Still in Acts

Philip K. Dick, Waking Life, and the Time That Doesn’t Pass

“There’s only one instant, and it’s right now, and it’s eternity.”
—Waking Life

If you’re not familiar, Waking Life is a 2001 animated film that blends philosophy, dreams, and existential questions through a series of surreal conversations. I know that some “smart” people criticize the movie for being somewhat elementary philosophically but I happen to love it and I’ve seen it many times.

For years, one scene in that film has captivated me. If you’ve seen it, you probably know the one I mean. Two characters discuss dreams within dreams, the illusion of time, and the eerie suggestion that we may all be spiritually stuck in some kind of waking dream. One recounts a bizarre experience involving déjà vu, death, and what he believes to be a visitation to the “land of the dead.” Then, almost offhandedly, he drops a name: Philip K. Dick.

“I read this essay by Philip K. Dick…”
“…He had this theory that time was an illusion and we were all actually in 50 A.D.”

That idea has never left me. It is my favorite part of the film, not just because it is trippy or cool, but because it actually makes a strange kind of sense. What if time isn't what it seems? What if we are still in the Book of Acts, still in the early Church, spiritually speaking, but blinded by a counterfeit world wrapped in layers of distraction and deception? Even before I came to faith it felt distinctly possible.

For years, I wanted to know more. What essay was he talking about? What really happened to Philip K. Dick that made him believe such a thing? I never fully chased it down until today.

By what I can only call perfect timing, I finally found the original speech:
[How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later – by Philip K. Dick (1978)]

And here’s the full scene from Waking Life that started it all:
[Waking Life – Chapter 18: Trapped in a Dream]

I truly and humbly implore you to take the time to read through both of them.

A Dream Within a Dream

In Waking Life, the scene begins with a disoriented man describing how he keeps waking up from dreams, only to realize he's still in one. He’s haunted by the idea that he might already be dead, caught in a purgatorial loop:

“I keep waking up, but I’m just waking up into another dream. I’m starting to get creeped out, too. Like I’m talking to dead people… I’m starting to think that I’m dead.”

Then the other character tells him a dream of his own. A dream preceded by reading a strange essay. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and the real-world coincidences that followed its publication.

“…as he’s telling it to [his priest], the priest says, ‘That’s the Book of Acts. You’re describing the Book of Acts.’”

The implication? Dick believed that the events in his novel, written unknowingly, were a veiled retelling of specific moments from the New Testament, especially Acts 8. The coincidences were so precise, he became convinced that time was a spiritual illusion, and that the Book of Acts never truly ended. That we are still living in it. That God’s kingdom is imminent, and that something, or someone, is actively trying to make us forget.

What Philip K. Dick Really Said

Reading the full speech today, I realized just how seriously he meant it. Dick wasn’t using metaphor. He believed it literally. He wrote:

“I had the acute, overwhelming certitude (and still have) that despite all the change we see, a specific permanent landscape underlies the world of change: and that this invisible underlying landscape is that of the Bible... It is, specifically, the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ; it is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts.”

He goes on to describe how his fictional characters unknowingly mirrored people in Acts. A character named Felix, a Roman official in both stories. A man named Jason, appearing only once in the Bible, and under similar circumstances. A black stranger on the road, just like the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. And Dick’s own name? Philip.

He writes:

“My character Felix Buckman reaches out to the black stranger for emotional support… an encounter between two strangers on the road which changes the life of one of them — both in my novel and in Acts.”

And later:

“I 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.”

It’s hard to dismiss. Either these are stunning coincidences… or God was speaking through a science fiction writer who didn’t even know He was listening.

The Gospel Behind the Curtain

Dick’s explanation? It echoes Scripture in a creepy way:

“Time is just this constant saying 'No' to God’s invitation.”
“There is only one instant, and it's right now, and it's eternity.”

Compare that with Paul in Romans 13:11:

“The hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.”

Or with Jesus in Matthew 24:34:

“Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.”

People have puzzled over that verse for centuries. But if Philip K. Dick was right, and if time is indeed a kind of veil, then Jesus may have been speaking literally. “This generation” hasn’t passed, because the age of the Spirit is still unfolding. The Kingdom is still drawing near. The Spirit is still moving. And Christ’s return is not late, it’s imminent.

But we’ve been lulled to sleep.

Satan and the Ape of God

Dick even draws on an old medieval theory that Satan is the “Ape of God.” He imitates creation. He counterfeits reality. He manufactures time as a distraction from Christ’s return. He builds Disneyland-like worlds: funhouse versions of truth, where even the fake birds aren’t allowed to sing real songs.

Dick writes:

“What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it into something real?”

In other words, we’re waking up slowly. The veil is thinning. But we’re not there yet.

Wake Up, While You Still Can

The final line in the Waking Life scene always makes me think:

“Just… wake up.”

It’s said casually, but it can and maybe should be taken quite seriously.

“If you can wake up, you should. Because someday, you won’t be able to.”

That’s not just an existential warning, it’s spiritual truth. As believers, we know that a day will come when Christ does return. When the false awakenings stop. When the counterfeit world burns away, and only what is true remains.

Until then, we are called to live as if the Kingdom is at hand, because it is.

Touching Something Sacred in the Dark

The strange part? Despite my longtime fascination, I think I’ve only ever read one of Dick’s novels, A Scanner Darkly, and that was years ago. I remember it being brilliant and bleak and unlike anything else I’d read. But until now, I never seriously explored his larger body of work.

Today changed that.

Reading the full backstory behind the Waking Life monologue, finally seeing the origin of an idea that had bugged me for years, brought something to the surface I hadn’t expected: a desire to go deeper. Not just into his writing, but into the question that obsessed him his whole life:

What is real, and who are we in light of it?

I’m not saying I fully believe Dick’s theory, that we’re literally still in A.D. 50, spiritually veiled in a false timeline. But I do think it’s compelling. Definitely possible, maybe even probable. And given the way Satan is described in Scripture, as the deceiver, the one who blinds the minds of unbelievers, it’s not a theory I can easily dismiss either.

What strikes me most is that a man like Philip K. Dick, flawed, searching, and speculative, may have stumbled into something true, not by intellect alone, but by a grace he barely understood. He touched something sacred in the dark. And somehow, across decades, it reached me too.

I don’t know whether we’re still in Acts in any literal sense. But I do know this:

The Spirit still speaks.

Christ is still near.

And we are still being called to wake up.

Maybe that's the only part that ever needed to be literally true.