Total Recall and Philip Dick’s Nature of Reality

Total Recall was based off of the prolific science fiction writer Philip
K. Dick’s (1928-1982) short story, ‘We Can Remember It for You
Wholesale’ from 1966. It is a story that questions reality and memories
and runs into a concept of cycles of time and repeating events.

The original Total Recall film featured a storyline that had the
protagonist Douglas Quaid interested in visiting the pyramids of Mars
and the alien artifacts found on it. There are also human-alien hybrids
which could be similar to the reptilian beings spoken of later in this
post. Total Recall could be considered a film with predictive
programming, where concepts are laid out by Hollywood in an effort to
‘prep’ our minds for the ability to accept the fact that aliens exist,
or perhaps to get us more comfortable with upcoming intrusive
technologies such as x-ray scanners in airports (oh wait, that one
really happened, could this evidence of predictive programming from the
first Total Recall film??…).

Dr. Joe Dispenza (as seen on the documentary ‘What the Bleep Do We
Know’) discusses how memories are created through the events we
experience. He makes some interesting observations, one of which is that
by the time we’re 35 years old, we’ve memorized enough thought patterns,
emotional reactions and our behavior is 95% cemented and our personality
is simply a memorized, repeated pattern. This is just one of his many
ideas that support the concept of repeating cycles of time and how our
bodies are computers with a code that runs on repeat, that can only be
“rewritten” with a strong desire to break free and continual stimulation
that keeps pushing for external changes to happen in our lives. Another
Dispenza observation is that in which we need to ask ourselves how much
we really change on a day to day basis. How much different is our lives
if you were to observe it from the outside? People complain that their
lives are routine and dull, yet they repeat the same daily pattern of
their morning routines, going to work to do the same tasks, going home
to eat dinner, watching the television, etc. with small variations. The
variations are too small to make the permanent changes needed to alter
our personality and change what we “filter” out from our senses.

Dick was influenced by Plato and Carl Jung. Jung was the psychologist
who worked on the concept of narrowing down human beings into one of 16
personality types (amazing isn’t it, all of this uniqueness we possess,
yet we’re all predictable down to 16 types). This prompts me to believe
that Jung thought about the possibility of the concept of a
human-computer, programmed to experience this software “reality” we can
label as the matrix. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test that
determines a person’s personality type is still used in management and
psychology courses today.

Dick wrote several science fiction novels that have been incorporated
into successful films including: Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly,
Minority Report, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. He had more
stories that followed the theme of questioning our nature of reality and
used parallel universes and alternative versions of history, such as The
Man in the High Castle. Dick experienced hallucinations and visuals that
seemed to awaken him to the nature of reality (similar to David Icke)
and used some experiences as jump offs for his stories. He focused on a
lot of people’s “lives” being illusory experiences manipulated and
controlled by external forces. This is akin to the reptilians that David
Icke speaks of, or the Chitauri


from Zulu legends (seen in The Avengers
film) or the Archons depicted in the Gnostic writings. These fourth
dimensional beings are able to tune us into a matrix-false reality and
this is becoming more and more possible as we learn more about quantum
mechanics and what goes on at the atomic level. For instance, the fact
that atoms are comprised mostly of nothing is one of the hypotheses that
scientists are looking at, which would indicate that all we sense is
just an illusion. Material objects don’t really exist anywhere but
within our mind, which is triggered by the external forces as a coded
software (this software is the matrix).

Dick went on record to voice his opinions and his life experiences and
how they influenced his ideas of the nature of reality. At the 9:05
point of this video we get a sample of Philip Dick trying to relay his
feelings on what is going on this world.


And here’s the trailer for the newest 2012 remake of the film:


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