The Lathe of Heaven

by Ursula K. Le Guin

"We all have, Mr. Orr." Orr stared. The perfect straight man.

  "The effect of the dreams of the just prewaking d-state on the general emotional level of the psyche can be—"

  But the straight man interrupted him. "No, I don't mean that." And stuttering a little, "What I mean is, I dreamed something, and it came true."

  "That isn't hard to believe, Mr. Orr. Fm quite serious in saying that. It's only since the rise of scientific thought that anybody much has been inclined even to question such a statement, much less disbelieve it.

  Prophetic—"

  "Not prophetic dreams. I can't foresee anything. I simply change things." The hands were clenched tight.

  No wonder the Med School bigwigs had sent this one here. They always sent the nuts they couldn't crack to Haber.

  "Can you give me an example? For instance, can you recall the very first time that you had such a dream? How old were you?"

  The patient hesitated a long time, and finally said, "Sixteen, I think." His manner was still docile; he showed considerable fear of the subject, but no defensiveness or hostility toward Haber. "I'm not sure."

  "Tell me about the first time you're sure of." "I was seventeen. I was still living at home, and my mother's sister was staying with us. She was getting a divorce and wasn't working, just getting Basic Support. She was kind of in the way. It was a regular three-room flat, and she was always there. Drove my mother up the wall. She wasn't considerate, Aunt Ethel, I mean. Hogged the bathroom—we still had a private bathroom in that flat. And she kept, oh, making a sort of joking play for me. Half joking. Coming into my bedroom in her topless pajamas, and so on. She was only about thirty. It got me kind of uptight. I didn't have a girl yet and . . . you know. Adolescents. It's easy to get a kid worked up. I resented it. I mean, she was my aunt."

  He glanced at Haber to make sure that the doctor knew what he had resented, and did not disapprove of his resentment. The insistent permissiveness of the late Twentieth Century had produced fully as much sex-guilt and sex-fear in its heirs as had the insistent repressiveness of the late Nineteenth Century. Orr was afraid that Haber might be shocked at his not wanting to go to bed with his aunt. Haber maintained his noncommittal but interested expression, and Orr plowed on.

  "Well, I had a lot of sort of anxiety dreams, and this aunt was always in them. Usually disguised, the way people are in dreams sometimes; once she was a white cat, but I knew she was Ethel, too. Anyhow, finally one night when she'd got me to take her to the movies, and tried to get me to handle her, and then when we got home she kept flopping around on my bed and saying how my parents were asleep and so on, well, after I finally got her out of my room and got to sleep, I had this dream. A very vivid one. I could recall it completely when I woke up. I dreamed that Ethel had been killed in a car crash in Los Angeles, and the telegram had come. My mother was crying while she was trying to cook dinner, and I felt sorry for her, and kept wishing I could do something for her, but I didn't know what to do. That was all. ... Only when I got up, I went into the living room. No Ethel on the couch. There wasn't anybody else in the apartment, just my parents and me. She wasn't there. She never had been there. I didn't have to ask. I remembered. I knew that Aunt Ethel had been killed in a crash on a Los Angeles freeway six weeks ago, coming home after seeing a lawyer about getting a divorce. We had got the news by telegram. The whole dream was just sort of reliving something like what had actually happened. Only it hadn't happened. Until the dream. I mean, I also knew that she'd been living with us, sleeping on the couch in the living room, until last night."

  "But there was nothing to show that, to prove it?"

  "No. Nothing. She hadn't been. Nobody remembered that she had been, except me. And I was wrong.

  Now."

  Haber nodded judiciously and stroked his beard. What had seemed a mild drug-habituation case now appeared to be a severe aberration, but he had never had a delusion system presented to him quite so straightforwardly. Orr might be an intelligent schizophrenic, feeding him a line, putting him on, with schizoid inventiveness and deviousness; but he lacked the faint inward arrogance of such people, to which Haber was extremely sensitive.

  "Why do you think your mother didn't notice that reality had changed since last night?"

  "Well, she didn't dream it. I mean, the dream really did change reality. It made a different reality, retroactively, which she'd been part of all along. Being in it, she had no memory of any other. I did, I remembered both, because I was … there ... at the moment of the change. This is the only way I can explain it, I know it doesn't make sense. But I have got to have some explanation, or else face the fact that I am insane."

