June-August 1977

Dick lists the four worlds: the black iron prison (which he calls Rome/USSR/Fascist USA), the normal world, the garden world, and what I believe he is calling the normal world in which one can see Zebra. The normal world is created by Zebra and also includes Zebra in its very fabric. He tries to explain all of this using an analogy (which he says is not an analogy) of a cocoon and a butterfly. 

The black iron prison is going through an insect-like metamorphosis to transform into the garden world, and I think he means the normal world is the cocoon state. This entry isn’t entirely clear to me. He says the speech he gave at a science fiction convention in Metz, France in 1977 was “correct but not radical enough.”

The transformation into our final form could happen instantly which is what the eschatological aspects of religion are dealing with. 

Dick wonders why the entity doesn’t just clear everything up, since it has the ability to transfer information directly to our minds. Perhaps it has been trying but we have limited abilities to make sense of it. It might only be a mystery because we can’t understand it, not because it is intrinsically mysterious. 

In Time Out of Joint he wrote about a phony 1950s world concealing a “real” world in the future. That is the inverse of what he experienced with a fake present world and a real world in the past of 70 A.D. He confronts his own relationship to time and asks who, when and where he is.

The only entry in folder 33 says: “The other night as I was going to sleep I was wondering who could ‘de-stegenographize’ the hidden material in my writing — and the spirit responded with ‘[those who are] conscious.’” Make of that what you will.