> I honestly can’t tell if he had mental health problems or if this essay is supposed to be a sort of self-aware self-referential story about reality breaking d

> I honestly can’t tell if he had mental health problems or if this essay is supposed to be a sort of self-aware self-referential story about reality breaking down. Yes. Less ellipticaly, Dick abused drugs at various points in his life and definitely struggled with his mental health. He also had mystical experiences that massively influenced his view of reality (beyond just the ones mentioned in this essay, actually - he reported a pink laser telling him his son had a deadly illness, which turned out to be true when he took his son to the hospital, IIRC). Whether those facts are all the same thing is left as a nontrivial exercise for the reader. It seems obvious to me that Dick was very aware of the amorphous unverifiability of so many of his life experiences, and that he loved to write about precisely the intersection of such nebulous experiences and the fact that reality is "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." He seems to have understood better than most that the standard he defined says nothing about falsifiability or knowability. Many possible things could in fact be part of reality without being knowable or falsifiable. I think our fundamental inability to Know Reality is precisely the theme of most of Dick's glorious fever-dream fiction.