George is afraid to dream. He has good reasons: he doesn't want to change the world.
The main character of Ursula K. LeGuin'sThe Lathe of Heaven, George Orr, is a simple man from the year 2002. He is a blue collar worker from a middle class life with his 8 1/2 x 11 foot apartment with a balloon bed, pull-out stove, and a communal bathroom down the hall.
But he is far from typical. When George goes to bed, there is a chance the world will be different when he wakes up.
George's dreams are not prophetic. His dreams actually change reality.
George gives this example of the first time he remembers it happening: When he was 17, his aunt lived with George and his family. She repeatedly tried to seduce George. One night George had a dream that his aunt was killed in an accident in Los Angeles. George woke to find that she had indeed been killed... six weeks earlier. Only George remembered that she had been alive and living with his family, but he also remembered how she had died. Everyone else believed she had been dead for six weeks.
He has had other terrible dreams, such as nuclear explosions, deadly plagues, and the end of the world. He has also had dreams that brought the world back from these cataclysmic events. As a result of his fear to dream, George tries taking medications. He is caught when he overdoses and is referred to a psychiatrist, Dr. Haber, who is an oneirologist (a dream specialist), for Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment. Needless to say, Haber does not believe George's claims when he tells him about his "effective dreams."
Haber is able to put George to sleep by hypnosis, a common practice, and with the help of an experimental device he is able to induce a dreaming state. He instructs George to have an "effective dream." Things around George change, but Haber pretends not to notice these changes. George knows he does.
As George continues to see Haber for therapy, he realizes Haber is trying to change the world. Thinking his rights are being violated, George finds a lawyer who agrees to witness a session. Heather Lelache, the lawyer, and George team up after she witnesses and "effective dream" in order to save the world form George's dreams and to save George himself.
After sending the world on a wild roller-coaster ride, Haber, George, and Heather nearly destroy the earth through a series of disastrous mistakes and are unable to restore it to how it should have been.
The Lathe of Heaven was made into a made-for-television movie for PBS in the 1970's. Both the film and the book received excellent reviews and were called "rare and powerful" by the New York Times. The book itself won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, two awards given to the best books related to science fiction. Though the book is a little out of date by today's standards (it was written in 1971), it is definitely worth reading since it is extremely thought provoking and shows us what our future has a potential of being.
© 1999 ~*~ mel ~*~
