Ursula Le Guin: The Lathe Of Heaven

Orr shook his head, too low-spirited to answer. Haber went on talking, and Orr tried to give him his attention. He was talking now about daydreams, about their relationship to the hour-and-a-half dreaming cycles of the night, about their uses and value. He asked Orr if any particular type of daydream was congenial to him. “For example,” he said, “I frequently daydream heroics. I am the hero. I’m saving a girl, or a fellow astronaut, or a besieged city, or a whole damn planet. Messiah dreams, do-gooder dreams. Haber saves the world! They’re a hell of a lot of fun—so long as I keep ‘em where they belong. We all need that ego boost we get from daydreams, but when we start relying on it, then our reality-parameters are getting a bit shaky.... Then there’s the South Sea Island type daydreams—a lot of middle-aged executives go in for them. And the noble-suffering-martyr type, and the various romantic fantasies of adolescence, and the sado-masochist daydream, and so on. Most people recognize most types. We’ve almost all been in the arena facing the lions, at least once, or thrown a bomb and destroyed our enemies, or rescued the pneumatic virgin from the sinking ship, or written Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony for him. Which style do you favor?”

“Oh—escape,” Orr said. He really had to pull himself together and answer this man, who was trying to help him. “Getting away. Getting out from under.”

“Out from under the job, the daily grind?” Haber seemed to refuse to believe that he was contented with his job. No doubt Haber had a lot of ambition and found it hard to believe that a man could be without it.

“Well, it’s more the city, the crowding, I mean. Too , many people everywhere. The headlines. Everything.”

“South Seas?” Haber inquired with his bear’s grin. “No. Here. I’m not very imaginative. I daydream about having a cabin somewhere outside the cities, maybe over in the Coast Range where there’s still some of the old forests.”

“Ever considered actually buying one?” “Recreation land is about thirty-eight thousand dollars an acre in the cheapest areas, down in the South Oregon Wilderness. Goes up to about four hundred thousand for a lot with a beach view.”

Haber whistled, “I see you have considered—and so returned to your daydreams. Thank God they’re free, eh! Well, are you game for another go? We’ve got nearly half an hour left.”

“Could you...”

“What, George?”

“Let me keep recall.”

Haber began one of his elaborate refusals. “Now as you know, what is experienced during hypnosis, including all directions given, is normally blocked to waking recall by a mechanism similar to that which blocks recall of 99 per cent of our dreams. To lower that block would be to give you too many conflicting directions concerning what is a fairly delicate matter, the content of a dream you haven’t yet dreamed. That—the dream—I can direct you to recall. But I don’t want your recall of my suggestions all mixed up with your recall of the dream you actually dream. I want to keep ‘em separate, to get a clear report of what you did dream, not what you think you ought to have dreamed. Right? You can trust me, you know. I’m in this game to help you. I won’t ask too much of you. I’ll push you, but not too hard or too fast I won’t give you any nightmares! Believe me, I want to see this through, and understand it, as much as you do. You’re an intelligent and cooperative subject, and a courageous man to have borne so much anxiety alone so long. We’ll see this through, George. Believe me.”

Orr did not entirely believe him, but he was an uncontradictable as a preacher; and besides, he wished he could believe him,

He said nothing, but lay back on the couch and submitted to the touch of the great hand on his throat.

“O.K.! There you are! What did you dream, George? Let’s have it, hot off the griddle.”

He felt sick and stupid.

“Something about the South Seas... coconuts .... Can’t remember.” He rubbed his head, scratched under his short beard, took a deep breath. He longed for a drink of cold water. “Then I ... dreamed that you were walking with John Kennedy, the president, down Alder Street I think it was. I was sort of coming along behind, I think I was carrying something for one of you. Kennedy had his umbrella up—I saw him in profile, like the old fifty-cent pieces—and you said, ‘You won’t be needing that any more, Mr. President,’ and took it out of his hand. He seemed to get annoyed over it, he said something I couldn’t understand. But it had stopped raining, the sun came out, and so he said, ‘I suppose you’re right, now.’... It has stopped raining.”

“How do you know?”

Orr sighed. “You’ll see when you go out. Is that all for this afternoon?”

“I’m ready for more. Bill’s on the Government, you know!”

“I’m very tired.”

“Well, all right then, that wraps it up for today. Listen, what if we had our sessions at night? Let you go to sleep normally, use the hypnosis only to suggest dream content. It’d leave your working days clear, and my working day is night, half the time; one thing sleep researchers seldom do is sleep! It would speed us up tremendously, and save your having to use any dream-suppressant drugs. You want to give it a try? How about Friday night?”

“I’ve got a date,” Orr said and was startled at his lie.

“Saturday, then.”

“All right.”

He left, carrying his damp raincoat over his arm. There was no need to wear it. The Kennedy dream had been a strong effective. He was sure of them now, when he had them. No matter how bland their content, he woke from them recalling them with intense clarity, and feeling broken and abraded, as one might after making an enormous physical effort to resist an overwhelming, battering force. On his own, he had not had one oftener than once a month or once in six weeks; it had been the fear of having one that had obsessed him. Now, with the Augmentor keeping him in dreaming-sleep, and the hypnotic suggestions insisting that he dream effectively, he had had three effective dreams out of four in two days; or, discounting the coconut dream, which had been rather what Haber called a mere muttering of images, three out of three. He was exhausted.

It was not raining. When he came out of the portals of Willamette East Tower, the March sky was high and clear above the street canyons. The wind had come round to blow from the east, the dry desert wind that from time to time enlivened the wet, hot, sad, gray weather of the Valley of the Willamette.

The clearer air roused his spirits a bit. He straightened his shoulders and set off, trying to ignore a fault dizziness that was probably the combined result of fatigue, anxiety, two brief naps at an unusual time of day, and a sixty-two-story descent by elevator.

Had the doctor told him to dream that it had stopped raining? Or had the suggestion been to dream about Kennedy (who had, now that he thought about it again, had Abraham Lincoln’s beard)? Or about Haber himself? He had no way of telling. The effective part of the dream had been the stopping of the rain, the change of weather; but that proved nothing. Often it was not the apparently striking or salient element of a dream which was the effective one. He suspected that Kennedy, for reasons known only to his subconscious mind, had been his own addition, but he could not be sure.

He went down into the East Broadway subway station with the endless others. He dropped his five-dollar piece in the ticket machine, got his ticket, got his train, entered darkness under the river.

The dizziness increased in his body and in his mind. To go under a river: there’s a strange thing to do, a really weird idea.

To cross a river, ford it, wade it, swim it, use boat, ferry, bridge, airplane, to go upriver, to go downriver in the ceaseless renewal and beginning of current: all that makes sense. But in going under a river, something is involved which is, in the central meaning of the word, perverse. There are roads in the mind and outside it the mere elaborateness of which shows plainly that, to have got into this, a wrong turning must have been taken way back.