Words by Riley Fitzgerald
Graphic by © Philippe Hupp/Bridgeman Images

In the 53 years he walked this earth, Philip K. Dick authored many of science fiction’s greatest works. Books Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and The Man in the High Castle are two of Dick’s best-known novels but he was a prolific writer, authoring at least another 47. Each was different, each a product of Dick’s wild and untamed imagination.

As a writer his achievements were vast, but towards the end of his life, Dick began to come unhinged. As his final years closed in, drug addiction, mental illness, and a restless imagination got the better of him. Dick’s writing became dense, sprawling, and littered with far-out theories and religious imagery. Increasingly he became convinced that a supernatural and godlike being – one he referred to as ‘Valis’ – was communicating with him.

In one instance this communication came through music. More specifically via the Beatles‘ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. The song has had a profound effect on many minds but perhaps none more than Dick’s.

“Sitting with my eyes shut I am listening to ‘Strawberry Fields’,” he writes in 1981 book VALIS. “I get up,” he continues. “I open my eyes because the lyrics speak of ‘going through life with eyes closed’.”

Dick here is, of course, misquoting John Lennon’s famous lyric, “Living is easy with eyes closed/Misunderstanding all you see.”

“I look towards the window” he then states. “Light blinds me; my head suddenly aches. My eyes close and I see that strange strawberry icecream pink. At the same instant knowledge is transferred to me.”

Now, this is where things get weird. Having had this information transmitted to him, Dick goes into another room. Here his wife Tess is changing his infant son Christopher.

“I then recite what has been conveyed to me,” Dick reflects. “That [Chris] has an undetected birth defect and must be taken to a doctor at once and scheduled for surgery. This turns out to be true.”

By all accounts, his son was in fact ill. Dick was adamant that the light informed him his Chris had an undiagnosed hernia, one which had burst and descended into his testicle. What’s more, if Chris had not been provided with immediate medical attention, the condition, the condition could very well have been fatal. At Dick’s insistence, his son was taken to a local doctor’s and later operated on.

It might be up to the reader as to whether this divine stroke of intervention may or may not have occurred. As these events happened in the early-to-mid 1970s, many years before Dick wrote VALIS it could have been a matter of delusion. Dick though was adamant: “God talked to me through a Beatles tune.”

While ‘Strawberry Fields’ had the most dramatic effect on Dick, he also discusses in VALIS how Paul McCartney’s first solo record, McCartney sent him into a years-long psychosis. “I sometimes think, that my psychotic journey began in 1970 in earnest that day I kept playing the Paul McCartney record over and over,” Dick theorizes. “I had been ‘neurotic’ until that day, but starting that day I suffered a collapse mentally, and descended into a world of dreams and nightmares and half sleep, through which I moved only partially conscious.” Dick claims he did not emerge from this state of mind until three to four years later.”

This was not the last time Dick would write about the Beatles. The death of John Lennon in 1980 is mentioned throughout Dick’s final novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. “John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this earth,” the author writes making one of several cryptic references to Lennon, “it’s to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design.”