The Lathe Of Heaven

by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  On commanding the patient to cease seeing the crystal ball and close his eyes, he obtained almost at once a strong, clear alpha trace at 12 cycles. He played about a little more with the brain, getting records for the computer and testing hypnotic depth, and then said, “Now, John—” No, what the hell was the subject’s name? “George. Now you’re going to go to sleep in a minute. You’re going to go sound asleep and dream; but you won’t go to sleep until I say the word ‘Antwerp’; when I say that, you’ll go to sleep, and sleep until I say your name three times. Now when you sleep, you’re going to have a dream, a good dream. One clear, pleasant dream. Not a bad dream at all, a pleasant one, but very clear and vivid. You’ll be sure to remember it when you wake up. It will be about—” He hesitated a moment; he hadn’t planned anything, relying on inspiration. “About a horse. A big bay horse galloping in a field. Running around. Maybe you’ll ride the horse, or catch him, or maybe just watch him. But the dream will be about a horse. A vivid—” what was the word the patient had used?— ” effectivedream about a horse. After that you won’t dream anything else; and when I speak your name three times you’ll wake up feeling calm and rested. Now, I am going to send you to sleep by ... saying... Antwerp.”

  Obedient, the little dancing lines on the screen began to change. They grew stronger and slower; soon the sleep spindles of stage 2 sleep began to appear, and a hint of the long, deep delta rhythm of stage 4. And as the brain’s rhythms changed, so did the heavy matter inhabited by that dancing energy: the hands were lax on the slow-breathing chest, the face was aloof and still.

  The Augmentor had got a full record of the waking brain’s patterns; now it was recording and analyzing the s-sleep patterns; soon it would be picking up the beginning of the patient’s d-sleep patterns, and would be able even within this first dream to feed them back to the sleeping brain, amplifying its own emissions. Indeed it might be doing so now. Haber had expected a wait, but the hypnotic suggestion, plus the patient’s long semi-deprivation of dreams, were putting him into the d-state at once: no sooner had he reached stage 2 than he began the re-ascent. The slowly swaying lines on the screen jittered once here and there; jigged again; began to quicken and dance, taking on a rapid, unsynchronized rhythm. Now the pons was active, and the trace from the hippocampus showed a five-second cycle, the theta rhythm, which had not showed up clearly in this subject. The fingers moved a little; the eyes under closed lids moved, watching; the lips parted for a deep breath. The sleeper dreamed.

  It was 5:06.

  At 5:11 Haber pressed the black OFF button on the Augmentor. At 5:12, noticing the deep jags and spindles of s-sleep reappearing, he leaned over the patient and said his name clearly thrice.

  Orr sighed, moved his arm in a wide, loose gesture, opened his eyes, and wakened. Haber detached the electrodes from his scalp in a few deft motions. “Feel O.K.?” he asked, genial and assured.

  “Fine.”

  “And you dreamed. That much I can tell you. Can you tell me the dream?”

  “A horse,” Orr said huskily, still bewildered by sleep. He sat up. “It was about a horse. That one,” and he waved his hand toward the picture-window-size mural that decorated Haber’s office, a photograph of the great racing stallion Tammany Hall at play in a grassy paddock.

  “What did you dream about it?” Haber said, pleased. He had not been sure hypnosuggestion would work on dream content in a first hypnosis.

  “It was. ... I was walking in this field, and it was off in the distance for a while. Then it came galloping at me, and after a while I realized it was going to run me down. I wasn’t scared at all, though. I figured perhaps I could catch its bridle, or swing up and ride it. I knew that actually it couldn’t hurt me because it was the horse in your picture, not a real one. It was all a sort of game.... Dr. Haber, does anything about that picture strike you as ... as unusual?”

  “Well, some people find it overdramatic for a shrink’s office, a bit overwhelming. A life-size sex symbol right opposite the couch!” He laughed.

  “Was it there an hour ago? I mean, wasn’t that a view of Mount Hood, when I came in—before I dreamed about the horse?”

