Dick solves the puzzle. He has been dreaming about the Dead Sea Scrolls. These scrolls from the Qumran Essene community were found in 1946 in the Judean desert, so they weren’t exactly a brand new discovery when Dick wrote this letter. Nonetheless he is convinced that is what he is tapping into at night. Jim Pike studied the scrolls so perhaps this is because of Jim’s influence.
I’m not sure how serious he is when he tells Claudia to be careful who she tells about all of this.
Another letter to Claudia Bush. Dick believes he is seeing beyond ‘the Lie’ he covered in the last letter. In a compelling idea he wonders if his writing alters reality. Do people expect the world to become more like his books after they read them?
He returns to Ubik. Is he (or everyone) living in a pseudo-environment like the one in that book? Is Jim Pike ‘coming across’ to him from beyond death like Runciter did? Dick is changing and wonders if this is from the influence of Jim. He switched to drinking beer instead of wine, listens to rock music which he never did before and trimmed his beard.
With his regimen of massive doses of water-soluble vitamins he thinks he may have improved communication between the two hemispheres of his brain which are now working together for the first time in his life.
He dreams mostly of the Hellenistic period. He decides whatever is contacting him is non-Christian or pre-Christian. It pulled him back to 100 A.D. just before the start of Christianity. Maybe VALIS decided Christianity was a wrong turn and Dick is supposed to get it right this time around. Finally he concludes he is being contacted by Asklepios, Greek son of Apollo.
In a footnote the editors remind us all these personality changes could be a result of temporary strokes due to Dick’s sky-high blood pressure.
A third letter to Claudia is about Zoroastrianism and the battle between honesty and lies in that belief system. The Persians believed in the value and power of this life as opposed to other religions like Christianity which preach acceptance of this miserable world in hopes of a better life after death. Dick wants to bring back this affirmative view of life.
I expect he’s not done writing to her, since the glossary also notes Dick referred to his early Exegesis as mostly letters to Claudia.
In a second letter to Claudia Dick tells her about more dreams. In addition to the mysterious book he dreamt about the Cumaean Sibyl and a Cyclops. This leads him to Virgil’s Aeneid and an exploration of Greek and Roman myths.
The sibyl tells him in a dream whoever broke into his home in San Rafael in 1971 and 1972 was looking for papers related to his friend Bishop Jim Pike.
The glossary notes Claudia Bush was a grad student at Idaho State University who corresponded with Dick while working on her master’s thesis.
In a letter to her Dick tells her about a dream he had that was trying to direct him to a book of some significance. All he could see in the dream was a hardbound blue book with a title that ended in the word ‘Grove.’ He eventually finds a book in his library that matches this description, a biography of Warren G. Harding called The Shadow of Blooming Grove, but it turns out to be ‘the dullest book in the world.’ In a postscript he tells Claudia to never take dreams too seriously.
