March 1977

Dick yearns for Zebra to contact him again. He returns to the night of his epic drug bender and decides Erasmus and Dionysus and Zebra are one and the same. Zebra is the rightful king of our world. Maybe if Dick’s experience did happen to others they kept it a secret. 

He reads an article in Time magazine about a book by psychologist Julian Jaynes which suggests that prior to 10,000 B.C. humans didn’t possess a consciousness but instead existed in a sort of schizophrenic state led by voices only they heard. Eventually humans evolved from this bicameral brain (left side for speech, right side for these voices) to the consciousness we know today.

Dick thinks Christ’s unachieved goal on Earth was to help restore that bicamerality. He believes in 3-74 he became temporarily bicameral, and if the gods communicated from our right brain then they are still there subconsciously guiding us. 

He imagines the mind as a computer that can retrieve any information (even that of long dead people?) if it’s given the correct signal. 

Dick writes Claudia this long letter the morning after an epic drug bender. He relates questions his wife Tessa had asked him while he was ‘ripped.’She wanted to know what entity took him over during his 2-3-74 experience and he decided it was the Greek scholar Erasmus. 

He tells Claudia we spend our whole lives seeing time in its secondary axis instead of the real axis which is orthogonal. He toys with the idea that orthogonal time is cyclical and not retrograde like he previously thought. Our linear time is probably warped (which makes sense based on what Einstein told us about spacetime) and so time will eventually loop back around just like an object in orbit around a star. 

Time doesn’t really move but rather we move along time, from signal to signal, based on the plan of the Logos.