The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Originally Published: May 1971
Science fiction was becoming a strong genre in the two decades proceeding the 70s.
From novels like I, Robot and Dune, and the many short stories published in magazines like Amazing Stories to hit movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and TV shows like Doctor Who in the UK and Star Trek in the US, there were many examples of impressive work within the genre that could be found by the early 70s. This work wasn’t always respected or understood by the general public, but it was the dedication of both the creators of these works and their fans that kept early science fiction going strong.
In the early 70s, one of the rising stars in the literary science fiction world was Ursula K. Le Guin, who was one of the first women to gain strong influence within the genre. Her 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, which tells the story of an outsider who explores a world where there is no gender, won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, elevating her status as a major writer of sci-fi and fantasy.
In The Lathe of Heaven, she once again tells a shocking and visionary tale, this time involving a man living in a future version of Portland whose dreams are changing reality. At first, the changes are rather small and only impact him and a few people around him, but after he starts seeing a psychiatrist who comes to understand what his dreams can do and tries using them for his own goals, these dreams start changing society at large, for both the better and the worse.
The story begins when a man named George Orr is having a bad reaction to drugs he’s been taking while inside his apartment building. An elevator guard notices what’s happening to him and gets a medic to help him. The medic discovers George has been taking a mixture of barbiturates and Dexedrine, and because those drugs had been obtained using somebody else’s Pharmacy Card, it’s an offense that must be reported. However, because taking those drugs isn’t considered a felony, he tells George he’ll most likely just have to see a psychiatrist for what’s known as VTT, or Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment.
George starts seeing a psychiatrist named Dr. William Haber. During their first session, Dr. Haber asks him why he’s taking drugs. George tells him it’s because he wants to stop dreaming. Haber asks if it’s to stop having bad dreams, and George says he tends to fear having dreams in general, and it’s because he thinks his dreams are capable of changing things. Haber demands to know when he started having such dreams.
George says they began when he was seventeen and an aunt started staying with his family. She had a strange habit of coming into his room in topless pajamas as a joke, and he started having feelings which he was ashamed of. As a result, he started having anxiety dreams involving his aunt. One night, she got him to go to the movies with her, and she began acting in predatory ways, trying to get him to touch her and even go to bed with him once they got home.
That night, George had a dream where he found out his aunt had died in a car accident through a telegram. Upon waking up, he discovered that his aunt had never been staying their apartment; she’d died in a car crash six weeks before after coming home from seeing a lawyer about a divorce. No one, including his mother, had any memory of his aunt staying at the apartment except for him, making it the first time he was aware that there was something unusual about his dreams.
Dr. Haber goes on to ask George several questions about his personal life, finding out that he’s a draftsman, that he’d had a trial marriage in the past, which ended because his wife didn’t want any kids, and his relationships with other people were good enough. All this seems to indicate that the only problem George has in his life is the drug dependency he developed to suppress the dreams he’s been having. He decides that to help George, he’s going to get him to fall asleep during his sessions using hypnosis and a machine called the Augmentor. As Haber hypnotizes George, he tells him that he will have a pleasant yet vivid dream about a horse.
George manages to fall asleep as the Augmentor is used to record and analyze his sleep patterns. He has exactly the sort of dream Haber convinced him to have, and upon waking up, he notices that a picture Haber had of Mount Hood in his office has been replaced by one of a horse. When he asks Haber, who’s pleased to see that the hypnosis worked, if the original picture had ever been in the office, he denies it, claiming this was a picture of an award- winning horse and he liked it because it represents for him what psychiatrists aim to achieve: strength and vigor. He demands that George come back tomorrow at four, and gives him a prescription for meprobamate, which is supposed to lessen the strength of dreams without fully suppressing the ability to have them.
In the next section, Haber requests George to have the same dream once again under hypnosis. George ends up having the same dream again but with one difference: in this dream, he sees the horse in a stable while defecating. When he wakes up, he notices the picture of the horse has been replaced with the original picture of Mount Hood. Haber responds by saying they’re getting somewhere because he’s been able to prove that George can follow directions through hypnosis while also responding extremely well to the Augmentor, and this means he can work with George without making him take drugs.
After another session where he has an unusual dream that stops the rain that had been going on earlier, George starts to realize that Haber is aware of the changes he’s been convincing him to cause. At first, this makes him happy because it proves Haber believes him, and therefore he isn’t insane. But upon thinking more about it, he wonders why Haber hasn’t said anything about noticing the changes he’s been causing, particularly that of the murals in the office. He wonders how Haber plans to stop his dreams once he gets used to what he can do, and this causes him to panic.
