In Philip K. Dick’s 1957 novel Eye in the Sky, a field trip to a cutting-edge particle accelerator turns catastrophic when a beam malfunction knocks eight tourists unconscious—plunging them all into a shared, hallucinated multiverse.
To escape, the survivors must navigate a gauntlet of surreal alternate realities, each ruled entirely by the subconscious mind, petty prejudices, and religious neuroses of a different group member. They move from a world governed by fundamentalist fundamentalist morality—where the literal, physical eye of God watches from the sky—to a paranoid communist dystopia, and finally into a claustrophobic universe shaped by pure neurotic phobia.
Rather than standard sci-fi space travel, Dick uses this shift to force his characters to confront how thoroughly their own biases warp perception. It is classic PKD: a dark, mind-bending interrogation of identity, objective truth, and the frightening ease with which personal dogma can become an inescapable reality.