  No, this fellow was no milquetoast.

  "I'm not in the judgment business, Mr. Orr. I'm after facts. And the events of the mind, believe me, to me are facts. When you see another man's dream as he dreams it recorded in black and white on the electroencephalograph, as I've done ten thousand times, you don't speak of dreams as 'unreal.' They exist; they are events; they leave a mark behind them. O.K. I take it that you had other dreams that seemed to have this same sort of effect?"

  "Some. Not for a long time. Only under stress. But it seemed to ... to be happening oftener. I began to get scared."

  Haber leaned forward. "Why?"

  Orr looked blank.

  "Why scared?"

  "Because I don't want to change things!" Orr said, as if stating the superobvious. "Who am I to meddle with the way things go? And it's my unconscious mind that changes things, without any intelligent control.

  I tried autohypnosis but it didn't do any good. Dreams are incoherent, selfish, irrational—immoral, you said a minute ago. They come from the unsocialized part of us, don't they, at least partly? I didn't want to kill poor Ethel. I just wanted her out of my way. Well, in a dream, that's likely to be drastic. Dreams take short cuts. I killed her. In a car crash a thousand miles away six weeks ago. I am responsible for her death."

  Haber stroked his beard again. "Therefore," he said slowly, "the dream-suppressant drugs. So that you will avoid further responsibilities."

  "Yes. The drugs kept the dreams from building up and getting vivid. It's only certain ones, very intense ones, that are. . . ." He sought a word, "effective."

  "Right. O.K. Now, let's see. You're unmarried; you're a draftsman for the Bonneville-Umatilla Power District How do you like your work?"

  "Fine."

  "How's your sex life?"

  "Had one trial marriage. Broke up last summer, after a couple of years."

  "Did you pull out, or she?"

  "Both of us. She didn't want a kid. It wasn't full-marriage material."

  "And since then?"

  "Well, there're some girls at my office, I'm not a ... not a great stud, actually."

  "How about interpersonal relationships in general? Do you feel you relate satisfactorily to other people, that you have a niche in the emotional ecology of your environment?"

  "I guess so."

  "So that you could say that there's nothing really wrong with your life. Right? O.K. Now tell me this; do you want, do you seriously want, to get out of this drug dependency?"

  "Yes."

  "O.K., good. Now, you've been taking drugs because you want to keep from dreaming. But not all dreams are dangerous; only certain vivid ones. You dreamed of your Aunt Ethel as a white cat, but she wasn't a white cat next morning—right? Some dreams are all right—safe."

  He waited for Orr's assenting nod.

  "Now, think about this. How would you feel about testing this whole thing out, and perhaps learning how to dream safely, without fear? Let me explain. You've got the subject of dreaming pretty loaded emotionally. You are literally afraid to dream because you feel that some of your dreams have this capacity to affect real life, in ways you can't control. Now, that may be an elaborate and meaningful metaphor, by which your unconscious mind is trying to tell your conscious mind something about reality

  —your reality, your life—which you ar
en't ready, rationally, to accept. But we can take the metaphor quite literally; there's no need to translate it, at this point, into rational terms. Your problem at present is this: you're afraid to dream, and yet you need to dream. You tried suppression by drugs; it didn't work.

  O.K., let's try the opposite. Let's get you to dream, intentionally. Let's get you to dream, intensely and vividly, right here. Under my supervision, under controlled conditions. So that you can get control over what seems to you to have got out of hand."

  "How can I dream to order?" Orr said with extreme discomfort.

  "In Doctor Haber's Palace of Dreams, you can! Have you been hypnotized?"

  "For dental work."

  "Good. O.K. Here's the system. I put you into hypnotic trance and suggest that you're going to sleep, that you're going to dream, and what you're going to dream. You'll wear a trancap to ensure that you have genuine sleep, not just hypnotrance. While you're dreaming I watch you, physically and on the EEG, the whole time. I wake you, and we talk about the dream experience. If it's gone off safely, perhaps you'll feel a bit easier about facing the next dream."

  "But I won't dream effectively here; it only happens in one dream out of dozens or hundreds." Orr's defensive rationalizations were quite consistent.

