Well. Nice little coinkidink there of your posting this response to me while I was posting a response to you about that other thing. Then again, such coinkidinks seem to come fast and furious for us. Or I think that's the case. Or I just like to consider how random things could be meaning-laden things.

This helped, what you said. It helped in one respect because you didn't answer my pointed question, exactly, and this leads me to believe that I'm emphasizing too much, in my own interpretation of the thing, the ending. I grew up on a diet of old Twilight Zones, I'm always waiting for that big trick ending, that, "oh, a-HA!" moment. When I read MITHC, I felt like that moment was there but that I didn't really understand it.

I did get out of it his presentation of the idea that reality isn't necessarily right here for us to know about. There's a scene in there in which the Japanese business guy (already i forget his name and exactly what his occupation was,) is trying to force a little piece of jewelry to reveal its secrets to him, and when he stands up from his reverie of arguing with the thing he's in another reality entirely. It was probably, for me, the most powerful part of the book. It expressed pretty clearly the idea that there were somehow, in this world PKD was presenting, different manifestations of reality that could be phyically moved between. The character crossed over from the fictional world he was living in in the book to our world. Or that's how I saw it.

Possibly my problem with the book lies in there somewhere, too. The philosophy you're telling me he presents in his books -- it's not something I think I am willing to place a high degree of trust in. It's something I very much enjoy the idea of, but I don't know that I've ever thought that that, exactly, is the nature of things. That our sense of reality is shaped by our perception I've no doubt. But that there's a real reality that somehow could be so much at ODDS with the one we think we're in is a tough thing for me to swallow.

So probably I need to read more of his stuff. I know some of my current desire to read his stuff started with something I read somewhere, probably pointed to by you, about his weird experience. I can't remember much about it right now, but it's hard for me not to wonder if that experience weren't evidence of some mental problem of his, maybe schizophrenia or something. Seeing wholly different realities, or seeing things in our reality which are not being seen by others, are to me things that probably happen when the brain is screwed up.

(I sound a little here like something I don't want to sound like. I'm not really closed minded about this, or at least I haven't been. Probably this is more of my agnosticism coming into view -- I'd love to believe that schizophrenics were actually seeing things others don't see because those things are, in some respect, actually THERE. But as far as I know there's no way to prove something like that to be true, and so there's no pragmatic reason to function as if it IS true.)

Okay. Thanks, this was a big help.