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Philip K. Dick's reputation as a "drug-addled nut," an "acid-crazed visionary," or the producer of a 'stimulant literature" promotes an image of Dick as a hyper-accelerated author of an ontologically weird and transcendental fiction, a fiendish hophead from whose hands spills forth a range of intractable gnostic images and narratives.¹ Such an aura, stereotypical as it is, has by now become so familiar to some circles of Dick's readership that it sometimes seems to be accepted uncritically, perhaps offering a consoling foothold amid the corona of philosophical question marks engendered both by Dick's tumultuous personal biography and his curiously unstable works.² Characteristically, Dick ironized such a pigeonholing avant la lettre, predicting his future critical reception in a 1980 letter, before the publication of VALIS: "took drugs. Saw God. BFD".³ Dick's biloquistic dismissal of his own work, articulated only two years before his untimely death, belies what is his far from simplistic attitude towards licit and illicit drugs and elides altogether his earnest critical views on the orbiting fields of psychiatry and psychosis, views that are fugitively expressed both in his fiction and his personal letters.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137414595_3

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