Ursula-K.-Le-Guin-Lathe-of-Heaven-2003
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Book Opening
- Identifies the book as The Lathe of Heaven.
- Names Ursula K. Le Guin as the author.
- Includes the beginning marker or page/chapter number â1.â
THE LATHE OF HEAVEN
Ursula K. Le Guin
1
The Vulnerable Dreamer
- The narrative opens with a philosophical paradox from Chuang Tse, suggesting that reality and the self are merely dreams.
- A metaphorical jellyfish represents the ultimate vulnerability of life, perfectly attuned to the ocean but destroyed by the 'terrible outerspace' of dry land.
- The protagonist experiences a harrowing transition from a nightmare of nuclear devastation and radiation sickness to a bleak physical reality.
- In his actual room, the protagonist is found by an elevator guard and a medic after overdosing on a dangerous cocktail of barbiturates and Dexedrine.
- The medic informs him that his illegal use of multiple pharmacy cards must be reported, highlighting a regulated and bureaucratic society.
- The protagonist's internal struggle is described as an inability to find the 'fit'âa key to lock the door against his intrusive dreams.
What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?
Confucius and you are both dreams, and I who say you are dreams am a dream myself.
This is a paradox. Tomorrow a wise man may explain it; that tomorrow will not be for
ten thousand generations.
âChuang Tse: II
Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish
drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung,
tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer
and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and
quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying,
pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence
and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.
But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break
from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radiance and instability, where
there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray,
breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking....
What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the
mind do, each morning, waking?
His eyelids had been burned away, so that he could not close his eyes, and the light
entered into his brain, searing.
He could not turn his head, for blocks of fallen concrete pinned him down and the steel
rods projecting from their cores held his head in a vise. When these were gone he could
move again; he sat up. He was on the cement steps; a dandelion flowered by his hand,
growing from a little cracked place in the steps. After a while he stood up, but as soon as
he was on his feet he felt deathly sick, and knew it was the radiation sickness. The door
was only two feet from him, for the balloonbed when inflated half filled his room. He
got to the door and opened it and went through it. There stretched the endless linoleum
corridor, heaving slightly up and down for miles, and far down it, very far, the men's
room. He started out toward it, trying to hold on to the wall, but there was nothing to
hold on to, and the wall turned into the floor.
"Easy now. Easy there."
The elevator guard's face was hanging above him like a paper lantern, pallid, fringed
with graying hair.
"It's the radiation," he said, but Mannie didn't seem to understand, saying only, "Take it
easy."
He was back on his bed in his room.
"You drunk?"
"No."
"High on something?"
"Sick."
"What you been taking?"
"Couldn't find the fit," he said, meaning that he had been trying to lock the door through
which the dreams came, but none of the keys had fit the lock.
"Medic's coming up from the fifteenth floor," Mannie said faintly through the roar of
breaking seas.
He was floundering and trying to breathe. A stranger was sitting on his bed holding a
hypodermic and looking at him.
"That did it," the stranger said. "He's coming round. Feel like hell? Take it easy. You
ought to feel like hell. Take all this at once?" He displayed seven of the little plastifoil
envelopes from the autodrug dispensary. "Lousy mixture, barbiturates and Dexedrine.
What were you trying to do to yourself?"
It was hard to breathe, but the sickness was gone, leaving only an awful weakness.
"They're all dated this week," the medic went on, a young man with a brown ponytail
and bad teeth. "Which means they're not all off your own Pharmacy Card, so I've got to
report you for borrowing. I don't like to, but I got called in and I haven't any choice, see.
But don't worry, with these drugs it's not a felony, you'll just get a notice to report to the
The Bureaucracy of Survival
- A medic pressures George Orr to reveal who provided him with extra Pharm Cards to avoid institutionalization.
- The elevator guard, Mannie Ahrens, provides a false confession to protect George from the legal consequences of his drug use.
- The medic describes a systemic crisis where children in state housing suffer from kwashiorkor due to protein shortages and bureaucratic red tape.
- The setting is established as a dystopian future Portland where basic resources are scarce and the National Guard is used to break transit strikes.
- George is referred to Dr. William Haber for Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment, a psychiatrist who values professional optics over genuine connection.
- The narrative introduces a world where medical care is a mix of surveillance, legal threats, and futile gestures against mass starvation.
