By Vicky Verma | Source
Philip K. Dick is remembered for stories in which reality refuses to stay still. A familiar world turns out to be artificial. History has another version hiding behind it. A character discovers that what looks solid and ordinary may be only one layer of something much stranger.
But in a speech in Metz, France, in 1977, Dick went far beyond discussing these ideas as fiction.
He believed reality itself could exist in different versions, or “tracks,” and that human beings might occasionally retain memories from a reality that no longer exists. He spoke about déjà vu, altered history, a “computer programmed reality,” and an intelligence he called the Programmer.
Dick said that in February 1975 he had “passed across into a third alternative present.” He called it Track C. It was not another police state or nightmare version of America. It was the opposite: a peaceful, beautiful world that he felt was superior to ours.
And he said he remained connected to it for about six hours.
A Reality Beyond the “Black Iron Prison”
To understand why Track C mattered so much to Dick, it helps to understand the other realities he described.
He spoke of a darker world associated with enslavement, prisons, jailers and police. He connected this world to two of his own novels, “The Man in the High Castle”and “Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said”. In an unusually candid moment, Dick said he had written both books from “fragmentary residual memories” of what he described as a horrible slave-state version of the United States.
He called one reality Track A. In his account, it represented a far more oppressive version of history. Our present reality, which he called Track B, was still full of war and oppression, but he considered it less terrible. He even suggested that history may have been “reprogrammed” so that a worse version of events was replaced by a better one.
Dick was not presenting any of this as conventional history. He was describing a personal theory built from experiences and memories he believed were meaningful.
In that theory, reality was not a single fixed timeline. It could be altered. Human beings might continue living inside the revised version without remembering what came before.
Dick compared the process to being moved backward in a board game and then having to relive events again after a variable had changed. He went so far as to say that “we are living in a computer-programmed reality,” and that the only clue might come when a variable changes and reality is altered around us.
That is the background against which Track C appears.
The Third Alternative Present
Dick said that in February 1975 he crossed into what he called a “third alternative present.”
“This was a garden or Park of peace and beauty,” he said, describing it as “a world superior to ours.”
He placed this world at the end of a sequence.
First came the “black iron prison” world, the reality dominated by extreme oppression. Then came the intermediate world, closer to the one we know, where war and oppression still existed but had been reduced. Finally came Track C, the peaceful garden world.
What makes his description especially strange is that he did not speak about Track C as a symbolic heaven he hoped to reach after death. He spoke as though he had temporarily experienced it as another present reality.
He imagined that this third world might one day replace ours after the correct variables in the past had been changed. If that happened, he said, people would awaken in the new world believing they had always lived there. Memories of the intermediate world could disappear just as memories of the darker world had already disappeared.
In Dick’s model, history could be rewritten so completely that the new reality would feel as if it had always been the only one.
He Thought It Was Our Real Home
The most striking part of the story comes when Dick explains how Track C felt to him. He did not merely say it was beautiful.
He said that while walking in this garden world he had “the strong impression that it was our legitimate home which somehow we had lost.”
That phrase changes the meaning of the experience. Dick was not describing a random parallel universe. He felt that this world belonged to humanity in some deeper sense. It seemed older, more natural and more correct than ordinary reality.
He even wondered whether it might be the restoration of a world our ancestors once inhabited. He imagined human history as a false path that could eventually be corrected, returning us to a place where people had once lived and been happy.
There is an obvious resemblance to the idea of humanity losing an original paradise, but Dick’s own description soon moved in a direction he did not expect.
Track C did not look like the Christian heaven his religious background had prepared him to see. That surprised him.
Six Hours in Another World
Dick said the time he spent there was short, but not momentary. “The time I spent there was short, about six hours of really elapsed time,” he told the audience, adding that he remembered it well.
It means Dick was not describing a split-second vision or a brief flash. At least as he told the story, this was an extended experience that stayed with him strongly enough for him to describe specific features of the landscape.
He said the place had a park-like quality. As it began to disappear, he could still see sky, land and smooth dark-blue water. Then he saw a woman standing beside the water. He identified her as Aphrodite.
The image is striking because it moved his experience away from the Christian framework he had expected. Instead of angels, biblical figures or a conventional image of heaven, he saw something he associated with the ancient Greek and Roman world.
For Dick, this mattered. He said Track C contained “non-Christian elements” and was not what his Christian training had prepared him for.
The Golden Doorway
Dick said the better world began to shrink from his view until he could see it only as a landscape beyond a golden rectangular doorway. The outline of the doorway, he said, pulsed with a laser-like light.
