Ursula Le Guin - The Lathe Of Heaven

Dr. Haber was busy with his machines, restlessly busy, bowing over them, adjusting them, watching them. He paid no heed at all to George.

“There,” he said softly—not to her, Heather thought; he was his own audience. “That’s it. Now. Now a little break, second-stage sleep for a bit, between dreams.” He did something to the equipment in the wall. “Then we’ll run a little test....” He came over to her again; she wished he would really ignore her instead of pretending to talk to her. He seemed not to know the uses of silence. “Your husband has been of inestimable service to our research here, Mrs. Orr. A unique patient. What we’ve learned about the nature of dreaming, and the employment of dreams in both positive and negative conditioning therapy, will be of literally inestimable value in every walk of life. You know what HURAD stands for. Human Utility: Research and Development. Well, what we’ve learned from this case will be of immense, literally immense, human utility. An amazing thing to develop out of what appeared to be a routine case of minor drug abuse! The most amazing thing about it is that the hacks down at the Med School had the wits to notice anything special in the case and refer it up to me. You seldom get so much acuteness in academic clinical psychologists.” His eye had been on his watch all along, and he now said, “Well, back to Baby,” and swiftly recrossed the room. He diddled with the Augmentor thing again and said aloud, “George. You’re still asleep, but you can hear me. You can hear and understand me perfectly. Nod a little if you hear me.”

The calm face did not change, but the head nodded once. Like the head of a puppet on a string.

“Good. Now, listen carefully. You’re going to have another vivid dream. You’ll dream that... that there’s a mural photograph on the wall, here in my office. A big picture of Mount Hood, all covered with snow. You’ll dream that you see the mural there on the wall behind the desk, right here in my office. All right. Now you’re going to sleep, and dream.... Antwerp.”

He bustled and bowed at his machinery again. “There,” he whispered under his breath. “There .. . O.K. . . right.” The machines were still. George lay still. Even Haber ceased to move and mutter. There was no sound in the big, softly lit room, with its wall of glass looking out into the rain. Haber stood by the EEG, his head turned to the wall behind the desk. Nothing happened.

Heather moved the fingers of her left hand in a tiny circle on the resilient, grainy surface of the armchair, the stuff that had once been the skin of a living animal, the intermediate surface between a cow and the universe. The tune of the old record they had played yesterday came into her head and wouldn’t get out again.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine....

She wouldn’t have thought that Haber could hold still, keep silent, for so long. Only once, his fingers flicked out to a dial. Then he stood immobile again, watching the blank wall.

George sighed, raised a hand sleepily, relaxed again, and woke. He blinked and sat up. His eyes went at once to Heather, as if to make sure she was there.

Haber frowned, and with a jumpy, startled movement pushed the lower button of the Augmentor. “What the hell!” he said. He stared at the EEG screen, still jigging with lively little traces. “The Augmentor was feeding you d-state patterns, how the hell did you wake up?”

“I don’t know.” George yawned. “I just did. Didn’t you instruct me to wake soon?”

“I generally do. On the signal. But how the hell did you override the pattern stimulation from the Augmentor.... I’ll have to increase the power; obviously been going at this too tentatively.” He was now talking to the Augmentor itself, there was no doubt of it. When that conversation was done he turned abruptly on George and said, “All right. What was the dream?”

“Dreamed there was a picture of Mount Hood on the wall there, behind my wife.”

Haber’s eyes flicked to the bare redwood-paneled wall, and back to George.

“Anything else? An earlier dream—any recall of it?”

“I think so. Wait a minute... I guess I dreamed that I was dreaming, or something. It was confused. I was in a store. That’s it—I was in Meier and Frank’s buying a new suit, it had to have a blue tunic, because I was going to have a new job, or something. I can’t remember. But anyhow, they had a guide sheet that told you what you ought to weigh if you’re so tall, and vice versa. And I was right in the middle of both the height scale and the weight scale for average-build men.”

“Normal, in other words,” Haber said, and suddenly laughed. He had a huge laugh. It startled Heather badly, after the tension and the silence.

“That’s fine, George. That’s just fine.” He clapped George on the shoulder, and began taking the electrodes off his head. “We have made it. We have arrived. You’re in the clear! Do you know it?”

“I believe so,” George replied mildly. “The big load’s off your shoulders. Right?”

“And onto yours?’

“And onto mine. Right!” Again the big, gusty laugh, a little overprolonged. Heather wondered if Haber was always like this, or was in a state of extreme excitement.

“Dr. Haber,” her husband said, “have you ever talked to an Alien about dreaming?”

“An Aldebaranian, you mean? No. Forde in Washington tried out a couple of our tests on some of ‘em, along with a whole series of psychological tests, but the results were meaningless. We simply haven’t licked the communications problem there. They’re intelligent but Irchevsky, our best xenobiologist, thinks they may not be rational at all, and that what looks like socially integrative behavior among humans is nothing but a kind of instinctual adaptive mimicry. No telling for sure. Can’t get an EEG on ‘em and as a matter of fact we can’t even find out whether they sleep or not, let alone dream!”

“Do you know the term iahklu’?”

Haber paused momentarily. “Heard it. It’s untranslatable. You’ve decided it means ‘dream,’ eh?”

George shook his head. “I don’t know what it means. I don’t pretend to have any knowledge you haven’t got, but I do think that before you go on with the, with the application of the new technique, Dr. Haber, before you dream, you ought to talk with one of the Aliens.”

“Which one?” The flick of irony was clear.

“Any one. It doesn’t matter.”

Haber laughed. “Talk about what, George?”

Heather saw her husband’s light eyes flash as he looked up at the bigger man. “About me. About dreaming. About iahklu’. It doesn’t matter. So long as you listen. They’ll know what you’re getting at, they’re a lot more experienced than we are at all this.”

“At what?”

“At dreaming—at what dreaming is an aspect of. They’ve done it for a long time. For always, I guess. They are of the dream time. I don’t understand it, I can’t say it in words. Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes.... But when the mind becomes conscious, when the rate of evolution speeds up, then you have to be careful. Careful of the world. You must learn the way. You must learn the skills, the art, the limits. A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully—as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously. Do you see? Does it mean anything to you?”

“It’s not new to me, if that’s what you mean. World soul and so on. Prescientific synthesis. Mysticism is one approach to the nature of dreaming, or of reality, though it’s not acceptable to those willing to use reason, and able to.”