I go give 'em Vitamin C shots and try to pretend that starvation is just scurvy....
police station and they'll send you up to the Med School or the Area Clinic for
examination, and you'll be referred to an M. D. or a shrink for VTTâVoluntary
Therapeutic Treatment. I filled out the form on you already, used your ID; all I need to
know is how long you been using these drugs in more than your personal allotment?"
"Couple months."
The medic scribbled on a paper on his knee. "And who'd you borrow Pharm Cards
from?"
"Friends."
"Got to have the names."
After a while the medic said, "One name, anyhow. Just a formality. It won't get 'em in
trouble. See, they'll just get a reprimand from the police, and HEW Control will keep a
check on their Pharm Cards for a year. Just a formality. One name."
"I can't. They were trying to help me."
"Look, if you won't give the names, you're resisting, and you'll either go to jail or get
stuck into Obligatory Therapy, in an institution. Anyway they can trace the cards through
the autodrug records if they want to, this just saves 'em time. Come on, just give me one
of the names."
He covered his face with his arms to keep out the unendurable light and said, "I can't. I
can't do it. I need help. "
"He borrowed my card," the elevator guard said.
"Yeah. Mannie Ahrens, 247-602-6023." The medic's pen went scribble scribble.
"I never used your card."
"So confuse 'em a little. They won't check. People use people's Pharm Cards all the time,
they can't check. I loan mine, use another cat's, all the time. Got a whole collection of
those reprimand things. They don't know. I taken things HEW never even heard of. You
ain't been on the hook before. Take it easy, George. "
"I can't," he said, meaning that he could not let Mannie lie for him, could not stop him
from lying for him, could not take it easy, could not go on.
"You'll feel better in two, three hours," the medic said. "But stay in today. Anyhow
downtown's all tied up, the GPRT drivers are trying another strike and the National
Guard's trying to run the subway trains and the news says it's one hell of a mess. Stay
put. I got to go, I walk to work, damn it, ten minutes from here, that State Housing
Complex down on Macadam." The bed jounced as he stood up. "You know there's two
hundred sixty kids in that one complex suffering from kwashiorkor? All low-income or
Basic Support families, and they aren't getting protein. And what the hell am I supposed
to do about it? I've put in five different reqs for Minimal Protein Ration for those kids
and they don't come, it's all red tape and excuses. People on Basic Support can afford to
buy sufficient food, they keep telling me. Sure, but what if the food isn't there to buy?
Ah, the hell with it. I go give 'em Vitamin C shots and try to pretend that starvation is
just scurvy.... "
The door shut. The bed jounced when Mannie sat down on it where the medic had been
sitting. There was a faint smell, sweetish, like newly cut grass. Out of the darkness of
closed eyes, the mist rising all round, Mannie's voice said remotely, "Ain't it great to be
alive?"
2
The Portal of God is non-existence.
âChuang Tse: XXIII
Dr. William Haber's office did not have a view of Mount Hood. It was an interior
Efficiency Suite on the sixty-third floor of Willamette East Tower and didn't have a view
of anything. But on one of the windowless walls was a big photographic mural of Mount
Hood, and at this Dr. Haber gazed while intercommunicating with his receptionist.
"Who's this Orr coming up, Penny? The hysteric with leprosy symptoms?"
She was only three feet away through the wall, but an interoffice communicator, like a
diploma on the wall, inspires confidence in the patient, as well as in the doctor. And it is
not seemly for a psychiatrist to open the door and shout, "Next!"
"No, Doctor, that's Mr. Greene tomorrow at ten. This is the referral from Dr. Waiters at
the University Medical School, a VTT case. "
The Dream Specialist
- Dr. Haber prepares to treat George Orr, a man referred for 'Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment' after illegally using extra pharmacy allotments.
- The setting is a future Earth where the Greenhouse Effect has erased mountain snows and blue skies are a memory or a fake.
- Society is highly regulated, with citizens using 'Pharmacy Cards' for controlled substances like tranquilizers and stimulants.
- Haber identifies Orr as a 'dreamer' who has been using barbiturates to suppress his dreams, a common reason for referral to his specialty.
- The doctor observes Orr as a repressed, unaggressive, and easily frightened individual with no psychological defenses.
The real trick was to learn how not to hear them. The only solid partitions left were inside the head.
"Drug abuse. Right. Got the file here. O. K., send him in when he comes. "
Even as he spoke he could hear the elevator whine up and stop, the doors gasp open;
then footsteps, hesitation, the outer door opening. He could also, now he was listening,
hear doors, typewriters, voices, toilets flushing, in offices all up and down the hall and
above him and underneath him, The real trick was to learn how not to hear them. The
only solid partitions left were inside the head.
