The story follows genetically enhanced pop singer and television star Jason Taverner who wakes up in a world where he has never existed.
[2][3] The novel is set in a dystopian version of 1988, following a Second Civil War which led to the collapse of the United States' democratic institutions.
The novel begins with the protagonist, Jason Taverner, a singer, hosting his weekly TV show which has an audience of 30 million viewers.
Through a succession of phone calls made from the hotel to colleagues and friends who now claim not to know him, Taverner establishes that he is no longer recognized by the outside world.
At the station, McNulty erroneously reports the man's name as Jason Tavern, revealing the identity of a Wyoming diesel engine mechanic.
Deciding to lie low, Taverner heads to a Las Vegas bar in the hopes of meeting a woman with whom he can stay.
The poem begins: Flow, my tears, fall from your springs, Exiled for ever, let me mourn Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings, There let me live forlorn.
In Dick's book, the police chief, Felix Buckman, meets a black stranger at an all-night gas station, and uncharacteristically makes an emotional connection with him.
In Acts Chapter 8, the disciple Philip meets an Ethiopian eunuch (a black man) sitting in a chariot, to whom he explains a passage from the Book of Isaiah, and then converts him to Christianity.
[7] Dick further notes that eight years after writing the book, he himself uncharacteristically came to the aid of a black stranger who had run out of gas.
[7][8]Mabou Mines presented the world premiere of a theatrical adaptation of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said at the Boston Shakespeare Theatre from June 18–30, 1985.
The Boston Phoenix quotes Hartinian on the subject in an interview before the play opened: "[Dick] was someone I admired and looked up to, and I knew he had always wanted one of his works to be adapted.
The Phoenix continues, "It was a draft of Flow My Tears, and as Hartinian discovered when she sat down to adapt the book, it contained many passages that had been cut from the published text, including a discussion of ways to remember deceased writers that was to prove prescient.
The play has been performed by Mabou Mines in Boston and New York City, and by the Prop Theatre in Chicago,[9] and the Evidence Room in Los Angeles.
The Evidence Room production received positive reviews including one from the Los Angeles Times which stated that "the piece is vintage Dick, fluctuating between the inventive and the paranoiac.
"[10] On February 1, 2004, Variety announced that Utopia Pictures & Television had acquired the rights to produce adaptations of three of Dick's novels: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth.
[11] In 2007, The Halcyon Company acquired the first-look rights to Dick's works, and in May 2009 they announced that after Terminator Salvation (2009), they would next adapt Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
Gary Numan referenced the novel in the 1978 song "Listen to the Sirens" from the debut Tubeway Army album.
The American indie rock band Built to Spill released a song, "Nowhere Nothin' Fuckup" on their 1993 album Ultimate Alternative Wavers.
The song on the album has the same name as protagonist Jason Taverner's hit played repeatedly on the jukebox by character Anne Dominic in the coffee shop in the novel.