He goes to see a lawyer to discuss this situation and see if there’s anything that can be done about it. The lawyer who attends him, Heather Lelache, thinks of him as a very simple person from the start. However, as she hears George explain his situation, she can’t see him as a crazy person, but rather someone that’s desperate. She explains it’s unlikely anyone going over his case would take a patient’s word over that of a doctor, and a similar case that had been made the year before implied that such patients usually had major issues that required the help they were already receiving, meaning George had to be careful against making allegations related to the treatments he was receiving.
In the end, Heather agrees to possibly observe one of George’s sessions with Haber to see if he was doing anything which violates George’s rights. She’d witnessed a hypnosis session before, so she’s aware of what to expect. However, to participate, she’d have to be invited, so she has to see what she can do first. She tells George not to dream her out of existence this week, to which George responds, “Not willingly.”
Heather eventually gets approval to do this. Haber does his best to be cooperative, aware that if doctors behaved resentfully towards such representatives, they didn’t get many government grants. During this session, Haber puts George under hypnosis once again. He says he remembers how George told him he’s afraid of being in places that get too crowded, like the subway he takes to work. Haber tells him “You’re going to have a dream in which you feel uncrowded, unsqueezed. You’ll dream about all the elbow room there is in the world, all the freedom you have to move around.” And as George falls asleep, Haber explains to Heather how the process works and the way he uses the Augmentor.
And just as he’s speaking with her, Haber notices he has two different memories. One of them is of the past reality where the population was seven billion and continuing to grow, and the other is of the world as it is in the reality that is just developing where the population is under one billion. He’d worried before whether Heather would realize what’s going on and either go insane or retain two memories of the different realities. But as he speaks with her now, he believes she’s speaking as if nothing’s changed, leading him to feel relieved.
When George wakes up, he reveals he’s had a dream about a plague, the first disturbing dream he’s had during his sessions. When he asks Haber if he remembers the Plague Years, he’s able to a give a detailed account of them, recalling how he was twenty-two when an announcement about it was made in Russia, with hospital statistics released the next night. He ended up losing his parents, his wife, and two of his sisters and their children. But because of this plague, there is no longer overpopulation, meaning no more strong famines or other problems that come along with it. When George asks for Heather’s opinion on what’s going on, Haber says she must not interfere since this is a psychiatric session.
As Heather is preparing to go, she says she found the session extremely interesting. Haber acts as if George is disturbed, commenting that a session like this one does not give a good impression, yet he believes George still has a chance of breaking out of the delusions he’s having. But when he’s on his own, he drinks a glass of bourbon to celebrate what he thinks of as a better world.
A while after this session, Heather and George arrange to meet on their own. However, George misses out on the meeting. After not hearing from him, Heather decides to go looking for him. She finds George alone in a cabin, completely sleep deprived. She feels bad seeing him like this and offers to make coffee. She reveals she does remember the changes that have occurred because of his dreams, and that she knew Haber didn’t want her to believe it.
George lets her know Haber had made him have a dream where there is peace on Earth, causing him to create Aliens which have invaded the moon base. Their appearance led humans to stop fighting with each other and turn their attention instead towards fighting the aliens, making this the latest change his dreams have caused.
He also says he’s capable of such dreams even without the machine, saying it only saves Haber time by getting him to dream right away. Heather, who is disturbed by the way George is being used, asks if there’s a way he can have a dream where he changes Haber so that he can stop taking advantage of him, and George simply says he’s not capable of choosing his own dreams. Heather offers to hypnotize him herself, claiming she learned how to do it through Psychology courses during her pre-law years. George is hesitant at first, but then seems to open up to the idea.
As they have a meal, Heather tells George more about herself. She’d once been married, but her husband during a war. She also reveals she had a black father who’d been involved in the Black Power movement and a white mother who was a hippie. When Heather was eight years old, her father had gone to Africa, leaving her mother to raise her on her own, bringing her up in a commune for a while. She ended up dying of a drug overdose when Heather was older, and it was her grandparents that later put her through college and law school. She admits she often struggles with understanding how she truly identifies in terms of race, and says the following regarding her family:
“See, my father really hated my mother because she was white. But he also loved her. But I think she loved his being black much more than she loved him. Well, where does that leave me? I have never figured out.”
After this, Heather tries hypnotizing George so that he’ll dream Haber becomes a different person. He does end up dreaming, but rather than going by what she told him, he dreams that the aliens leave the moon base and are now on Earth.
George’s next dream under the influence of Haber results in creating a world where everyone is the color gray. This means there was never racial discrimination within society, so atrocities like slavery and segregation were never a thing. Haber makes it seem as if this is a major good for the world, but George is left in dismay over how he can’t find Heather, leading him to believe she probably doesn’t exist anymore.