  "You can dream any style dream at all here. Dream content and dream affect can be controlled almost totally by a motivated subject and a properly trained hypnotizer. I've been doing it for ten years. And you'll be right there with me, because you'll be wearing a trancap. Ever worn one?"

  Orr shook his head.

  "You know what they are, though."

  "They send a signal through electrodes that stimulates the . . . the brain to go along with it."

  "That's roughly it The Russians have been using it for fifty years, the Israelis refined on it, we finally climbed aboard and mass-produced it for professional use in calming psychotic patients and for home use in inducing sleep or alpha trance. Now, I was working a couple of years ago with a severely depressed patient on OTT at Linnton. Like many depressives she didn't get much sleep and was particularly short of d-state sleep, dreaming-sleep; whenever she did enter the d-state she tended to wake up. Vicious-circle effect: more depression—less dreams; less dreams—more depression. Break it.

  How? No drug we have does much to increase d-sleep. ESB—electronic brain stimulation? But that involves implanting electrodes, and deep, for the sleep centers; rather avoid an operation. I was using the trancap on her to encourage sleep. What if you made the diffuse, low-frequency signal more specific, directed it locally to the specific area within the brain; oh yes, sure, Dr. Haber, that's a snap! But actually, once I got the requisite electronics research under my belt, it only took a couple of months to work out the basic machine. Then I tried stimulating the subject's brain with a recording of brain waves from a healthy subject in the appropriate states, the various stages of sleep and dreaming. Not much luck. Found a signal from another brain may or may not pick up a response in the subject; had to learn to generalize, to make a sort of average, out of hundreds of normal brain-wave records. Then, as I work with the patient, I narrow it down again, tailor it: whenever the subject's brain is doing what I want it to do more of, I record that moment, augment it, enlarge and prolong it, replay it, and stimulate the brain to go along with its own healthiest impulses, if you'll excuse the pun. Now all that involved an enormous amount of feedback analysis, so that a simple EEG-plus-trancap grew into this," and he gestured to the electronic forest behind Orr. He had hidden most of it behind plastic paneling, for many patients were either scared of machinery or overidentified with it, but still it took up about a quarter of the office. "That's the Dream Machine," he said with a grin, "or, prosaically, the Augmentor; and what it'll do for you is ensure that you do go to sleep and that you dream—as briefly and lightly, or as long and intensively, as we like. Oh, incidentally, the depressive patient was discharged from Linnton this last summer as fully cured." He leaned forward. "Willing to give it a try?"

  "Now?"

  "What do you want to wait for?"

  "But I can't fall asleep at four-thirty in the afternoon—" Then he looked foolish. Haber had been digging in the overcrowded drawer of his desk, and now produced a paper, the Consent to Hypnosis form required by HEW. Orr took the pen Haber held out, signed the form, and put it submissively down on the desk.

  "All right. Good. Now, tell me this, George. Does your dentist use a Hypnotape, or is he a do-it-yourself man?" 'Tape. I'm 3 on the susceptibility scale." "Right in the middle of the graph, eh? Well, for suggestion as to dream content to work well, we'll want fairly deep trance. We don't want a trance dream, but a genuine sleep dream; the Augmentor will provide that; but we want to be sure the suggestion goes pretty deep. So, to avoid spending hours in just conditioning you to enter deep trance, we'll use v-c induction.

  Ever seen it done?"

  Orr shook his head. He looked apprehensive, but he offered no objection. There was an acceptant, passive quality about him that seemed feminine, or even childish. Haber recognized in himself a protective/bullying reaction toward this physically slight and compliant man. To dominate, to patronize him was so easy as to be almost irresistible.

