The girl from the pharmacy who delivered Darvon to Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer, wore a golden fish necklace.

“What does that mean?” asked Dick.

She touched it and said, “This is a sign worn by the early Christians so that they would recognize one another.”

“In that instant,” Dick writes, “I suddenly experienced anamnesis, a Greek word meaning, literally, loss of forgetfulness.”

Anamnesis is brought on by the action of the Holy Spirit. The person remembers his true identity throughout all his lives. The person recognizes the world for what it is — his own prior thought formations — and this generates the flash. He now knows where he is.

Joy Williams, “Buried in Colorado All Alone”

“I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind,” Dick told Charles Platt, “as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane.”

And just for fun, here’s Robert Crumb’s illustrated take on PKD’s experience for Weirdo, the lowbrow counterpart to Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s aspirationally intellectual Raw. Crumb mentions the experience only as occurring in March of 1974, but Dick identifies February 20th as the first inklings of the two-month-long spiritual awakening he would later refer to as 2-3-74 (for February-March 1974).