Several other realities follow, including one where there are child centers meant to prevent problems that arise from being raised within nuclear families. George becomes increasingly frustrated with how Haber keeps using him to create utopias and tries finding ways of changing things on his own. One day, while staying at someone’s place, he has cannabis tea while listening to a phonograph which plays the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends”. This causes him to fall asleep, and when he awakens, Heather is back, and they are now married to each other.
Since they are now together again, George and Heather become more determined to take matters into their own hands, and they work towards finding a way to stop Haber from taking advantage of George and put a halt to the powerful dreams George has.
When it comes to science fiction, I tend to prefer certain forms of the genre over others.
I first became interested in the genre when it came in the form of time travel stories. I came to love such stories when I read the Magic Tree House series at the age of eight, leading to an interest in history and certain forms of science (and I admit I only remained very good at the former subject later on). As I got older, other similar forms of media got my attention, including the Back to the Future trilogy when I was in high school and Doctor Who during my college years. Such stories grab my attention due to the history which is often explored and the combination of adventure and fantasy that comes along with it. I also grew to enjoy dystopian stories, starting with The Hunger Games when I was a junior in high school, followed by classics like 1984, and to a lesser extent, The Handmaid’s Tale and Brave New World.
On the other hand, and this is probably going to disappoint the more hardcore sci-fi fans reading this, hard sci-fi, including certain space operas, haven’t been as enjoyable to me. I remember reading Ancillary Justice, a modern award-winning sci-fi novel, and finding some of the ideas interesting, but not understanding it too much. It’s supposed about a conscious ancillary (who is the narrator of the story) who tries to seek justice for the starship it was once a part of which got destroyed, set in a world where, like The Left Hand of Darkness, the way gender is seen is different from our own. However, while The Left Hand of Darkness gave detailed explanations of how the world in the novel viewed gender, Ancillary Justice didn’t do it as much. These and other confusing things in this book I at first accepted as ideas I simply couldn’t understand as someone new to reading hard sci-fi, but have since realized is just not my thing.
The Lathe of Heaven falls somewhere in the middle for me. Overall, reading this story for the second time, I still enjoy it and many of the ideas behind it. I get a little uneasy over discussions of dreams sometimes, especially if they call to mind my own dreams, but stories with dreams as their main subject are often fascinating. This story combined utopia, set in a gritty future version of Portland where environmental ruin, constant wars, and poverty are much worse than they were in the past, along with a constantly changing reality which is influenced by George Orr’s dreams, making it a concept I enjoy reading about. Some parts of the novel come across as dense, making it a little hard to get through quickly despite the short length of the book, but it doesn’t ruin the overall story too much for me.
The characters here enrich the story just as much. George does not seem to be exceptional, working as a draftsman and having rather simple ways of approaching people, and yet he has a strong ability which he at first has no idea how to control. Reading about such individuals and how they learn to use gifts which they at first can’t understand or control can make for good character arcs. He also understands that certain things may not be worth changing for a more fair world, as we see through his abhorrence of the child centers that separate kids from their families. This appears to be the influence of Ursula Le Guin’s interest in Taoist philosophy, of which one of the core tenants is it’s best to leave certain things alone.
And seeing how Dr. Haber tries using George for his own purposes is just as interesting. Throughout the novel, George refuses to think of Haber as a bad person. When he meets up with Heather for the first time, he describes him like this:
“He’s not…not an evil man. He means well. What I object to is his using me as an instrument, a means-even if his ends are good. I can’t judge him- my own dreams have immoral effects, that’s why I tried to suppress them with drugs, and got into this mess. And I want to get out of it, to get off the drugs, to be cured. But he’s not curing me. He’s encouraging me.”
George refuses to condemn Haber because he thinks he has good intentions and he tends to cause bad things himself through his dreams, but he still realizes that what Haber is doing to him could be harmful. I admit to finding Haber’s character to be difficult to understand for these reasons. On the one hand, he does try to make George’s treatment comfortable. When he hypnotizes him, he usually makes sure he doesn’t have bad dreams, and he explained to George at the beginning that dream suppression is harmful because dreaming is supposed to a healthy part of the sleep cycle. And his desires to change the world, such as bringing world peace and ending racism, could be seen as a good thing if they are done the right way.
On the other hand, he tries to achieve all this by pushing George way too hard, making him have dreams with much stronger impacts as they continue with their sessions together. His ideals of a perfect society also become more sinister as time goes by, to the point where he starts supporting efforts to prevent the birth of people with certain health conditions, such as cancer and mental illnesses. The more he embraces utopian ideas, the worse he seems to become.