Now Penny was going through the first-visit routine with the patient, and while waiting
Dr. Haber gazed again at the mural and wondered when such a photograph had been
taken. Blue sky, snow from foothills to peak. Years ago, in the sixties or seventies, no
doubt. The Greenhouse Effect had been quite gradual, and Haber, born in 1962, could
clearly remember the blue skies of his childhood. Nowadays the eternal snows were
gone from all the world's mountains, even Everest, even Erebus, fiery-throated on the
waste Antarctic shore. But of course they might have colored a modern photograph,
faked the blue sky and white peak; no telling.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Orr!" he said, rising, smiling, but not extending his hands, for
many patients these days had a strong dread of physical contact.
The patient uncertainly withdrew his almost-proffered hand, fingered his necklace
nervously, and said, "How do you do." The necklace was the usual long chain of silvered
steel. Clothing ordinary, office-worker standard; haircut conservative shoulder-length,
beard short. Light hair and eyes, a short, slight, fair man, slightly undernourished, good
health, 28 to 32. Unaggressive, placid, milquetoast, repressed, conventional. The most
valuable period of relationship with a patient, Haber often said, is the first ten seconds.
"Sit down, Mr. Orr. Right! Do you smoke? The brown filters are tranks, the white are
denicks." Dorr did not smoke. "Now, let's see if we're together on your situation. HEW
Control wants to know why you've been borrowing your friends' Pharmacy Cards to get
more than your allotment of pep pills and sleeping pills from the autodrug. Right? So
they sent you up to the boys on the hill, and they recommended Voluntary Therapeutic
Treatment and sent you over to me for the therapy. All correct?"
He heard his own genial, easy tone, well calculated to put the other person at his ease;
but this one was still far from easy. He blinked often, his sitting posture was tense, the
position of his hands was overformal: a classic picture of suppressed anxiety. He nodded
as if he was gulping at the same moment.
"O. K., fine, nothing out of the way there. If you'd been stockpiling your pills, to sell to
addicts or commit a murder with, then you'd be in hot water. But as you simply used
'em, your punishment's no worse than a few sessions with me! Now of course what I
want to know is why you used 'em, so that together we can work out some better life
pattern for you, that'll keep you within the dosage limits of your own Pharm Card for
one thing, and perhaps for another set you free of any drug dependency at all. Now your
routine," his eyes went for a moment to the folder sent down from the Med School, "was
to take barbiturates for a couple of weeks, then switch for a few nights to
dextroamphetamine, then back to the barbiturates. How did that get started? Insomnia?"
"I sleep well."
"But you have bad dreams."
The man looked up, frightened: a flash of open terror. He was going to be a simple case.
He had no defenses.
"Sort of," he said huskily.
"It was an easy guess for me, Mr. Orr. They generally send me the dreamers." He
grinned at the little man. "I'm a dream specialist. Literally. An oneirologist. Sleep and
dreaming are my field. O.K., now I can proceed to the next educated guess, which is that
you used the phenobarb to suppress dreaming but found that with habituation the drug
has less and less dream-suppressive effect, until it has none at all. Similarly with the
The Necessity of Dreams
- The patient, Mr. Orr, has been alternating drugs to suppress his ability to dream, leading to severe physical and mental strain.
- Dr. Haber explains that dreaming is a biological necessity as vital as food, water, and air.
- Systematic dream deprivation results in irritability, paranoia, and potential brain lesions that can be fatal.
- The brain will eventually force a dreaming state regardless of drug use, unless the dosage is lethal.
- Orr reveals that his fear is not of nightmares specifically, but of the act of dreaming itself.
- Dr. Haber views the verbal consultation as a 'vestigial rite' before he begins more direct psychological conditioning.
No drug we have will keep you from dreaming, unless it kills you.
Dexedrine. So you alternated them. Right?"
The patient nodded stiffly.
"Why was your stretch on the Dexedrine always shorter?"
"It made me jumpy."
"I'll bet it did. And that last combination dose you took was a lulu. But not, in itself,
dangerous. All the same, Mr. Orr, you were doing something dangerous." He paused for
effect. "You were depriving yourself of dreams."
Again the patient nodded.
"Do you try to deprive yourself of food and water, Mr. Orr? Have you tried doing
without air lately?"
He kept his tone jovial, and the patient managed a brief unhappy smile.