  "I use it on most patients. It's fast, safe, and sure—by far the best method of inducing hypnosis, and the least trouble for both hypnotist and subject." Orr would certainly have heard the scare stories about subjects being brain-damaged or killed by overprolonged or inept v-c induction, and though such fears did not apply here, Haber must pander to them and calm them, lest Orr resist the whole induction. So he went on with the patter, describing the fifty-year history of the v-c induction method and then veering off the subject of hypnosis altogether, back to the subject of sleep and dreams, in order to get Orr's attention off the induction process and on to the aim of it. "The gap we have to bridge, you see, is the gulf that exists between the waking or hypnotized-trance condition and the dreaming state. That gulf has a common name: sleep. Normal sleep, the s-state, non-REM sleep, whichever name you like. Now, there are, roughly speaking, four mental states with which we're concerned: waking, trance, s-sleep, and d-state. If you look at mentation processes, the s-state, the d-state, and the hypnotic state all have something in common: sleep, dream, and trance all release the activity of the subconscious, the undermind; they tend to employ primary-process thinking, while waking mentation is secondary process—rational. But now look at the EEG records of the four states. Now it's the d-state, the trance, and the waking state that have a lot in common, while the s-state—sleep—is utterly different. And you can't get straight from trance into true d-state dreaming. The s-state must intervene. Normally, you only enter d-state four or five times a night, every hour or two, and only for a quarter of an hour at a time. The rest of the time you're in one stage or another of normal sleep. And there you'll dream, but usually not vividly; mentation in s-sleep is like an engine idling, a kind of steady muttering of images and thoughts.

  What we're after are the vivid, emotion-laden, memorable dreams of the d-state. Our hypnosis plus the Augmentor will ensure that we get them, get across the neurophysiological and temporal gulf of sleep, right into dreaming. So we'll need you on the couch here. My field was pioneered by Dement, Aserinsky, Berger, Oswald, Hartmann, and the rest, but the couch we get straight from Papa Freud. . . . But we use it to sleep on, which he objected to. Now, what I want, just for a starter, is for you to sit down here on the foot of the couch. Yes, that's it. You'll be there a while, so make yourself comfortable. You said you'd tried autohypnosis, didn't you? All right, Just go ahead and use the techniques you used for that.

  How about deep breathing? Count ten while you inhale, hold for five; yes, right, excellent. Would you mind looking up at the ceiling, straight up over your head. O.K., right."

  As Orr obediently tipped his head back, Haber, close beside him, reached out quickly and quietly and put his left hand behind the man's head, pressing firmly with thumb and one finger behind an
d below each ear; at the same time with right thumb and finger he pressed hard on the bared throat, just below the soft, blond beard, where the vagus nerve and carotid artery run. He was aware of the fine, sallow skin under his fingers; he felt the first startled movement of protest, then saw the clear eyes closing. He felt a thrill of enjoyment of his own skill, his instant dominance over the patient, even as he was muttering softly and rapidly, "You're going to sleep now; close your eyes, sleep, relax, let your mind go blank; you're going to sleep, you're relaxed, you're going limp; relax, let go—"

  And Orr fell backward on the couch like a man shot dead, his right hand dropping lax from his side.

  Haber knelt by him at once, keeping his right hand lightly on the pressure spots and never stopping the quiet, quick flow of suggestion. "You're in trance now, not asleep but deeply in hypnotic trance, and you will not come out of it and awaken until I tell you to do so. You're in trance now, and going deeper all the time into trance, but you can still hear my voice and follow my instructions. After this, whenever I simply touch you on the throat as I'm doing now, you'll enter the hypnotic trance at once." He repeated the instructions, and went on. "Now when I tell you to open your eyes you'll do so, and see a crystal ball floating in front of you. I want you to fix your attention on it closely, and as you do so you will continue to go deeper into trance. Now open your eyes, yes, good, and tell me when you see the crystal ball."

  The light eyes, now with a curious inward gaze, looked past Haber at nothing. "Now," the hypnotized man said very softly.

  "Good. Keep gazing at it, and breathing regularly; soon you'll be in very deep trance. . . ."

  Haber glanced up at the clock. The whole business had only taken a couple of minutes. Good; he didn't like to waste time on means, getting to the desired end was the thing. While Orr lay staring at his imaginary crystal ball, Haber got up and began fitting him with the modified trancap, constantly removing and replacing it to readjust the tiny electrodes and position them on the scalp under the thick, light-brown hair. He spoke often and softly, repeating suggestions and occasionally asking bland questions so that Orr would not drift off into sleep yet and would stay in rapport. As soon as the cap was in place he switched on the EEG, and for a while he watched it, to see what this brain looked like.