  Oh Christ it had been Mount Hood the man was right

  It had not been Mount Hood it could not have been Mount Hood it was a horse it was a horse

  It had been a mountain

  A horse it was a horse it was—

  He was staring at George Orr, staring blankly at him, several seconds must have passed since Orr’s question, he must not be caught out, he must inspire confidence, he knew the answers.

  “George, do you remember the picture there as being a photograph of Mount Hood?”

  “Yes,” Orr said in his rather sad but unshaken way. “I do. It was. Snow on it.”

  “Mhm,” Haber nooded judicially, pondering. The awful chill at the pit of his chest had passed. “You don’t?”

  The man’s eyes, so elusive in color yet clear and direct in gaze: they were the eyes of a psychotic.

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t. It’s Tammany Hall, the triple-winner back in ‘89. I miss the races, it’s a shame the way the lower species get crowded out by our food problems. Of course a horse is the perfect anachronism, but I like the picture; it has vigor, strength—total self-realization in animal terms. It’s a sort of ideal of what a psychiatrist strives to achieve in human psychological terms, a symbol. It’s the source of my suggestion of your dream content, of course, I happened to be looking at it. . ..” Haber glanced sidelong at the mural. Of course it was the horse. “But listen, if you want a third opinion we’ll ask Miss Crouch; she’s worked here two years.”

  “She’ll say it always was a horse,” Orr said calmly but ruefully. “It always was. Since my dream. Always has been. I thought that maybe, since you suggested the dream to me, you might have the double memory, like me. But I guess you don’t.” But his eyes, no longer downcast, looked again at Haber with that clarity, that forbearance, that quiet and despairing plea for help.

  The man was sick. He must be cured. “I’d like you to come again, George, and tomorrow if possible.”

  “Well, I work—”

  “Get off an hour early, and come here at four. You’re under VTT. Tell your boss, and don’t feel any false shame about it At one time or another 82 per cent of the population gets VTT, not to mention the 31 per cent that gets OTT. So be here at four and we’ll get to work. We’re going to get somewhere with this, you know. Now, here’s a prescription for meprobamate; it’ll keep your dreams low-keyed without suppressing the d-state entirely. You can refill it at the autodrug every three days. If you have a dream, or any other experience that frightens you, call me, day or night. But I doubt you will, using that; and if you’re willing to work hard at this with me, you won’t be needing any drug much longer. You’ll have this whole problem with your dreams licked, and be out in the clear. Right?”

  Orr took the IBM prescription card. “It would be a relief,” he said. He smiled, a tentative, unhappy, yet not humorless smile. “Another thing about the horse,” he said.

  Haber, a head taller, stared down at him.

  “It looks like you,” Orr said.

  Haber looked up quickly at the mural. It did. Big, healthy, hairy, reddish-brown, bearing down at a full gallop—

  “Perhaps the horse in your dream resembled me?” he asked, shrewdly genial.

  “Yes, it did,” the patient said.

  When he was gone, Haber sat down and looked up uneasily at the mural photograph of Tammany Hall. It really was too big for the office. Goddamn but he wished he could afford an office with a window with a view!

  3

  Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.

  Chuang Tse: XXIII

  George Orr left work a
t 3:30 and walked to the subway station; he had no car. By saving, he might have afforded a VW Steamer and the mileage tax on it, but what for? Downtown was closed to automobiles, and he lived downtown. He had learned to drive, back in the eighties, but had never owned a car. He rode the Vancouver subway back into Portland. The trains were already jam-packed; he stood out of reach of strap or stanchion, supported solely by the equalizing pressure of bodies on all sides, occasionally lifted right off his feet and floating as the force of crowding (c) exceeded the force of gravity ( g). A man next to him holding a newspaper had never been able to lower his arms, but stood with his face muffled in the sports section. The headline, “BIG A-l STRIKE NEAR AFGHAN BORDER,” and the subhead, “Threat of Afghan Intervention,” stared Orr eye to I for six stops. The newspaper-holder fought his way off and was replaced by a couple of tomatoes on a green plastic plate, beneath which was an old lady in a green plastic coat, who stood on Orr’s left foot for three more stops.

