Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 1: The Wake Up Call
Chapter 1 opens with a married couple fighting. Not about money. Not about the kids. About which emotion to feel today.
Rick Deckard wakes up because his Penfield mood organ zapped him awake. This is a device sitting next to the bed that electrically stimulates your brain to produce whatever feeling you want. His wife Iran is lying there, refusing to get up. Rick tells her she set her dial too low. She tells him to keep his hands off her settings.
And just like that, we’re in Philip K. Dick’s future.
The Morning Argument
What starts as a typical morning grumble turns into something fascinating. Iran calls Rick a “murderer hired by the cops.” He says he’s never killed a human being. She says, “Just those poor andys.” This is our first hint about Rick’s job. He’s a bounty hunter who retires androids. And his wife is not exactly thrilled about it.
But here’s the thing. The argument is not really about androids. It’s about the mood organ itself. Rick wants to dial away the conflict. He stands at his console, choosing between a setting that would kill his anger or one that would amp it up enough to win the fight. Iran catches him and threatens to dial maximum venom if he dials for more aggression.
They’re negotiating their emotions like it’s a thermostat war.
Iran’s Scheduled Despair
This is the part that hit me hardest. Iran tells Rick she has a six-hour “self-accusatory depression” scheduled for today. Rick is confused. Why would anyone program themselves to feel miserable?
Iran explains. One afternoon she turned off the TV sound and heard the building. Really heard it. Half the apartments are empty. Before the mood organ could filter her reaction, she noticed something terrifying: she wasn’t feeling anything about it. The emptiness of a dying world, and she felt nothing. She recognized this as a sign of something broken, not in the world, but in her.
So she experimented with her mood organ until she found a setting for despair. Now she schedules it twice a month.
Think about that for a second. In a world where you can dial away any negative feeling, Iran deliberately chooses to feel bad. Because not feeling bad about a terrible situation seemed worse to her. She wants to stay human in the most basic sense, to have real reactions to real problems. Even if those reactions hurt.
Rick doesn’t understand this. He tries to talk her out of it, offers to dial a pleasant emotion they can share together. Eventually Iran gives up and lets him dial her mood. He picks setting 594: “pleased acknowledgment of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters.”
Yeah. He really does that.
The Sheep on the Roof
After breakfast, Rick goes up to the roof pasture to check on his sheep. Every apartment building has these little plots of land on top where people keep animals. Owning a real animal is basically a moral requirement in this society. It ties into their religion, Mercerism, and the whole culture of empathy.
But Rick’s sheep is fake. It’s an electric replica. His real sheep, Groucho, died of tetanus from a piece of baling wire left in the hay. So Rick had a company build an exact copy. He tends to it every morning, pretending. Because in this world, admitting you have a fake animal is almost as bad as not having one at all.
His neighbor Bill Barbour makes things worse. Barbour’s horse is pregnant. A real horse. A Percheron mare he flew to Canada to buy. Rick asks if Barbour would sell the colt. Barbour says no, that would be immoral. Rick pulls out his Sidney’s catalogue, the price guide for animals, and offers full catalogue value. Barbour still says no.
So Rick does something desperate. He shows Barbour the control panel hidden under his sheep’s wool. Now Barbour knows the truth. And Barbour, to his credit, promises not to tell anyone.
What This Chapter Sets Up
Dick packs an enormous amount of world-building into one chapter. We learn that World War Terminus wrecked the planet. Radioactive dust fills the air, slowly damaging people’s genes. The government pushes everyone to emigrate to Mars with slogans like “Emigrate or degenerate!” People who stay behind risk becoming “specials,” those whose DNA has been damaged beyond the legal threshold for reproduction.
Rick stays because of his job. He’s a bounty hunter for the San Francisco Police Department. And at the end of the chapter, we learn what he really wants. Five android bounties at a thousand dollars each would be enough to buy a real animal. But for that to happen, the androids would have to come to his territory, and the senior bounty hunter, Dave Holden, would have to be out of the picture.
Remember that detail. It matters.
My Take
What impresses me about this chapter is how much emotional weight Dick puts on everyday objects. A mood organ. A fake sheep. A horse pregnancy. These aren’t dramatic sci-fi set pieces. They’re mundane things made strange by context. And through them, Dick asks a question that runs through the whole book: in a world where everything can be faked, feelings, animals, even people, what counts as real?
Iran’s decision to schedule her own despair is one of the smartest things I’ve read in science fiction. It’s a tiny rebellion against a system designed to keep everyone comfortable and numb. And it sets the tone for everything that follows.
Tomorrow we meet a very different character in Chapter 2. Someone who doesn’t have the luxury of choosing how to feel.