THE LATHE OF HEAVEN
By Ursula K. Le Guin
184 pages
Available at Powerbooks
Browsing through Powerbooks in Mall of Asia, I came across Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 novel about a young man whose dreams literally come true. I first encountered The Lathe of Heaven as a PBS movie (1980) starring Bruce Davison, known to many as the ill-fated Senator Robert Kelly in X-Men, or perhaps earlier as the rat-befriending Willard in the ‘70s movie of the same name.
It’s easy to imagine him as the young, dithering George Orr — a man who is sent for psychiatric care to Dr. William Haber after he is caught taking too many government prescription pills, “uppers” mostly. The reason? He’s afraid to sleep. His dreams, he believes, cause things to change in the real world.
In the age of Obama, it may be a little churlish to say “Be careful what you wish for.” But not all actions bear intended consequences. I am reminded of a recent talk show appearance by actress Sharon Stone. She was advocating anti-AIDS drugs for Africa, which, thanks to hundreds of millions in foreign donations, were quickly supplied to the continent with the burgeoning HIV levels. Only problem is, they were in pill form. So, with brows knitted in consternation, she explained how the next step would be to supply Africa with potable water pills… so they could get clean water… so the women could take the pills and stop the HIV from being passed on to their nursing babies. And so on.
You never know how your wishes will manifest in the real world. That’s Orr’s problem, exacerbated by Dr. Haber, who quickly realizes what he has on his hands with his sleep-wary patient. Using hypnosis and a device called the Augmentor, he sends Orr directly to REM sleep with the magic word “Antwerp” — but first he gives him suggestions on how to spiff up the world, which at the beginning of the novel is plagued by pretty much the same problems we have now: global warming, wars, poverty and food shortages.
That Le Guin, who wrote the novel back in ‘71from her relatively remote enclave of Oregon, saw the end of the century’s looming problems so clearly is no matter of a crystal ball: scientists even back then warned of the Greenhouse Effect and rising sea levels. Now we call it global warming, and still lack the political will to make any clear decisions about it. Copenhagen may nudge temperature levels down a few degrees, but we are still looking at 50 to 100 years of the past decades’ neglect.
But this is just one of the prescient matters in The Lathe of Heaven. On one page, a newspaper headline reads “BIG A-1 STRIKE NEAR AFGHAN BORDER.” Elsewhere, battles rage in the Middle East and become nuclear, dragging in the former superpowers. World overpopulation is the biggest problem, or so believes Dr. Haber, so he instructs George to have an “effective dream” in which he will feel “uncrowded” when he awakens. On hand is Heather Lelache, a civil rights lawyer, who watches as buildings disappear from existence right outside Haber’s office window.
Like him, she had turned to look out the window at the vanishing towers fade like a dream, leave not a wrack behind, the insubstantial miles of suburb dissolving like smoke on the wind…
My God, he thought, what has Orr done?
Six billion people.
Where are they?
Orr’s strange condition doesn’t just change the world, it changes people’s memories of the world. And for every effect, there has to be a preceding cause: Orr’s dreams subconsciously and retroactively invent a deadly plague capable of wiping out seven billion people, leaving a puny one billion left alive on earth. And that’s how all the survivors remember it. Their internal wiring has been automatically changed to reflect Orr’s every subconscious musing.
The scenario has a distinct Twilight Zone tinge to it — specifically that strange episode (“It’s a Good Life”) involving a young boy in a Midwestern town whose every thought comes scarily true, causing the townspeople to become very solicitous of the little boy’s happiness. There’s also a little bit of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in it: the idea of multiple realities, all existing in a time continuum that is not sequential but simultaneous. Then there’s Groundhog Day, the existential comedy in which Bill Murray tries, again and again, to perfect a single day so that he can jump-start his déjà vu-ing life.
But Le Guin has other philosophical messages in mind. Of course, it’s wrong to implant suggestions in people’s heads. It’s wrong to exert too much control over anybody, and Haber — though he may have social progress in mind — suffers from a voracious ego that seals his fate. Orr, on the other hand, has a virtually neutral response to everything; his passiveness in the face of a power he can neither control nor direct seems almost Buddhist.
The one thing that stirs his higher instincts is his love of LeLache, whom he brings back from his dream’s destructive powers by playing the Beatles’ A Little Help From My Friends on his record player repeatedly as he falls asleep. (The tune was used to great effect in the PBS TV version.)
As the sleep of reason breeds monsters, Orr’s dreams conjure up a race of alien beings who seem to mean earth great harm (they were dreamt up after Haber suggested that people stop fighting one another; so Orr created aliens for humans to fight). But this race of aliens — who resemble flying turtles, speak out of their elbows and recognize Orr as an evolved being — are actually on earth to teach humanity a lesson.
“Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes… But the conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and consciously — as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously.”
Perhaps only a Zen Buddhist turtle from another galaxy could understand mankind’s connection to the vibration of the cosmos so succinctly. But since he was dreamed up by Orr’s subconscious, perhaps there is hope for the rest of mankind’s dreams after all.