Valis

It's strange that when I hear an odd tapping noise I will turn to look at it, but when I see a strange flashing light I do not turn my head to check if it is making a sound.  But that's not what I'm going to talk about.

This is.  I'm currently reading Valis by Philip K. Dick.  I'm only up to page 50 but it's already a weird experience.  Any PKD book is a weird experience at some level, but this one more than any other so far.  What's weird about it is that he keeps diverting the narrative off onto seemingly random/arbitrary topics - but those topics are often things that have some kind of personal resonance to me.

I've started marking the pages where this happens so I can go back and check, since it occurred to me that maybe it's an artifact of me being really tired when I'm reading it.  Here's a partial list of statistically unlikely topics to arise so far:

• The concept of degrees of psychosis or delusion, where you get delusions about delusions.  You may remember that I queried my psychiatry teacher about this some time back and just got a funny look in return.
• Inguinal hernias, which I have previously ranted about.
• T-34 tanks, as used by Russia in the second World War.  I don't recall mentioning them in this blog but I certainly have played an awful lot of WWII war-games.
• The issue of Kevin's dead cat and the central question of its nonexistence before its own birth and how that is qualitatively different from its nonexistence after its own death, which is something that I have pondered at length in my offline life.
• Deus Absonditus, or the hidden God.  I have a book at home which uses game theory to analyse and explain why God doesn't just tell us all to our faces that he's right here, and related topics.
• Paroxysmal atrial tachycardia, which I seem to have discussed repeatedly with my Smaller Half recently because of a minor technical disagreement between us as to whether it really is a subset of the supraventricular tachycardias.  Yeah, we're dazzingly charismatic.

As mentioned, I'm only up to page 50.  What delights lie in store for me in the next 221?

It's a strange sensation - as if I'm reading a book that was written by someone who knows all about me and deliberately wrote a book that I would find appealing.  That kind of thinking, that the radio is broadcasting specially to you, or that there are hidden messages intended for your consumption in everyday occurrences, is known as a delusion of reference, and is a marker of psychosis.  Valis is all about the main character's drift into madness, unfortunately either initiated or accelerated by thinking too much about madness.  So I'm thinking that pretty soon now they're going to come for me.

Hopefully they won't take my book away.