  He struggled off at the East Broadway stop, and shoved along for four blocks through the ever-thickening off-work crowd to Willamette East Tower, a great, showy, shoddy shaft of concrete and glass competing with vegetable obstinacy for light and air with the jungle of similar buildings all around it. Very little light and air got down to street level; what there was was warm and full of fine rain. Rain was an old Portland tradition, but the warmth—70° F. on the second of March—was modern, a result of air pollution. Urban and industrial effluvia had not been controlled soon enough to reverse the cumulative trends already at work in the mid-Twentieth Century; it would take several centuries for the CO2 to clear out of the air, if it ever did. New York was going to be one of the larger casualties of the Greenhouse Effect, as the polar ice kept melting and the sea kept rising; indeed all Boswash was imperiled. There were some compensations. San Francisco Bay was already on the rise, and would end up covering all the hundreds of square miles of landfill and garbage dumped into it since 1848. As for Portland, with eighty miles and the Coast Range between it and the sea, it was not threatened by rising water: only by falling water.

  It had always rained in western Oregon, but now it rained ceaselessly, steadily, tepidly. It was like living in a downpour of warm soup, forever.

  The New Cities—Umatilla, John Day, French Glen— were east of the Cascades, in what had been desert thirty years before. It was fiercely hot there still in summer, but it rained only 45 inches a year, compared with Portland’s 114 inches. Intensive farming was possible: the desert blossomed. French Glen now had a population of 7 million. Portland, with only 3 million and no growth potential, had been left far behind in the March of Progress. That was nothing new for Portland. And what difference did it make? Undernourishment, overcrowding, and pervading foulness of the environment were the norm. There was more scurvy, typhus, and hepatitis in the Old Cities, more gang violence, crime, and murder in the New Cities. The rats ran one and the Mafia ran the other. George Orr stayed in Portland because he had always lived there and because he had no reason to believe that life anywhere else would be better, or different.

  Miss Crouch, smiling uninterestedly, showed him right in. Orr had thought that psychiatrists’ offices, like rabbit holes, always had a front and a back door. This one didn’t, but he doubled that patients were likely to run into one another coming and going, here. Up at the Medical School they had said that Dr. Haber had only a small psychiatric practice, being essentially a research man. That had given him the notion of someone successful and exclusive, and the doctor’s jovial, masterful manner had confirmed it. But today, less nervous, he saw more. The office didn’t have the platinum-and-leather assurance of financial success, nor the rag-and-bottle assurance of scientific disinterest. The chairs and couch were vinyl, the desk was metal plasticoated with a wood finish. Nothing whatever was genuine. Dr. Haber, white-toothed, bay-maned, huge, boomed out, “Good afternoon!”

  That geniality was not faked, but it was exaggerated. There was a warmth to the man, an outgoingness, which was real; but it had got plasticoated with professional mannerisms, distorted by the doctor’s unspontaneous use of himself. Orr felt in him a wish to be liked and a desire to be helpful; the doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them. He boomed “Good afternoon!” so loud because he was never sure he would get an answer. Orr wanted to say something friendly, but nothing personal seemed suitable; he said, “It looks as if Afghanistan might get into the war.”

  “Mhm, that’s been in the cards since last August.” He should have known that the doctor would be better informed on world affairs than himself; he was generally semi-informed and three weeks out of date. “I don’t think that’ll shake the Allies,” Haber went on, “unless it pulls Pakistan in on the Iranian side. Then India may have to send in more than token support to the Isragypts.” That was teleglot for the New Arab Republic/Israel alliance. “I think Gupta’s speech in Delhi shows that he’s preparing for that eventuality.”

  “It keeps spreading,” Orr said, feeling inadequate and despondent. “The war, I mean.”

  “Does it worry you?”

  “Doesn’t it worry you?”

  “Irrelevant,” said the doctor, smiling his broad, hairy, bear’s smile, like a big bear-god; but he was still wary, since yesterday.

