Spiritual Forum

Fascinating testimony of an author whose fantasy novels have become real and who has met actual characters from his novels in real life. This begs the question where do ideas come from. I too have had many ideas come through my imagination in what I thought were just fantasy novels.

http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm

I got into D&D at a young age, made my own system, was a DM for 16+ years, made campaigns with my best friend every other weekend and a few others from time to time. Many of these became inspiration for fantasy novels.

The ancient empire of light - a past in my world where there was super advanced technology. It also featured a dark lord that was defeated yet cursed to return every 500 years until he is allowed to reign for 500 years. He had three students who became top notch black magicians.

Two worlds - planet Milenia and planet Gemina: each usually on opposite sides of the sun. Gemina is entirely medieval, milenia is technological, a second world having to do with the millenium obviously. 4 evil prophets gather the worlds into a intergalaic war. Milenia is either a reference to the second earth or the planet Venus, the morning star which may have once been habitable, but in my world these two planets exist at the same time.

Nibiru - I made a planet called Nibiru surrounded by 3 suns. Before I ever heard of the name. I read something about the Nibiru sun being called Zaos. Zaos was a name I used in my world for a sacred sword that needed to be blessed by 9 elemental powers of 9 elemental gem guardains to extinguish evil. A sword blessed by the council of nine perhaps?

Arcturus - He was a super powerful villian who people on my planets lost continent worshipped as a god. I was very surprised to find out there was a race of aliens called Arcturians. In my world Atcturus started a cult on a sunken continent (Atlantis) where he had both Arcane and Spirit bloodline abilities giving him the ability to create his own dimension and trap souls inside that dimension and feed on them. The battle of Arcturus vs a hero with attuned to the nine elemental gem guardians was so epic it resulted in the sinking of the continent. Although I made him into a villian, some truth concerning the dimension and souls being able to go there may have something to do with the fifth dimension. Arcturus seems to be good in the Bible "Canst thou guide Arcturus and his sons?" Job 38 also mentions the Pleiades.

390-391 - the classic quest year for our gaming sessions. In the year 391 AD all non-Christian temples in the Empire were closed. There is probably a lot of other interesting things that happened in 390, 391.

From: http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm

In 1970 I wrote a novel called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. One of the characters is a nineteen-year-old girl named Kathy. Her husband's name is Jack. Kathy appears to work for the criminal underground, but later, as we read deeper into the novel, we discover that actually she is working for the police. She has a relationship going on with a police inspector. The character is pure fiction. Or at least I thought it was.

Anyhow, on Christmas Day of 1970, I met a girl named Kathy—this was after I had finished the novel, you understand. She was nineteen years old. Her boyfriend was named Jack. I soon learned that Kathy was a drug dealer. I spent months trying to get her to give up dealing drugs; I kept warning her again and again that she would get caught. Then, one evening as we were entering a restauant together, Kathy stopped short and said, "I can't go in." Seated in the restaurant was a police inspector whom I knew. "I have to tell you the truth," Kathy said. "I have a relationship with him."

Certainly, these are odd coincidences. Perhaps I have precognition. But the mystery becomes even more perplexing; the next stage totally baffles me. It has for four years.

In 1974 the novel was published by Doubleday. One afternoon I was talking to my priest—I am an Episcopalian—and I happened to mention to him an important scene near the end of the novel in which the character Felix Buckman meets a black stranger at an all-night gas station, and they begin to talk. As I described the scene in more and more detail, my priest became progressively more agitated. At last he said, "That is a scene from the Book of Acts, from the Bible! In Acts, the person who meets the black man on the road is named Philip—your name." Father Rasch was so upset by the resemblance that he could not even locate the scene in his Bible. "Read Acts," he instructed me. "And you'll agree. It's the same down to specific details."

I went home and read the scene in Acts. Yes, Father Rasch was right; the scene in my novel was an obvious retelling of the scene in Acts... and I had never read Acts, I must admit. But again the puzzle became deeper. In Acts, the high Roman official who arrests and interrogates Saint Paul is named Felix—the same name as my character. And my character Felix Buckman is a high-ranking police general; in fact, in my novel he holds the same office as Felix in the Book of Acts: the final authority. There is a conversation in my novel which very closely resembles a conversation between Felix and Paul.

Well, I decided to try for any further resemblances. The main character in my novel is named Jason. I got an index to the Bible and looked to see if anyone named Jason appears anywhere in the Bible. I couldn't remember any. Well, a man named Jason appears once and only once in the Bible. It is in the Book of Acts. And, as if to plague me further with coincidences, in my novel Jason is fleeing from the authorities and takes refuge in a person's house, and in Acts the man named Jason shelters a fugitive from the law in his house—an exact inversion of the situation in my novel, as if the mysterious Spirit responsible for all this was having a sort of laugh about the whole thing.

Felix, Jason, and the meeting on the road with the black man who is a complete stranger. In Acts, the disciple Philip baptizes the black man, who then goes away rejoicing. In my novel, Felix Buckman reaches out to the black stranger for emotional support, because Felix Buckman's sister has just died and he is falling apart psychologically. The black man stirs up Buckman's spirits and althought Buckman does not go away rejoicing, at least his tears have stopped falling. He had been flying home, weeping over the death of his sister, and had to reach out to someone, anyone, even a total stranger. It is an encounter between two strangers on the road which changes the life of one of them—both in my novel and in Acts. And one final quirk by the mysterious Spirit at work: the name Felix is the Latin word for "happy." Which I did not know when I wrote the novel.

A careful study of my novel shows that for reasons which I cannot even begin to explain I had managed to retell several of the basic incidents from a particular book of the Bible, and even had the right names. What could explain this? That was four years ago that I discovered all this. For four years I have tried to come up with a theory and I have not. I doubt if I ever will.

But the mystery had not ended there, as I had imagined. Two months ago I was walking up to the mailbox late at night to mail off a letter, and also to enjoy the sight of Saint Joseph's Church, which sits opposite my apartment building. I noticed a man loitering suspiciously by a parked car. It looked as if he was attempting to steal the car, or maybe something from it; as I returned from the mailbox, the man hid behind a tree. On impulse I walked up to him and asked, "Is anything the mattter?"

"I'm out of gas," the man said. "And I have no money."

Incredibly, because I have never done this before, I got out my wallet, took all the money from it, and handed the money to him. He then shook hands with me and asked where I lived, so that he could later pay the money back. I returned to my apartment, and then I realized that the money would do him no good, since there was no gas station within walking distance. So I returned, in my car. The man had a metal gas can in the trunk of his car, and, together, we drove in my car to an all-night gas station. Soon we were standing there, two strangers, as the pump jockey filled the metal gas can. Suddenly I realized that this was the scene in my novel—the novel written eight years before. The all-night gas station was exactly as I had envisioned it in my inner eye when I wrote the scene—the glaring white light, the pump jockey—and now I saw something which I had not seen before. The stranger who I was helping was black.

We drove back to his stalled car with the gas, shook hands, and then I returned to my apartment building. I never saw him again. He could not pay me back because I had not told him which of the many apartments was mine or what my name was. I was terribly shaken up by this experience. I had literally lived out a scene completely as it had appeared in my novel. Which is to say, I had lived out a sort of replica of the scene in Acts where Philip encounters the black man on the road.