As a result, although he may not be outright evil, he still ends up doing bad things because of his efforts to use his patient to bring about the changes he wants to see in the world. This could be seen as a criticism of psychiatrists who subject their patients to harmful treatments in the hopes that they can be cured of their conditions, or perhaps even social idealists who embrace all sorts of societal changes, including some which could simultaneously produce both positive and negative results within society. In both cases, these people have good intentions, but it risks getting out of hand if they focus not so much on what others around them want and need, but rather what they themselves want for those people who are impacted by their wishes.
One thing I find interesting about this story that others may not notice is the significance of when this story is set, which is in the year 2002. This may have only been significant in 1971 because of it being 31 years into the future, but as we all know now, this was the year after the terrorist attacks of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon during 9/11, an event which changed the United States forever in terms of politics, global affairs, wars, and how citizens saw their identities as Americans. This may not be the same thing as society changing because of a man’s dreams, but it can still come across as a literary prediction of societal change which began around the early 2000s.
Something else in this story which ended up becoming reality more recently was the plague which ends overpopulation, experienced in the real world through the COVID-19 pandemic that started in late 2019 and continues as of the writing of this review. Some of the social upheaval occurring during the time of the fictional pandemic became a reality as well; when Haber described the pandemic to George after his dream, he says: “Then they figured out the incubation period, and everyone began counting. Waiting. And there were the riots, and the fuck-ins, and the Doomsday Band, and the Vigilantes.”
Some of this will sound eerily familiar to those who have followed the news closely in the past two years. There’s no doubt that society has changed just as much in our reality as it does in George’s, with people becoming divided over ideological views and trust in the media and politics decreasing significantly. It’s not certain how much the pandemic has impacted the overall population yet, but some of the other changes we’ve witnessed make it all seem just as discomforting as learning the exact number of casualties.
Likewise, other aspects of this book examine issues that remain as relevant today as they were in the early 70s. For instance, when George becomes aware that the world is now one gray race, he makes the following disturbing realization:
“That’s why she’s not here, he thought. She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed upbringing, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, Baltic amber. She could not exist in a gray people’s world. She could not have been born.”
The eraser of Heather’s existence when everyone becomes gray probably represents the struggles with racial identity experienced by many African Americans. The Civil Rights Amendment had been around for only seven years in 1971, and despite the changes that came around because of it, African Americans still faced racism to certain degrees. In addition, there were debates over what was the best way to live as black people in the United States, with some wanting the more peaceful and unified path embraced by Martin Luther King Jr. while others preferred the more politically confrontational ways supported by Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. Today, these struggles continue as seen through debates over how to handle police brutality, the methods of teaching history and culture in schools, and how exactly race should be addressed and handled within society.
Could Heather have continued to exist without her racial identity? We see many examples of how strong she is as a character throughout the story, including her early straight forward interactions with George when he tries seeking a lawyer, how composed she remains when she observes his therapy session with Haber, and her determination to help George when she discovers how much worse he’s been doing on account of how Haber is using him. We didn’t always see race come up when she was dealing with these situations, and yet when we learn about her past, we notice that her family’s background did mean a lot to her.
Perhaps it can be argued that it could go beyond skin color; our cultural backgrounds, whether we are Irish, Hispanic, African American, Native American, or something else, often shapes the communities we’re a part of, and therefore, it can influence the way we see the world around us and also set us apart from others in both positive and negative ways. And something like having light or dark skin, or black or blonde hair, could serve as something that makes others see a person as beautiful or unique just as much as it can be used to make fun of or discriminate against someone. Take those differences away, and you can risk losing part of who you are.
Therefore, some of the issues which Ursula Le Guin would have been aware of when writing this story around the early 70s aren’t all that different from what we’re seeing right now. Around that time, the political unrest seen within society was caused primarily by the controversial Vietnam War, but it could be seen in other societal aspects as well, including presidential elections, racial relations, attitudes towards sex and families, and even environmental awareness. More recently, political tensions have tightened due to a controversial presidency, and this has resulted in division regarding almost every social issue imaginable, including some similar to the ones faced during the late 60s and early 70s.
Seen this way, reading this novel nowadays could make readers aware that there are people who approach the divisive issues of our day in ways similar to how Haber does by pushing for a more ideal world in unrealistic ways, sometimes even taking advantage of the people who are helping make those changes possible. At the same time, there are those like George who recognize that while some things could be done better, pushing for change so drastically or in questionable ways isn’t always the best option. Our biggest challenge is making sure we know the right ways to bring about the change we want to see, and making sure we’re truly making a difference for those we hope get impacted by this change.
I thought this was awesome, my favorite book review I've read from you so far. :D And of course I love Ursula K. Le Guin, but it's also your commentary -- I really enjoyed it. :)