Philip K. Dick

In February and March 1974 he experienced something he spent the last eight years of his life trying to explain, filling eight thousand pages of a private journal he called the Exegesis. One of the explanations he kept returning to: the world is a counterfeit built by a lesser mind, the Roman empire never ended, and something outside is trying to signal in.

The most vivid modern instance of a person reaching Gnostic conclusions from experience rather than from reading — and then discovering, with visible alarm, that people in the second century had got there first.