The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula K. LeGuin Explores the Future Through Dreams

Science fiction is a genre that gets no respect, but it certainly should.  Ursula K. LeGuin is the Grand Dame of this genre, though I have never read her work – frankly, because of her Grand Dame status, I thought it would be too difficult to approach when I was an adolescent and reading lots of science fiction and fantasy.  Her reputation as a “great writer” put her, in my mind, in the league of people like Tolkien, whose work was hard for my fourteen year old self to follow – I was more a Vonnegut, Bradbury and Heinlein guy.

A few years ago, when the reluctant son was eight or ten, he and I read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 which was a summer reading for incoming first year students at my University.  We were both struck by the ways in which Bradbury was able to accurately foretell aspects of the world that we currently live in – one that can seem dominated by large screen televisions (not yet the wall size that Bradbury imagined) and a world in which books did not have the cachet they once did (even if they are not outright banned as they were in the novel).  Among other things, Bradbury’s imagining of far off wars that don’t seem to ever come to a conclusion rang true for us, even then. 

Ursula K LeGuin

Ursula K. LeGuin, writing a few years after Bradbury and much more in the style of my guys – incredibly approachably, is also predicting a world – or many of them – that exist now, more or less, from the vantage point of 1970 or so.  She is even more precise in her predictions – that there will be conflicts between Afghanistan and Syria that will draw in troops from Pakistan and then India and that these wars will drain the resources of the United States, and she places her hero not in a vague general place, but in a very specific one – Portland, Oregon (where she lived).  The worlds that she paints are colored by the anxieties of her era, anxieties that were epitomized by me at the time in the book The Limits to Growth, which foretold, using the limited but biggest and fastest computer technology of the day, doom and gloom based on overpopulation, pollution, and exhaustion of natural resources.  It is a bit uncanny, then, to be living in the world that she and I imagined and feared and to recognize aspects of it, but not others – and to have an eerily parallel world or worlds articulated by this writer that I knew of at the time but never read. 

In the first iteration of her future vision, the people of Portland are more densely packed than Manhattan at its busiest point and the total human population on the planet has ballooned to 9 billion people.  Global warming has melted the snow pack on Mount Hood that overlooks Portland and imperiled, through rising seas, New York and Florida.  Well, this prediction partly came true.  In addition to some warming of the environment, Google tells us that the world’s population is 7.6 billion and it was 3.4 billion or so when she was writing, though the US population has not grown at the same rate – it has grown from 210 million to about 330 million – it is about 50% bigger while the world has doubled.  Portland, which is surely larger than it was when LeGuin was writing is not the unrecognizable city of skyscrapers – what she is describing better fits a city like Singapore, perhaps.  Another difference is that Portland is not suffocating under the haze of a caustic air pollution that is all but unbreathable – it – and most cities in the U.S. – have relatively clean air – cleaner now than in the seventies.

In the second iteration – the first alternate vision of the city as a whole – the city is considerably smaller and the pollution is less because history has been rewritten and a plague has happened.  In this iteration, the world population is only 1 billion people.  The odd thing is that many of the people who were living in the first iteration are now dead, and the people who knew those people before now know them as people who have died.  They mourn the deaths, but are not aware that there was an alternate universe that existed in which these people continued to live, with one or maybe two exceptions.  The only person who knows and remembers the alternate reality is the hero of the book – a rather non-descript fellow named George Orr.  And what is the vehicle for the transition from one reality to another?  George Orr’s dreams. 

Wow.  This book is, forgive the pun, a psychoanalyst’s wet dream.  George Orr is referred for psychiatric treatment because he has started abusing stimulants to keep himself awake so that he doesn’t fall asleep and cause some new catastrophic change to happen as a result of his dreams.  We don’t believe that his dreams are changing the world, at least not at first.  The dreams that he has are not yet of the size of the alternate realities I have traced above.  He confesses to the psychiatrist that he is referred to that he dreamt that his Aunt, who had come to stay with his family five weeks earlier and was sexually intrusive in an unwanted way with him, was represented as a cat in his dream, run over by a car and, when he awoke, his aunt was now dead – she had died when a car hit her before she ever came to stay with the family.  His psychiatrist, a sleep specialist and hypnotist, believes he is delusional and hypnotizes him to fall asleep - and the first hint we get that the problem is real is when the wall poster in the hypnotizer’s room has changed when he awakens.  George hopes the hypnotizer will notice this because the hypnotizer was present during the transformation and aware that it was going on, but the hypnotizer appears to be unaware of the changes, but we are not – we now know that George really is changing the world.  The hypnotizer asks him back and provides “guidance” to his future dreams, apparently with the intent to convince him that the changes are not real and to reduce his anxiety about dreaming so that he doesn’t need to keep taking the drugs to stay awake, even though bigger and bigger changes occur, including the dream that kills billions of people, and this dream results in the death of the hypnotizer’s wife and children.

