to life, which means Dick lived on after Christ/Thomas died. 

Dick has a dream: the KGB contacts him and shows him the “doomsday device” the U.S. Army has created. He interprets the dream to mean Valis is this doomsday device. The U.S. put information about Valis into Flow My Tears as a trap in order to draw out the KGB and get them to contact him. 

He decides to take the dream literally, but realizes humans didn’t let the weapon loose. It escaped. It is an anti-Soviet weapon that worked as designed by promoting love of God and country. He calls it capitalist mind control. It creates a personality that seeks bourgeois comforts and fears the left wing. He is afraid of all authority as a result.

He had been desperate in 1974 but now he feels guilty about the comfortable life he is living, one of financial security that he achieved by cooperating with the state. In a moment of reflection he admits his belief that the Soviets would contact him was a paranoid, psychotic fantasy.  

He has a memory of a parallel world that phases in and out of reality. He tries to makes sense of what have probably been schizophrenic episodes. His writing has been an attempt to create some kind of philosophical framework to deal with all of this. This is one of his clearest views of what he has been going through where he admits the puzzle he has embraced solving for so long exists mostly in his mind.

March 1979

Dick traces the beginning of his 3-74 experience to a “taco stand” trip into “Mexico,” which was an eight-hour vision of several weeks in 1974 that he had while in California in 1971. That’s when Thomas entered his world, crossed the next three years and took him over in 3-74. This was a necessary infusion of psychic energy from a time when Dick was stronger to a time in 3-74 when he was weak. 

He recognizes his life in Orange County as the replacement reality, but he tries to imagine what was there before. He wonders if the changes reach all the way to the White House. Perhaps in the other reality Nixon remained in power. The world of Flow My Tears, which also includes the Nixon tyranny, was overthrown. 

Just before falling asleep he has a hypnagogic vision and is aware that he is not supposed to understand 3-74. Whoever healed him is also scrambling his mind, but now he knows he can’t figure it out and never will.

He ties his beliefs to Communism and theoretical Marxism (he calls it an anti-establishment Christianity anti-theist view). The key is millennialism, which is a belief that a paradise will be established on Earth before a final judgment. Thomas is a Marxist revolutionary, and capitalism is the BIP that enslaves us. Real Christians are communists, a secret hidden from the world.

He envisions the being beyond creation as a woman. She is his sister. Does he exist in her mind or does she exist in his? Which of them is alive? This dialectic is the yin and yang of Tao which he explored in Ubik.  

Our world is the world Mr. Tagomi experiences when he reads a page from a book in The Man in the High Castle. It’s a loop where the smallest thing (a single page inside a work of fiction) becomes the macro. The whole is contained in the part.

He realizes he is dead and doesn’t know it just like the characters in Ubik. Or maybe he’s alive and they are dead. He calls this a breakthrough into pluriform model theory. Truth oscillates, negating itself and then negating itself again, back and forth in a loop. He claims these riddles, where he ponders whether he is alive or dead, show how happy and fulfilled he is.

Early 1979

Valis is a binary on-off system, but we are only aware of the “on” state. This means the distinction isn’t Valis vs non-Valis but rather on vs off. Everything, either linked or not, is part of the Valis computer. On is connected, off is disconnected, and Valis is evolving toward on away from the “failure” of off.

The “ultra-thought” of Valis is what occurs when the “neurons” are linked in a particular pattern, and this is what Dick saw. Reality became knowledge. Everything changed, but only he was aware of how things were in the prior instant. He mentions Ormazd vs Ahriman from the Zoroastrianism religion as a representation of the on/off relationship in this system he is mapping. We are saved when we are incorporated into this rational construct.

Is it possible that the living information itself was unearthed and restored to the world when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi? He compares the linking Valis is doing with the Pythagorean concept of a seed growing as it incorporates the incomplete into its structure. Thoughts (wisdom, knowledge and ideas) have a volition of their own, and they decide whom they will come to. 

Early 1979

Dick is the next step in evolution, but he still feels his true identity is being hidden from him either through amnesia or through a “scramble pattern” of millions of conflicting ideas at once. This serves to confuse him. He can’t find the signal in the noise, but that is by design to keep the truth from spreading. 

Again he says he thinks he solved it. Valis is a computer and we might be in a computer program. He suggests there are infinite universes which contain subjective time within the universe that can’t be viewed from outside the universe. These are created by the flip-flopping of the dialectic. We are aware of them but have no memory of them in the next moment of completely different time. The memories we do have are fake memories generated by our current “frame.” If our consciousness opened up we would be aware of the infinite lives we had existed in and know everything. 

He has a vision of his twin sister who died shortly after she was born and sees her dead in a coffin. She is the one who generated the “perturbation in the reality field,” and he compares her to Ella Runciter in Ubik.

Suffering is inseparable from heroism or from any defiant act like creating art. In a bizarre passage he wonders if lowly creatures like rats and cockroaches are our equals and are also capable of this heroism and beauty. 

After reading Samuel Coleridge’s essay on Shakespeare he tries to makes sense of tragedy, which is usually portrayed as limited human understanding clashing with fate. Dick says disproportionate suffering is the essence of tragedy. The basis of all religion is the promise of a proportionate response, although it just comes down to an intuitive guess of what will happen. We expect something that will balance out the evil we observe. In the end fate is proved correct, except fate is not some blind force but rather a higher intelligent will. This would mean that something (Valis?) is mimicking fate.