I'm familiar with the work of Philip K. Dick more by virtue of the many film adaptations of his work than direct from the source material. I intend to rectify that this year.
I've had reason recently to poke at the work of a few authors with respect to their relationship with mental illness, and it comes as no surprise that Dick's relationship with reality is somewhat privileged.
What distinguishes schizophrenic existence from that which the rest of us like to imagine we enjoy is the element of time. The schizophrenic is having it all now, whether he wants it or not; the whole can of film has descended on him, whereas we watch it progress frame by frame. So for him, causality does not exist. Instead, the acausal connective principle that Wolfgang Pauli called synchronicity is operating in all situations — not merely as only one factor at work, as with us. Like a person under LSD, the schizophrenic is engulfed in an endless now. It's not too much fun.
— from "Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes," by Philip K. Dick.
An endless now!
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