The three letters "PKD" have become a shorthand for readers of Philip K. Dick's work to identify themselves and find others. The man's initials inspire admiration among fans and ridicule among detractors.

I had the great honor and privilege of spending ten years with a great genius. Those were the final ten years of Phil's life.

Falsely branded as a brain-damaged drug addict, Philip K. Dick continued producing stories in which the ideas of the great philosophers entered into concrete reality. The allegations of insanity hurt him, but he refused to engage in a futile argument with his accusers.

If producing one of his finest works, A Scanner Darkly, did not prove that he had all of his faculties, then any effort to demonstrate his mental health was futile.

Yes, he was diagnosed as manic depressive, and later as bipolar (the same thing, with a new label), but his tendency to experience wide mood swings had nothing to do with drugs. His hyperactivity was simply a symptom of his premature birth. He also suffered from asthma and hypertension, due to his having been born six weeks early. Phil and his twin sister were tiny babies. In fact, Phil was one of the smallest babies to survive, and his twin sister did not survive. Medical science has advanced considerably since 1928, yet even today, premature babies experience a plethora of medical problems as they grow up, and they do not live as long as full-term babies.

When my husband began experiencing visions in February 1974, he might have been suffering minor strokes due to his high blood pressure, which kept getting out of control. At one point, he was hospitalized for ten days so the doctors could closely monitor his blood pressure while they adjusted his medication.

Minor strokes might explain the flashes of bright light that Phil saw, but they would not explain the content of his visionary experience. I was there, and I know that he was not abusing any substances, so you can throw that one out the window.

Besides, there were some visible, tangible events. For example, one night the radio kept playing after I unplugged it. One afternoon a yellow van pulled up out front, and workmen in white coveralls brought half a dozen large, unlabeled cardboard boxes into the vacant apartment next door. We were curious, so when we found the door unlocked, we went inside. We found all sorts of electronic equipment in the hall closet and a working telephone in the kitchen of that supposedly vacant apartment. Strange cars began pulling up in the alley behind our apartment and sitting there for up to half an hour at a time.

The visions stopped when we moved out of that apartment, so I can't help thinking that the electronic equipment in the next apartment had something to do with Phil's experience.

That having been said, Phil viewed the phenomenon as an attack by unknown forces followed with a rescue by equally unknown forces. It began with voices coming over our bedside radio and telling him to die, and it ended with a message of hope and healing.

I can't help believing that Phil experienced something very real, but that something defies explanation. He spent the last eight years of his life trying to explain it, and he wrote thousands of pages about it, but he never found a satisfying solution to the puzzle of his visionary experiences of 1974.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the experience was that people presented themselves to him as time travelers. They said that somebody had changed history, that they didn't like the outcome, and that they were attempting to repair our timeline to produce a more hospitable future. They introduced the idea of orthogonal time, which appears prominently in Phil's Exegesis. They explained that alternate timelines exist perpendicular to the timeline that we experience, like a series of dominoes stacked above our world. The time travelers, or rather time meddlers, were capable of opening gaps in our timeline and dropping one or more sections of the alternate timelines into those gaps.

The time travelers warned Phil that the United States was in danger of becoming a police state much like the scenario of George Orwell's dystopic novel 1984. Our television sets would watch us, indoctrinate us and numb our senses to the reality of an increasingly restricted life. Our friends and neighbors would turn us in to the authorities for the most minor offenses, fearing that they would be punished if they failed to report our smallest transgressions, such as putting out our trash cans on the wrong night or crossing the street in the middle of the block instead of at the corner The government would control our thoughts, as well as our actions, down to the smallest detail. Orwell's "Big Brother" was becoming a reality. Those predictions seemed possible, although improbable, in the midst of the War on Drugs. Today, on the other hand, that possibility is becoming a probability.

For one thing, researchers are exploring ways of communicating directly to people's brains with electronic devices, while others are seeking ways to receive messages directly from people's brains with electronic devices. These efforts might seem wasted, their goals impossible, but they are attempting to achieve positive results. In fact, with the miniaturization of electronics, it is possible to implant a tiny receiver in a person's ear and transmit to it, much as you might place a call to a cellular telephone.

There's more, and it is frightening.

Ever since that tragic September morning in 2001, we have seen our personal liberties stripped away, one seemingly insignificant bit at a time. Elderly ladies are searched before boarding an airline flight, children's toys are ripped apart or confiscated, and we are not allowed to carry bottled water or fingernail clippers past the boarding gate. We are not even allowed to lock our checked-in luggage, since that would stop strangers from opening up our suitcases to look inside. We are required to obtain passports to visit our neighboring countries, whereas in the past all we needed to cross into Mexico or Canada was a driver's license or non-driver ID. Oh, yes, you can still enter Mexico without a passport, but you can not get back into the United States without one. And did you know that all the new passports contain tracking devices that enable the authorities to know exactly where you are? Is Big Brother watching you?

I'm scaring myself, so I'll stop here.

~~ Tessa B. Dick