"Thinking comparatively, Dick goes on to argue that hallucinations—whether caused by hypnosis, psychosis, drugs, or even the mystical experience of religious “conversion”—may represent realities the rest of us cannot perceive. As such, they should be considered to be qualitatively different than ordinary perception—paranormal breakthroughs rather than merely pathological excesses. Dick's ontological pluralism here, which recalls James’ nitrous-inflected pluraverse as well as Huxley's “reducing valve” theory of consciousness, also points to the strange coincidence of psychosis and paranormal or spiritual experience.
For the moment, let's accept the idea that in 1974 Dick suffered what he himself called on many occasions a “total psychosis.” As the clinical psychologist Arnold argues, the pathological dimensions of 2-3-74 do not automatically close the doors to the possibility that Dick encountered an actual Beyond—a possibility that most explorers of the alternate-consciousness paradigm find devilishly hard to put down, given the wealth of weirdness associated with altered states. Again, the eruption of pathological symptoms might actually clear the space for divine invasions—or at least for the collapse of the distinction between vision and madness. Perhaps what we are dealing with here are what Dick impishly calls, at one point, his “supernatural psychotic experience.”
Supernatural or not, it is clear that Dick's accounts of 2-3-74 often read like episodes from his earlier fictions, which abound in time-slips, schizophrenic visions, dualist metaphysics, conspiracies, and spookily animated everyday objects. But these resemblances bubble up from something deeper—and weirder—than his own mendacious imagination run riot. All the words that Dick threw at 2-3-74 unpacked, through time, the impossible text that was always already inscribed within and as the raptures of 2-3-74—a palimpsest marked up and annotated by Dick's wordsmith unconscious, by the spectral Logos, and by that “goddam typewriter” (and ballpoint pen). This circuit between Dick's fictions, his writing machines, his experiences, and his Exegesis of those experiences set in motion a psychogenic network of feedback loops and phantasms that engendered parallel worlds of meaning and encounter that transcend the idea of mere “projection.”
I am not just saying that we should admire the lemonade Dick made from the rotten lemons that were his psychophysiological lot. I am saying that, consciously and not, the strategies that Dick used to clamber out of his own “tomb world” and towards philosophical vision possessed, in some enigmatic but more-than-metaphoric sense, an integrity and life of their own. 2-3-74 was not merely scripted, at least in the sense that Kantian critics of religious experience insist. Or rather, the “metaprogramming” play of textuality and experience can sometimes set loose strange loops that unfold existence as something more than the execution of blind code. Dick's visions phenomenalize and operationalize textuality, just as his written work, and especially his Exegesis, unrolls itself as a visionary and sometimes daemonic experience in its own right."
- Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
