Lathe of Heaven

What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?

I go give 'em Vitamin C shots and try to pretend that starvation is just scurvy....

The real trick was to learn how not to hear them. The only solid partitions left were inside the head.

No drug we have will keep you from dreaming, unless it kills you.

"Not prophetic dreams. I can't foresee anything. I simply change things."

I dreamed that Ethel had been killed in a car crash in Los Angeles, and the telegram had come. ... She wasn't there. She never had been there.

I didn't want to kill poor Ethel. I just wanted her out of my way. Well, in a dream, that's likely to be drastic. Dreams take short cuts.

Then, as I work with the patient, I narrow it down again, tailor it: whenever the subject's brain is doing what I want it to do more of, I record that moment, augment it, enlarge and prolong it, replay it, and stimulate the brain to go along with its own healthiest impulses, if you'll excuse the pun.

He felt a thrill of enjoyment of his own skill, his instant dominance over the patient, even as he was muttering softly and rapidly, 'You're going to sleep now; close your eyes, sleep, relax, let your mind go blank; you're going to sleep, you're relaxed, you're going limp; relax, let go—'

It was a scene he never tired of, the All-Night Movie, the show on Channel One.

And as the brain's rhythms changed, so did the heavy matter inhabited by that dancing energy: the hands were lax on the slow-breathing chest, the face was aloof and still.

Oh Christ it had been Mount Hood the man was right It had not been Mount Hood it could not have been Mount Hood it was a horse it was a horse

He stood out of reach of strap or stanchion, supported solely by the equalizing pressure of bodies on all sides, occasionally lifted right off his feet and floating as the force of crowding (c) exceeded the force of gravity (g).

The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.

Orr felt rumpled and foolish, sitting on the couch still giddy from sleep, having lain asleep there, probably with his mouth open and snoring, helpless, while Haber watched the secret jigs and prancings of his brain, and told him what to dream.

No way out. Orr was where he had been for months—alone: knowing he was insane and knowing he was not insane, simultaneously and intensely.

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

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.

He felt the heaviness upon him, the weight bearing down endlessly. He thought, I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

He did not see connections, which is said to be the hallmark of intellect. He felt connections—like a plumber.

Its cement floors were stained with the excreta of innumerable engines, the wheelprints of the dinosaurs were fossilized in the dust of its echoing halls.

If I told you that some of my dreams exert an influence over reality, and that Dr. Haber has discovered this and is using it ... this talent of mine, for ends of his own, without my consent . . . you'd think I was crazy.

I know you know. All about how they decided to lease parts of the National Forests last spring. Only I also know that that was not true until last Friday.

Each dream covers its tracks completely. There would just be a normal everyday pink dog there when I woke up, with a perfectly good reason for being there.

She stuck out her brown hand, he met it with a white one, just like that damn button her mother always kept in the bottom of her bead box, SCNN or SNCC or something she'd belonged to way back in the middle of the last century, the Black hand and the White hand joined together.

A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one's function in the sociopolitical whole.

She snapped and clicked. Heavy brass snap catch on handbag, heavy copper and brass jewelry that clattered, clump-heel shoes, and a huge silver ring with a horribly ugly African mask design, frowning eyebrows, hard voice: clack, clash, snap....

The difference between it and electrode implantation is—oh, hell—a scalpel to a sledgehammer!

The contrast amused Haber: the harsh fierce woman, the meek characterless man.

Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation—overcrowding—reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind.

His whole autonomic system is as fully mobilized as it might be in an exciting moment of waking life; but his muscle tone is nil, the large muscles are relaxed more deeply than in s-sleep.

She was staring in dismay, shock, terror, out the window at the view.

He had been there, had seen the walls change around him, had known the world was being remade, and had forgotten it.

Of course, Haber thought, a man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.

There was a singular poise, almost a monumentally, in the stance of his slight figure: he was completely still, still as the center of something.

Haber thought he was laughing, and drew back a little apprehensively; then he realized that it was tears that gave Orr's eyes that queer shine.

"To a better world!" Dr. Haber said, raising his glass to his creation, and finished his whisky in a lingering, savoring swallow.

I haven't any strength, I haven't any character, I'm a born tool. I haven't any destiny. All I have is dreams. And now other people run them.

He was caught. Rat in a trap. Running a maze for the mad scientist, and no way out.

The goose. Precisely. That describes me perfectly, Orr thought. A damned white vapid stupid goose.

Nothing will keep a man from dreaming, he had said, but death.

The Crash, the carcinomic plague which had reduced human population by five billion in five years, and another billion in the next ten, had shaken the civilizations of the world to their roots and yet left them, in the end, intact.

But the big man was like an onion, slip off layer after layer of personality, belief, response, infinite layers, no end to them, no center to him.

The ground swung up and down, great trembling wrinkles passing through the skin of Earth.

You're trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn't suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.

As she stood down on the sidewalk staring up at the disused building with its queer, slightly skewed floors and narrow window slits, she felt very strange indeed.

Old hippies never die.

It symbolized neither the Unattainable, as it had for thousands of years, nor the Attained, as it had for a few decades, but the Lost.

He was the strongest person she had ever known, because he could not be moved away from the center.

I sure have been trying to run on two tracks with one set of wheels ever since. I walked right into a wall Sunday in my own apartment!

