The Man in the High Castle Trivia

Man in the High Castle scores low on the "twins and doubles"-meter, whereas many of Dick's works push that trope hard. Sometimes that means robot impostors of real people; and in Dr. Bloodmoney it means one telepathic twin inside the other twin. Why so many twins and doubles? Well, some critics think it has to do with Philip and his twin sister, Jane, who died as a baby. (Source.)

Is it paranoia if they're out to get you? Philip K. Dick was under investigation by the FBI in the 1960s—but then, everyone was. But he didn't hold that against them and even wrote letters to the FBI alerting them about various dangers he saw in the world. For instance, in 1974, Philip K. Dick sent a letter to the FBI telling them to look at some Marxist science fiction scholars and at the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem. According to this letter, Dick thought that the KGB was trying to infiltrate American science fiction. But our favorite claim was when he said that Lem might not be a real person, but a committee pretending to be a person. That sounds like something straight out of Dick's novels. (It's possible that Dick was suffering some mental problems at the time, or using drugs, or maybe joking—or some combination of all three.) (Source.)

Ready for the real weird stuff? Philip K. Dick experienced a vision in February and March, 1974. In this vision, this pink light was beamed into his head and showed him the nature of reality. For example:

March 20, 1974: It seized me entirely, lifting me from the limitations of the space-time matrix; it mastered me as, at the same time, I knew that the world around me was cardboard, a fake. Through its power of perception I saw what really existed, and through its power of no-thought decision, I acted to free myself. 

Dick wrote several works about this experience, from his novel VALIS (1981) to his giant memoir of this experience, The Exegesis. Now, Dick believed he had this experience, but he accepted that it could have been just a hallucination. After all, it all started after a visit to the dentist (kind of like this). Curiously, while he had this experience in 1974, we can kind of see something of that idea in this 1962 book. VALIS is an intelligence that exists outside our frame of reference, which sounds a lot like the I Ching in Man in the High Castle. (Source.)

If you wanted to make a robotic head that seemed human, why wouldn't you make it look like Philip K. Dick? That's what one group of roboticists did. Hilariously, the Philip K. Dick robot head went missing years ago when it was forgotten on a plane. 
(Source.)

Started in 1983 (the year after Dick died), the Philip K. Dick Award is given to the best science fiction paperback. (This is a nice reminder that, even if PKD is well-respected today, he was published in the less prestigious paperback format—no expensive hardcovers for him.) (Source.)

He may have started as a paperback writer, but some of his books are more expensive. A copy of The Man in the High Castle sold for $2000 dollars. And that's not even the most expensive Philip K. Dick book. (Source.)