I 'glitched' in 2020. Then I found this message from 50 years ago.

I’ve struggled to put this experience into words. Every time I try to explain it, I’m met with a heavy, paralyzing silence, as if the language to describe it simply doesn't exist. For years, as a journalist grounded in observable facts, I convinced myself my experience was an anomaly. I couldn't reconcile my professional training with the memory of a blue swarm of light and the terrifying sensation of dying in one timeline, only to wake up in another.

Yet, that feeling of a ‘singular anomaly’ changed with my first sharing of the experience, when I encountered so many who also had been through such strange experiences. That's when I found the words of Philip K. Dick.

I had never heard about his story, read his books or his personal journals before I published my own book, but listening to his words from 1977, the parallels between his 'pink beam' and my 'blue swarm' were impossible to ignore.

I decided to investigate further.

Light

Our experiences began decades apart but followed a similar rhythm. Dick was struck by a "pink beam" of information-rich energy in 1974. My own encounter in 2020 involved a "blue swarm of light", shimmering specks that felt like a "plural" presence, a chorus of voices speaking in unison.

The visual details differed, but the internal shift seemed to have a similar essence. I struggled to find the words for my experience, but when I read Dick's description of 'anamnesis' (the loss of forgetfulness), it gave me another word for the 'unlocking' I felt in my own room. While Dick felt he had suddenly become sane after a lifetime of insanity, I realized that the answers to my existence had always been etched into my soul, waiting for the light to reveal them.

‘Orthogonal Time’

The most unsettling parallel is the mechanism by which we could have survived. Dick spoke of "orthogonal time", a lateral domain where one can move sideways across timelines to avoid a dark fate. He believed a "Programmer" moved him from a track where he would have died to a better world where he was allowed to live.

In my own account, I described the physical sensation of rotting and dying in one version of existence, only to be told by a voice that “I chose different”. It feels as though we may have touched upon the same mechanism. Dick called it 'orthogonal time'; I called it a 'sea of possibilities'. The vocabulary is different, but the mechanics of survival (stepping sideways to avoid death) feel strikingly familiar.

Burden

Our interpretations of these events were shaped by our different lives.

Dick’s vision was filtered through the "Black Iron Prison" of ancient Rome; mine was stripped of religious dogma, viewing reality as an expression of the infinite. However, we both returned with an incredible weight. Dick was warned of a fatal health issue for his son; I was shown a vision of a pandemic spreading across a global map like wildfire.

I might investigate more into his life, books, and notes. But as of now, I feel a sense that we were both pulled from our normal routines, compelled to bridge the gap between the ineffable and the understandable through our writing.

Finding Dick’s story years after my own experience felt like a gift. Whether struck by a pink beam or enveloped by a blue swarm, it seems PKD and I both returned with a similar burden: the conviction that the world is a construct, and the knowing that we are in fact not alone.

Maybe, we are simply observers who had a brief access to glimpse the architecture of reality.

***

Emerson's experience is available in his new book, I See the Light, on Amazon.