The premise is intriguing.  Not all of George’s dreams change the world – just the most vivid ones.  But those that do are gratifying a wish – to be rid of the aunt’s intrusiveness – and then to have a world that is less populated.  Both wishes are gratified in the ways that dream wishes are gratified, in fantastical, final and symbolic ways that we don’t worry about because “it is only a dream”.  But this guy, who is the kind of guy you would never notice and that the hypnotizer sees as malleable, dreams not just in his mind, but in the universe – and the vivid dreams – the ones about the important stuff in his mind, are heard by the universe and the universe rearranges itself to grant the wishes that are being expressed in the dream.  “Dear Universe, the subway was crowded this morning. Yours, George.” ”Dear George, got it.  Will have to go into the way-back machine to make this work, but tomorrow there will be way less people to get on the subway with you.  In fact, they won’t have built a subway because there will have been no need.  The Universe.”

At this point I need to warn you that, because this novel, which is short (less than 200 pages) and very readable, has touched off so many nerve endings that I am going to move in multiple directions and write, somewhat paradoxically, a longer than usual post. 

While the mechanisms of dreaming that she is describing make sense to me, LeGuin offers some bad data about hypnosis.  It is NOT the case that we have evidence that people under hypnosis will do things they would not do in other conditions.  We can offer direct and indirect suggestions to people (e.g. “Take your clothes off” and “It is getting very warm in here and you are free to do anything you might want to do to make yourself more comfortable”), but they will not do things that they would not have done without hypnosis.  On the other hand, someone uninhibited about their nudity will take their clothes off based on indirect and direct suggestion, regardless of whether they are hypnotized or not.  Stage hypnotists get people to do things that most of us wouldn’t do primarily through selecting those who are highly suggestible – and these people likely would do the things they are asked to WITHOUT hypnosis – but the stage hypnotist has to find out who these people are by calling a herd of people on stage (anyone who volunteers has made the first cut) and then apparently gets them to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do, when in fact they would have.  By the end of the act, the hypnotist has chosen the most suggestible to do the most outrageous things.  That said, we can do things under hypnosis – especially bear or be unaware of pain – that we could not do were we not in a hypnotic state, but I digress.  LeGuin is using the hypnosis as a tool to clarify that, as terrifying as it is to be responsible for one’s own dreams, it might be relieving, but the effects could be much more problematic, to relinquish control of one’s dreams to another.

All that said, having the mental health treater function as a hypnotist who can make suggestions that override the conscious and unconscious intent of the hero is a great plot device.  Irv Yalom, a psychotherapist who wrote a wonderful text about existential psychotherapy, maintains that freedom is one of four great existential dilemmas.  From this perspective, freedom, which we think of as desirable, is actually problematic in that we are responsible for our actions.  We can be held accountable and, just as George feels guilty for the effects of his dreams, we feel guilty for what we have done in the world.  George, who, I think, embodies a kind of everyman, does what many (most) of us would do – as we did in the classic Milgram experiments where we acquiesced to the orders of a person in authority to shock someone in a laboratory -  he turns over the responsibility for his dreams to the hypnotist.

The act of turning over the dreams creates one of the central tensions in this text:  it becomes more and more apparent to the dreamer that his therapist does, indeed, know about the effects of George's dreams and that the therapist may be exploiting the dreams to achieve his own ends, but the therapist won’t acknowledge to the dreamer for a long time that he is onto the power of the dreams.  But, as a result of the dreams, not only do 8 billion people die in the plague, but the therapist gets a window, then a corner office with windows, then he is the director of a whole center of dream research and hobnobs with the governmental officials who oversee mental health.  He also, I think, becomes more physically attractive.  The tension is a tension that is present to some level in every treatment – does the treater have my best interests at heart?  Is he interested in what he can help me do for myself or is he interested in me for what it can do for the treater – does he care more about me or the fee that he gets from me or the appreciation he receives from me or the gratification he gets from watching me change?  Freud, naively I think, thought that the analyst’s own analysis would “cure” him or her of wanting anything beyond the fee from the patient. 

