Have you ever met a book character?
The title of this thread must sound somewhat... impossible, but I bet that at least once in our lives we have all met that Somebody... Somebody, for whom we wondered, and pondered, where do we know them from, where have we met them, why do they seem so familiar to us - perhaps their sole physical aspect, perhaps their specific movements, the sentences they said perhaps provoked a deja vu in us? Or, more specifically - deja lu? :D
Were you ever on a train station and met that beautiful young woman which seemed surprisingly familiar? Whom you did not know, but for whom you could have sworn she had something to do with some Levin, and for whom you felt a strange fear?
Have you ever found yourself on a fair and met madame Bovary? And was that her husband not so like Charles?
Ever ended up in philosophical... political... theological... debate with a stranger in a caffe, and recognised Ivan Karamazov in him?
And that thin, worn-out, broke student who lives next door to you... do you not know him from somewhere?
Share your experiences. :D
Flow My Tears the Policeman Said
I can't say that I've met anyone that eerily fit the bill for a fictional character I've read of. But I would like to relate the very strange experiences of Phillip K. Dick in relation to the novel above. PKD had written this novel in record time, he compared it to channeling due to the ease of his experience. A few years later he met a woman at a party who was dating the Chief of Police at the time. It just so happened that her name matched a character in his book who was dating the Chief of Police. She happened to be cheating on this man, a situation that was mirrored in his novel. Both gentleman had corresponding names to their novel counterparts. After this party he was driving down the road and noticed a man waving for help. He pulled to the side of the road (something he would never do) and offered to give him a ride. As they pulled into the gas station he realized that this was also in his novel. He wrote all of this down in his exegisis and forgot about it for a while. Sometime later he was telling a friend who happened to be a minister about this incident and his friend asked for an outline of his novel. When he read it he called PKD and told him, "This is a futuristic version of the Book of Acts, like a modern day rendering of the Odyssey." Phillip told him that he had never read the book of Acts. "I suggest that you give it a try, then" was his suggestion. When he read Acts he was stunned. Many of the names were even exactly identical. It was at this point in PKD's life that he adopted a curious theory about time. He believed that time was basically an illusion, and that we were all living in apostolic times, ie, the first century. The Devil was pulling this mask of Time and Space over mankind's eyes to make him believe that two thousand years have passed and we were living in the midst of a technological mecca. But this was really his trick as the Ape of creation, to deceive mankind into beliving that Christ would not return. Phillip believed that this was the essence of the Kingdom of God--seeing through the illusory world--and realizing that Christ was at our very doorstep. He later turned this episode into a much more layered and somewhat convoluted mystic idealogy, but the personal testimony remains an integral part of Phillip's exegesis.
