PKD’s musical tastes began to broaden during this time. He would never lose his interest in classical music but during the sixties he got into rock music, including the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish. In California in the 1960s, hand in hand with rock music went drugs. People were experimenting wi

‘Phil told Vince that the reason he was getting divorced was that I would buy every new car that came along and that he had to stop me before I lost the house. He told Vince that I had attacked him with a carving knife, that I had chased him around the yard with the white Jaguar (which we hadn’t owned for years), and that I had murdered my first hu

‘Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.’ – Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This was based upon a short story, ‘The Little B

In general terms, Jaynes suggested that human consciousness is ‘bicameral’. By this he meant that the two hemispheres of the brain work independently of each other. In effect this means that inner thoughts would have been sensed as verbal instructions by our distant ancestors. They heard the gods speaking to them. Jaynes believed that the source of

Binswanger’s model became known as Existentialist Psychiatry. Like all forms of therapy, this is an attempt to cure a person of psychological problems. To do this an existentialist psychiatrist must seek out the ‘lived world’, the Lebenswelt, of his or her client. This is, in simple terms, a person’s view of how the world functions for them. Centra

On 5 July 2007 I was invited to give a talk in the North of England on my first book, Is There Life After Death?: The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When We Die. This book explored the idea that all human beings have two centres of consciousness: the ‘Eidolon’, the everyday part that lives time in a linear fashion and knows nothing other tha

and, in early 1981, David Peoples was called in to do a major re-write. PKD was much happier with the new story-line.

Working late at night also allowed PKD to ‘tune in’ to the ‘voices’. As he explained in the introduction to an anthology of his works, these stories are… ‘…attempts at reception—at listening to voices from another place, very far off, sounds quite faint but important. They only come late at night, when the background din and gabble of our world hav

One of the major projects Galen took over was the movie rights to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).