The Lathe of Heaven

Ursula K. Le Guin
1971

George Orr has dreams. Sometimes he has bad dreams, but no more than anyone else. He takes drugs to keep from dreaming. Because sometimes his dreams come true.

Sometimes when he wakes up, his dream is true, and it always has been, everyone believes the ‘new’ reality, everyone but him. When he dreams ‘effectively’, he doesn’t wake up and find out that what he dreamt comes true, he finds out it has already come true, and has always been true. That the whole world was retroactively changed by his dream. When he was younger, he often wished his Aunt weren’t living with them after her divorce. One day when he woke up, she wasn’t, and she never had been, she’d died six weeks earlier. He feels a heavy weight of responsibility for changing reality that may include people dying.

When George Orr is caught after taking too many sleeping drugs without prescription, he is assigned to Voluntary Therapy. Which means that he has to have therapy or go to jail. He is sent to Dr William Haber, an obscure sleep researcher.

Haber uses a machine to amplify George’s dream states, it take the pattern of impulses and feeds them straight back, and gives a hypnotic suggestion that George should dream about a horse. When George wakes up, he doesn’t remember the suggestion, but the huge picture of a mountain on the wall has been replaced with a picture of a horse. Haber claims it was always there, and George is disappointed that Haber didn’t notice the change. The following day when George wakes up, the mountain is back. He realises that Haber did know about the change, but he won’t admit it.

He soon realises that Haber is using his dreams to try and make the world better, but it just gets worse.

He goes to see a lawyer, a woman called Heather Lelache, and tries to enlist her help. She doesn’t believe him, but feels sympathy for him, and decides to find out if Haber is using his experimental machine unethically. By the time she gets to sit in on a session, Haber is a leading researcher in an important institute, a powerful man. But it doesn’t occur to him that she will see the change too.

This is an outstanding novel that brings the confusion and loneliness of the main character into sharp focus for the reader. Using various points of view, it’s easy to see a quiet, peaceful man being used by both his own ability and by the desires of another. Haber is one of the classic do-gooders of the world, who always seems to think he knows how to make things better, and that his own point of view is right.

No matter which version of reality Orr wakes up in, he is always trapped in therapy with Haber, and the dreams which were once a product of his own mind are now controlled by another. The people they know, the world they live in, shifts rapidly and unpredictably. Even though Haber tries to correct what he perceives to be the great problems facing the world, Orr’s mind persistantly chooses simplistic and often devastating changes to remove them.

The fractious nature of the story, as it jumps from one reality to another, is conveyed well enough to understand, but not so well that it becomes incomprehensible to the reader. A beautiful work of classic speculative fiction, easily readable, over and over.