  “Yes, it worries me.” But Haber had not earned that answer; the questioner cannot withdraw himself from the question, assuming objectivity—as if the answers were an object. Orr did not speak these thoughts, however; he was in a doctor’s hands, and surely the doctor knew what he was doing.

  Orr had a tendency to assume that people knew what they were doing, perhaps because he generally assumed that he did not.

  “Sleep well?” Haber inquired, sitting down under the left rear hoof of Tammany Hall.

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “How do you feel about another go in the Palace of Dreams?” He was watching keenly.

  “Sure, that’s what I’m here for, I guess.”

  He saw Haber rise and come around the desk, he saw the large hand come out toward his neck, and then nothing happened.

  “. . . George...”

  His name. Who called? No voice he know. Dry land, dry air, the crash of a strange voice in his ear. Daylight, and no direction. No way back. He woke.

  The half-familiar room; the half-familiar, big man, in his voluminous russet gernreich, with his red-brown beard, and white smile, and opaque dark eyes. “It looked like a short dream but a lively one, on the EEG,” said the deep voice. “Let’s have it. Sooner the recall, the completer it is.”

  Orr sat up, feeling rather dizzy. He was on the couch, how had he got there? “Let’s see. It wasn’t much. The horse again. Did you tell me to dream of the horse again, when I was hypnotized?”

  Haber shook his head, meaning neither yes nor no, and listened.

  “Well, this was a stable. This room. Straw and a manger and a pitchfork in the corner, and so on. The horse was in it. He...”

  Haber’s expectant silence permitted no evasion.

  “He did this tremendous pile of shit. Brown, steaming. Horseshit. It looked kind of like Mount Hood, with that little hump on the north side and everything. It was all over the rug, and sort of encroaching on me, so I said, ‘It’s only the picture of the mountain.’ Then I guess I started to wake up.”

  Orr raised his face, looking past Dr. Haber at the mural behind him, the wall-sized photograph of Mount Hood.

  It was a serene picture in rather muted, arty tones: the sky gray, the mountain a soft brown or reddish-brown, with speckles of white near the summit, and the foreground all dusky, formless treetops.

  The doctor was not looking at the mural. He was watching Orr with those keen, opaque eyes. He laughed when Orr was done, not long or loudly, but perhaps a little excitedly.

  “We’re getting somewhere, George!”

  “Where?”

  Orr felt rumpled and foolish, sitting on the couch still giddy fr
om sleep, having lain asleep there, probably with his mouth open and snoring, helpless, while Haber watched the secret jigs and prancings of his brain, and told him what to dream. He felt exposed, used. And to what end?

  Evidently the doctor had no memory at all of the horse-mural, nor of the conversation they had had concerning it; he was altogether in this new present, and all his memories led to it. So he could not do any good at all. But be was striding up and down the office now, talking even louder than usual. “Well! (a) you can and do dream to order, you follow the hypnosuggestions; (b) you respond splendidly to the Augmentor. Therefore we can work together, fast and efficiently, without narcosis. I’d rather work without drugs. What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation; that’s why I developed the Augmentor, to provide the brain a means of self -stimulation. The creative and therapeutic resources of the brain—whether waking or sleeping or dreaming—are practically infinite. If we can just find the keys to all the locks. The power of dreaming alone is quite undreamt of!” He laughed his big laugh, he had made that little joke many times. Orr smiled uncomfortably, it struck a bit close to home. “I am sure now that your therapy lies in this direction, to use your dreams, not to evade and avoid them. To face your fear and, with my help, see it through. You’re afraid of your own mind, George, That’s a fear no man can live with. But you don’t have to. You haven’t seen the help your own mind can give you, the ways you can use it, employ it creatively. All you need to do is not to hide from your own mental powers, not to suppress them, but to release them. This we can do together. Now, doesn’t that strike you as right, as the right thing to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Orr said.

  When Haber spoke of using, employing his mental powers, he had thought for a moment that the doctor must mean his power of changing reality by dreaming; but surely if he’d meant that he would have said it clearly? Knowing that Orr desperately needed confirmation, he would not causelessly withhold it if he could give it.