Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Philip Purser-Hallard on Philip K Dick and drugs:
"...In 1960s California it was inevitable that a writer like Dick would become a counterculture guru, expected - practically obliged, in fact - to flaunt a drug-rich lifestyle of his own, and he rose enthusiastically to that challenge. His writing had always been fuelled by vast quantities of amphetamines, but he soon branched out into marijuana, mescaline, LSD, sodium pentothal and even PCP...
...Dick's insights into the true nature of reality were spectacular and varied... only Dick could have constructed an elaborate conspiracy theory out of his momentary confusion as to whether his bathroom light had a wall switch or a pull-cord. (Since he'd never lived in a house with a bathroom pull-cord, he decided he must be experiencing memories from an alternative reality. It seemed the obvious explanation.)
...Strangely enough, in 1974 the other drugs in his life were put to shame by a rank outsider: vitamin C, under the influence of which he had perhaps his most celebrated hallucinatory episode.
...Taking a truly enormous dose of vitamin C to help him cope, Dick believed that pink laser beams from space were firing information into his brain, beginning with thousands of paintings flashing past his eyes - works by Klee, Kandinsky and Picasso, but far more than any of them could have painted in a lifetime.
For the rest of his life, Dick was obsessed with explaining these events. Inspired by the delivery woman's jewellery, he decided he'd been contacted by God, who wanted him to join a cabal of "secret Christians" who knew the hidden truth about reality. He came to believe that a member of this secret society was living inside his head, much like "Fred" in Bob Arctor's. For a while he suspected this other personality was James Pike, the late Bishop of California, an episcopal renegade who'd marched with Martin Luther King, been censured for supposedly heretical beliefs and died in the Israeli desert while seeking the truth behind the Dead Sea Scrolls. Dick based his final novel, The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer, [The Archer book is really, really good - Rob] around his extraordinary life.
Dick's interpretation of his visions changed on an almost daily basis. In Valis he adopted the position that God is actually an ancient satellite planted in orbit by three-eyed aliens, and that the true year is sometime in 1AD, the 1900 years of intervening history being an illusion created by Satan."
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