Then the opening became smaller. The landscape receded. The doorway seemed to consume itself and finally disappeared, “sealing off what lay beyond.” Dick said he never saw the world again.
What remained was the memory. He described what he had seen in simple physical terms: sky, sea, land, and the beautiful woman.
He believed it was the “next world,” but not the next world described by Christianity. Instead, he associated it with what he called the Arcadia of the Greco-Roman world. He described what he had seen as something “very old and very lovely.”
And when the doorway finally closed, Dick said he found himself shut off from that place with a “bitter sense of loss.” That may be the most human moment in the entire story.
Whatever one thinks happened to Dick, he was not describing the experience like an intellectual puzzle. He spoke about losing the place as if he missed it.
The Stranger Who Told Him His Fiction Was True
There is another strange episode immediately before Dick introduces Track C.
He explains that a repeated theme in his fiction involved a dark-haired woman arriving and telling a protagonist that his understanding of reality was false. In *The Man in the High Castle*, he points to the peculiar idea of a woman telling an author that his supposedly fictional book is, in some sense, true.
Dick said he had developed a growing feeling that something similar would happen to him.
He expected that a woman who was a stranger would contact him and tell him that his own fiction was not entirely fiction. He even said he had a sense that she would have black hair.
Then, according to Dick, it happened. He said a total stranger who had systematically read more than 30 of his novels, along with many stories, contacted him and told him that some of his fictional works were “in a literal sense true.”
Dick connected this encounter to his memories of alternate worlds. The woman, he said, could identify from his books which reality he had experienced. But there was one thing she did not know until he told her: he had experienced not two realities, but three.
That third one was Track C.
Was Dick Saying His Fiction Came From Memories?
Dick did not simply suggest that fiction can accidentally predict the future or that writers unconsciously notice patterns around them. He claimed that at least some of his own fiction had been written from residual memories of another version of the present.
He described a specific trigger for these memories. In late February 1974, he said he was given sodium pentothal during the extraction of impacted wisdom teeth. Later, while still strongly under its influence, he experienced what he called a sudden flash of recovered memory.
He said that in one instant he “caught it all,” then immediately rejected it, even while feeling that what he had retrieved was authentic. Again, none of this establishes that an alternate reality existed. The important point is what Dick believed the experience meant.
He was looking back at the worlds he had written about and asking a disturbing question: what if imagination was not the whole explanation?
Déjà Vu as a Memory of a Previous Present
This idea also shaped the way Dick thought about déjà vu. If reality could be reprogrammed, he reasoned, people might occasionally retain fragments from a previous version of events.
A familiar room might feel slightly wrong. A person might expect an object to be where it no longer exists. A moment might seem to have happened before because, in another version of the present, perhaps it had.
Dick described this as the possibility of a reflex surviving from a “previous present.” In another part of the talk, he connected déjà vu with the overwhelming impression that we are reliving the present, hearing the same words and saying the same things.
In Dick’s theory, the strange feeling was not necessarily a memory of a past life.
It could be a memory of a previous version of now. That is why his computer-programmed reality statement matters. He was not simply throwing out a futuristic idea about computers. He was trying to explain why the world could appear to have been edited.
Dick’s alternate realities were not only mystical. They were political. He said that an idea had seized him decades earlier and never let him go: a society in which people constantly interfere in other people’s lives is not a good society.
He then gave a remarkably sharp definition of an oppressive state. A government that “knows more about you than you know about yourself,” he said, is a state that must be overthrown.
Dick said the political label was secondary. Such a state could appear under different systems. What mattered was the intrusion, knowledge and control it exercised over individual people.
More remarkably, he did not limit himself to warning that such a system ‘could’ exist.
Within his alternate-reality account, Dick said it had existed in another version of the United States, and that he remembered himself as one of the people who resisted it. He called that darker reality Track A.
He even said he believed that in this previous world he had not survived beyond March 1974. The reality he was speaking from, Track B, was in his view a better outcome. And Track C was better still.
This gives his strange cosmology a direction. Dick was not imagining parallel worlds as an endless collection of random alternatives. He pictured reality as something that could be corrected, moving away from imprisonment and tyranny toward something freer and more beautiful.
It can be approached as mystical experience, speculation, altered-state memory, religious vision, psychological material, or the intensely personal philosophy of a writer whose work repeatedly questioned the stability of reality.
What the talk itself gives us is Dick’s testimony, not proof of another world. But his description of Track C is difficult to forget because it is so specific. He did not merely say there was a better universe somewhere.
He said he had been there. He said it was peaceful and beautiful. He remembered dark-blue water and a woman he identified as Aphrodite. He watched the place retreat behind a golden, pulsing doorway. He said the experience lasted about six hours.