The VALIS Experience

In February 1974, Philip K. Dick answered his door in Fullerton, California, and saw a young woman wearing a gold Christian fish pendant. Sunlight struck the pendant. Dick experienced what he later described as a beam of pink light entering his consciousness, carrying information that was specific, practical, and, in at least one documented case, medically actionable: he perceived that his infant son had an undiagnosed inguinal hernia. A doctor confirmed the diagnosis. For the remaining eight years of his life, Dick attempted to determine what had happened. He called the source VALIS — Vast Active Living Intelligence System — and considered multiple explanations: God, an alien satellite, a symptom of temporal lobe epilepsy, a genuine informational substrate underlying physical reality. He never decided. The Exegesis, his eight-thousand-page handwritten exploration of the experience, is the record of the attempt — by turns brilliant, exhausting, and heartbreaking.