He's not interested in what's true, in what is, he can't see anything except his mind—his ideas of what ought to be.

I don't do anything. I never have done anything. I just dream. And then it is.

I mean, 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.

I sat there and I couldn't get up again and I knew I couldn't. I kept thinking that I was standing up and going on, getting out of the city, but it was just delirium, I'd come to and see the dandelions again and know I was dying.

This world isn't even probable. It was the truth. It was what happened. We are all dead, and we spoiled the world before we died.

He went like a half-stuffed pillow, softly, forward and sideways, till he was a large, warm, inert heap on the floor.

The hills muttered and dreamed of falling in the sea, and over the hills, faint and horrible, the sirens of distant towns howled, howled, howled.

Very faintly he could hear elephants screaming, over in the zoo.

He needed somebody, anybody, to talk to, he had to tell them what he felt so that he knew if he felt anything.

It is incredibly complex, yet it's consistent and it recurs. Therefore I can feed it to you straight, and amplified.

The eruption of Mount Hood was quite hidden by events closer at hand; the earth, however, had been trembling gently for the past few minutes, a sort of fundamental palsy that made one's hands and mind shake sympathetically.

A flat, toneless voice came out of the elbow joint. 'Do not do to others what you wish others not to do to you,' it said.

Of course it happened. An effective dream is a reality, Dr. Haber.

Why had this gift been given to a fool, a passive nothing of a man?

He was living almost like a young child, among actualities only. He was surprised by nothing, and by everything.

But they all wore the same clothes, trousers, tunic, raincape; and underneath the clothes they were all the same color. They were gray.

That every soul on earth should have a body the color of a battleship: no!

Layer after layer might peel off the onion and yet nothing be revealed but more onion.

Indeed, their communication with human beings, limited to speech emission from the left elbow and some kind of auditory receiver, was limited; he was not even sure that they could see, that they had any sense organ for the visible spectrum.

The skill of the single fighters was fine, but lacked the splendid abreactive release of mass killing.

Over the pillared portico, incised in white concrete in the straight Roman capitals whose proportions lend nobility to any phrase whatsoever, was the legend: THE GREATEST GOOD FOR THE GREATEST NUMBER.

Well, you're a queer fish, George, and the queerest thing about you is that there's nothing queer about you!

We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand outside things and run them, that way.

It was grotesque to the point of being funny; like a sea turtle, and yet like a sea turtle it possessed a strange, large beauty, a serener beauty than that of any dweller, in sunlight, any walker on the earth.

Orr set his teeth and faced Chaos and Old Night.

He seemed to recoil, as a man might who thought to push aside a gauze curtain and found it to be a granite door.

You have no social conscience, no altruism. You're a moral jellyfish.

The lips within the curly beard parted in a straining, staring smile, a grin of ecstasy that made Orr turn away as if he had seen something never meant to be seen, both terrifying and pathetic.

He knew that in so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

From the receding prospect of shadows, bulky furniture, decrepit acres of Action Paintings and fake-antique spinning wheels now becoming genuinely antique though still useless, from these tenebrous reaches of no-man's-things, a huge form emerged, seeming to float forward slowly, silent and reptilian: The proprietor was an Alien.

He can't accept, he can't let be, he can't let go. He is insane.

George lay flat as a skinned cat on the floor, right by the phonograph, which was slowly eating its way through "With a Little Help" right down to the turntable.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.

In fact it was, the endless warm drizzle of spring—the ice of Antarctica, falling softly on the heads of the children of those responsible for melting it.

As if the electrode things were little suction cups that would drain the thoughts out of George's head and turn them into scribbles on a piece of paper, the meaningless writing of the mad.

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

Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes.

No water ran in the bizarre, romantic fountains of twisted metal.

The buildings of downtown Portland, the Capital of the World, the high, new, handsome cubes of stone and glass interspersed with measured doses of green, the fortresses of Government—Research and Development, Communications, Industry, Economic Planning, Environmental Control—were melting.

The car swung wild in the abyss, between the unforming city and the formless sky.

The eyes looked straight forward into the dark, into the void, into the unbeing at the center of William Haber; they were no longer opaque, they were empty.

It took the entire will power, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned OFF button.

A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.

Industry and distribution had been left in disastrous confusion by The Break; national and international government had been so distraught for weeks that a state of laissez faire had prevailed perforce.

But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.

The Alien watched them from within the glass-fronted shop, as a sea creature might watch from an aquarium, seeing them pass and disappear into the mist.

What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?

I go give 'em Vitamin C shots and try to pretend that starvation is just scurvy....

The real trick was to learn how not to hear them. The only solid partitions left were inside the head.

No drug we have will keep you from dreaming, unless it kills you.

"Not prophetic dreams. I can't foresee anything. I simply change things."

I dreamed that Ethel had been killed in a car crash in Los Angeles, and the telegram had come. ... She wasn't there. She never had been there.

Oh Christ it had been Mount Hood the man was right It had not been Mount Hood it could not have been Mount Hood it was a horse it was a horse

If I told you that some of my dreams exert an influence over reality, and that Dr. Haber has discovered this and is using it ... this talent of mine, for ends of his own, without my consent . . . you'd think I was crazy.

Each dream covers its tracks completely. There would just be a normal everyday pink dog there when I woke up, with a perfectly good reason for being there.