I was also thinking about how Philip K. Dick writes, and I think he was very much about creating cognitive dissonance within his stories. It’s almost like he sets up a continuous positive feedback loop on purpose, with the express intention of exploding the system which he is creating in his novels. And it generally works. Unlike a lot of stories where the finale includes everything kind of settling down back to normal, he seems to revel in the beautiful destruction of what was. That once you have destroyed everything, you’re really free to move ahead.

Though he doesn’t mention cognitive dissonance or feedback theory, there’s an excellent quote from his 1978 lecture, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later:

It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

I love that guy.