VALIS

I'm rereading Philip K. Dick's novel "VALIS" for the umpteenth time, and for the umpteenth time it makes me think. It's a screwy book that only barely qualifies as a novel by technical definition, and I can never decide if it is brilliant or complete swill. I suppose cynics would argue that since Mr. Dick got my royalty check either way, it doesn't matter, but still, when I read something as dense, strange and thoughtful as VALIS, I want it to mean something. I just don't know if it does.

My favorite part of the book by far, aside from the idea of Soviet technicians scurrying around in the background behind the three-eyed alien cyborgs in Horselover Fat's bizarre vision, is when the narrator talks about his persistent dreams of living in a nice house by a lake in northern California, a house he doesn't own near a lake that doesn't exist with a wife he never had. (For the record, yes, I know that Horselover Fat and the narrator are one and the same, but one of the glories of the book is the way he effortlessly convinces you that they are separate people even though he goes out of his way to remind you that they are not separate people.)

He concludes that not only is the landscape and population in his dreams wrong, but the ideology is wrong. He doesn't even want to live that way, would rather eat a dead dog than succumb to that kind of suburban swill - but the dreams are nevertheless extremely pleasant. He concludes in the end that he isn't dreaming his dreams but is in fact dreaming his father's dreams.

Maybe. Maybe not.

What interests me about this is that I also have recurrent dreams that always take place in a constrained geographical region that doesn't exist, in my case, an entirely fictional part of central Arizona somewhere between Camp Verde and Phoenix. This landscape is fairly rugged, ridged with mountains and slashed with valleys, and the roads wind painfully up and down the mountains in endless switchbacks. But what's really interesting is that this landscale is dominated by what can only be called Herculean earthmoving projects - highways, dams, tunnels and weirder things yet - sometimes I encounter titanic earthmoving projects that appear to have no purpose other than their own mere existence, as though someone decided to move 300 million cubic yards of earth just for the sheer hell of it.

Unlike the narrator's dreams, I don't find this landscape or ideology unnerving. Well, sometimes I do - sometimes the earthmoving projects are a bit hair-raising with dozers and tandem scrapers perched on the narrowest cuts on the sides of nearly vertical slopes, bringing to mind the Fun Old Days when doing my job involved running the right track of my D6C halfway out over the abyss... Strange, isn't it, that I never see hydraulic excavators in my mythic landscape. It's always oval-track dozers, D9Gs to be specific, and strange tractor scrapers like Cat 630s or DW-20s, or Euclid TSS-24s, or even older "pans" pulled by bladeless D9s, and spidery draglines and - oh dear - Wabco graders.

I once dreamed that I was riding on the back of such a grader, gripping the exhaust stack while someone else drove. It was raining and the grader's tires were throwing up great sprays of muddy water, and I decided I didn't want to ride on the back of the grader any more. I tapped on the glass and the driver turned and I saw that it was Adolf Hitler wearing a stamped-metal hard hat. Huh. Go figure that one out. Maybe we would all have been better off if Hitler had been a crabby, dyspeptic grader operator instead of a monstrous dictator...

When I was a kid there were only two kinds of landscape: that which was flat enough to be built on as it was, and that which required a bigger dozer before it could be built upon. I think that's the message of my dream landscape, that no matter what the terrain is like, we (mankind in general) can master it with the proper application of engineering, willpower, guts, and heavy equipment.

Which doesn't have much to do with VALIS at all, now that I think about it, except for the shared habit of dreaming about a specific geographic locale that doesn't actually exist. Well, that and my habit of sitting out on the patio at night and speculating about Gnosticism.