Dream of January 30/31, 1992

Peter Stenshoel

(I intentionally tried to dream either about Philip K. Dick or have dreams which shed light on him, for the ZXQ radio special soon approaching.)

Sequence: I thought the world had come to its end by a cosmic cork popping into the air, releasing the contents of the bottle (terrarium?) which sustained all life. The sound, which woke me clean up, was actually our noisy Southern California gas heater, starting itself up. Nevertheless, my heart palpitated for what seemed like several minutes as I forced myself to calm down. In this period I remembered a dream I had had prior to the end-of-the-world cork pop. In this dream I had returned to Minnesota to spend time with my family. We were all having a swell time until I realized my father wasn't around. I found out he had died. When I asked my mother why she hadn't informed me of his death she said, "Didn't I? I guess it must have slipped my mind."

The phildickian elements in this dream involve his bitter hatred of his mother, and the blame he places on her for the death of his twin sister. The cork pop at the end of the world represents a kind of paranoia and hallucinatory quality, giving power to events by investing them with meaning. Maybe a world did come to its end when that noise sounded; maybe it was the world of my dream, whose unwelcome reality was starting to threaten to become substantial, and needed to be popped.

It was later, in the hypnogogic reverie of morning time, that I was given a nice phildickian-style interpretation of some words of Jesus: "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's; render unto the Lord what is the Lord's." Granted, taken out of context, but rife with a longterm secret new meaning, these words can now mean: Discard the elements of Christianity which were fashioned by Constantine and the Roman Empire (the Black Iron Prison!) that have nothing to do with Christ. Go back to the gnostic Jesus. Freed from the burden of worshipping a corrupt system of power-wielding and mind control which is organized religion, Christianity can become infused with lightness, can become light-as-a-feather, new, and helpful, happy, exciting, as it must have been to those people who hid out in the catacombs with secret fish symbols around their necks (which is a reference to Dick's famous 3/74 visit and subsequent epiphany).