October 1977

Dick sees his 26 years of writing as a map or guide to his 3-74 experience. Without the experience the writing would have been a map of nothing, and without the writing to guide him after the experience he would have been lost. He cites Ubik, Time out of Joint, A Maze of Death and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch as examples that illustrate orthogonal time breaking through into a false world. 

He looks at A Scanner Darkly in a new way and wonders who the tyrant is in the circular system of control in that book if it isn’t the government. 

Entropy equals disorder which means the universe is moving toward disorder. Orthogonal time is moving the other way toward form we just aren’t always aware of it. Dick wonders if one intersecting arc of the Jesus fish represents linear time and the other arc orthogonal time. They intersected in the past (100 A.D.) and are about to meet again. The symbol was designed to show Christ’s First and Second Coming.

In an idea for the novel he is working on called To Scare the Dead his protagonist realizes the two hemispheres of his brain are traveling at right angles to each other in time. All the questions this raises will be answered by the Valisystem entity that has been contacting him. 

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. 

Spurred on by an essay by Angus Taylor called “Philip K. Dick and the Umbrella of Light” about his work concerning the nature of reality Dick decides he inadvertently uncovered the form of Plato’s Eternal Real World.  The intellectuals though have been saying for centuries Plato’s worldview is pointless to even consider, since his idea of a real world cannot be experienced. Dick takes comfort in the fact that even if he doesn’t convince everyone about this the truth will eventually re-emerge just as it did with him. 

He goes on to speculate about curved orthogonal time which lies at a right angle to the time we perceive. This horizontal time axis is the eternal one in which the Logos exists. Either Dick regressed or Rome came forward on this timeline and was revealed to him.