It was at about this point, as the dreamer is creating new world after new world under the hypnotist’s guidance that the book went from being uncanny and intriguing to being destabilizing.  I became aware of the ways that I work with the dreams of my patients – and their conscious hopes and dreams – and, in doing this; I am working with them to create new worlds – and neither they nor I know the ramifications that the changes in their worlds will bring.  We don’t change the past, but, in so far as the treatment is effective, we are having an impact on the future – it will be different than it otherwise would have been if we had not worked together.  This is always background in our work, but while I was reading the book this came very much into the foreground and I felt keenly aware of the possible directions that each intervention might lead.  It felt a little giddy – like flying down a slope on skis and deciding whether to take this trail or that one – even as I was doing the work that I do every day, helping people to make sense of what it is that they are thinking.

It also has ramifications for the current state of political affairs.  We don't have overpopulation in the developed world because women there have control over their reproductive functions in ways that are not always available in third world countries where population growth can be explosive.  We don't have the kind of local pollution that was forecast in this book because of government regulation through the EPA that ended such things as acid rain.  At the time that I write this, a woman's right to manage her own reproduction is being attacked, and the head of the EPA is someone who has fought against what the EPA has worked on for decades to achieve.  If the governmental regulations change, what will be the outcome of the dream that is our reality forty years from now?

In order to protect himself from the treater, George Orr (who is white, as is his hypnotist) hires an attorney – a black woman, who figures out how to be present in the treatment interactions without the hypnotist knowing that she is there as an advocate for his patient.  This raises a host of cross cultural or diversity issues that are addressed by LeGuin in ways that seem a bit dated because they are not as sharply defined as I think they would be if they were written today – I think our discourse about race is miles and miles from where it was then – and is simultaneously surprisingly fresh and current. 

As the relationship between Orr and the attorney develops across a series of dream induced alternate universes, one of the dreams eliminates skin coloration as a means of reducing racial tension in the world and everyone has the same grey shaded skin.  This creates a decided loss for George (though not for the rest of society that doesn’t remember alternatives).  He finds that the attorney is fundamentally different – a part of what he liked about her was shaped by her experience as a member of what we would now call a marginalized group – and he finds her less attractive both physically - the beauty of her brown skin is gone - but also psychologically - she no longer has the edginess she had before - as a result of this transformation.  I also think LeGuin overreached in this change.  How would history have brought the same individual to Portland if the history of race relations had never occurred?  This is a moment when the novel, spinning as it does a hypnotic dream trance, seems, like one of those dreams that awakens us, to spin perilously close to losing the integrity of the dream in order to make a symbolic point - or to gratify a wish that is beyond the reach of even this dreamer.

I think that “vivid dreaming” is a concept that has emerged since LeGuin was writing.  As currently described, vivid dreamers feel that they can direct their dreams.  The vivid dreams of this man are being directed by the hypnotist, not by himself.  But LeGuin, as the author who dreams up this book, is creating a text that is complex, vivid, but also, in some sense, more linear than it needs to be.  Though she was awarded many science fiction awards and was often a finalist for such awards as the Pulitzer, she was never awarded it.  I wonder if part of that has to do with particular limitations of the genre, particularly the introduction of concrete technical mechanisms to address some of the messy psychological issues that are at the heart of the book. 

In this text, the lathe of heaven is a reference to an Eastern mystical premise that getting too close to an understanding of the workings of the universe (the lathe of heaven) will end badly – we need to know when to step back and realize that some things simply can’t be known (NeilTyson DeGrasse notes that we can only know about that part of the cosmos that is close enough that light can reach us from it – things located farther away than that – the light of their existence will never reach us).  If we get too close to the lathe, we will be chewed up by it.  This very intriguing idea – one that goes against much of what we in the West strive for – and that should give up pause – as I felt a pause in my interactions with patients – gets played out in a very concrete fashion in the plot of the book. 

I have all but spoiled the ending, but won’t talk about it, not just to prevent providing additional spoiler damage, but because I think the ending is not the point of the book.  I found the initial premises incredibly interesting – and I also think the premise that this might or might not have been the functioning of a deluded mind – one in which George alone experiences the world as altered by his dreaming – could perhaps have been an even more tantalizing book.  I think there is something about the mystery that LeGuin is both respecting, by noting it and having us “step away from the lathe”, but also collapsing, by articulating a particular mechanism for it that reduces it to something that we can approach with our technology – as if we could in fact dial up the universe with the right gear – something that I think doesn’t give the universe’s mysteries enough credit.  I ultimately found this book which I liked tremendously to disappoint as it reduced rather than expanded the mystery and turned something mystical into something more like a boiler plate thriller with an ending that I felt didn’t live up to the promise of the premise.

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