"You know that you need sleep. Just as you need food, water, and air. But did you realize
that sleep's not enough, that your body insists just as strongly upon having its allotment
of dreaming sleep? If deprived systematically of dreams, your brain will do some very
odd things to you. It will make you irritable, hungry, unable to concentrateâ does this
sound familiar? It wasn't just the Dexedrine!â liable to daydreams, uneven as to
reaction times, forgetful, irresponsible, and prone to paranoid fantasies. And finally it
will force you to dreamâno matter what. No drug we have will keep you from
dreaming, unless it kills you. For instance, extreme alcoholism can lead to a condition
called central pontine myelinolysis, which is fatal; its cause is a lesion in the lower brain
resulting from lack of dreaming. Not from lack of sleep! From lack of the very specific
state that occurs during sleep, the dreaming state, REM sleep, the d-state. Now you're no
alcoholic, and not dead, and so I know that whatever you've taken to suppress your
dreams, it's worked only partially. Therefore, (a) you're in poor shape physically from
partial dream deprivation, and (b) you've been trying to go up a blind alley. Now. What
started you up the blind alley? A fear of dreams, of bad dreams, I take it, or what you
consider to be bad dreams. Can you tell me anything about these dreams?"
Orr hesitated.
Haber opened his mouth and shut it again. So often he knew what his patients were
going to say, and could say it for them better than they could say it for themselves. But it
was their taking the step that counted. He could not take it for them. And after all, this
talking was a mere preliminary, a vestigial rite from the palmy days of analysis; its only
function was to help him decide how he should help the patient, whether positive or
negative conditioning was indicated, what he should do.
"I don't have nightmares more than most people, I think," Orr was saying, looking down
at his hands. "Nothing special. I'm . . . afraid of dreaming."
"Of dreaming bad dreams."
"Any dreams."
"I see. Have you any notion how that fear got started? Or what it is you're afraid of, wish
to avoid?"
As Orr did not reply at once, but sat looking down at his hands, square, reddish hands
lying too still on his knee, Haber prompted just a little. "Is it the irrationality, the
lawlessness, sometimes the immorality of dreams, is it something like that that makes
you uncomfortable?"
"Yes, in a way. But for a specific reason. You see, here ⌠here I ..."
Here's the crux, the lock, though Haber, also watching those tense hands. Poor bastard.
He has wet dreams, and a guilt complex about 'em. Boyhood enuresis, compulsive
motherâ
The Power of Effective Dreams
- Dr. Haber dismisses the concepts of belief and disbelief as irrelevant to his psychological work.
- George Orr reveals that his dreams do not merely predict the future but actively change reality.
- Haber initially misinterprets Orr's claims as common psychological phenomena or prophetic intuition.
- Orr recounts a formative memory from age seventeen involving his Aunt Ethel and a crowded living situation.
- The interaction highlights a power dynamic where Haber views Orr as a 'nut' sent to him by medical authorities.
- Orr's physical appearance, specifically his transparent eyes, momentarily unsettles the clinical detachment of the doctor.
"Not prophetic dreams. I can't foresee anything. I simply change things."
"Here's where you stop believing me." The little fellow was sicker than he looked. "A
man who deals with dreams both awake and sleeping isn't too concerned with belief and
disbelief, Mr. Orr. They're not categories I use much. They don't apply. So ignore that,
and go on. I'm interested." Did that sound patronizing? He looked at Orr to see if the
statement had been taken amiss, and met, for one instant, the man's eyes. Extraordinarily
beautiful eyes, Haber thought, and was surprised by the word, for beauty was not a
category he used much either. The irises were blue or gray, very clear, as if transparent.
For a moment Haber forgot himself and stared back at those clear, elusive eyes; but only
for a moment, so that the strangeness of the experience scarcely registered on his
conscious mind.
"Well," Orr said, speaking with some determination, "I have had dreams that ... that
affected the ... non-dream world. The real world."
"We all have, Mr. Orr." Orr stared. The perfect straight man.
"The effect of the dreams of the just prewaking d-state on the general emotional level of
the psyche can beâ"
But the straight man interrupted him. "No, I don't mean that." And stuttering a little,
"What I mean is, I dreamed something, and it came true."
"That isn't hard to believe, Mr. Orr. Fm quite serious in saying that. It's only since the
rise of scientific thought that anybody much has been inclined even to question such a
statement, much less disbelieve it. Propheticâ"
"Not prophetic dreams. I can't foresee anything. I simply change things." The hands
were clenched tight. No wonder the Med School bigwigs had sent this one here. They
always sent the nuts they couldn't crack to Haber.
"Can you give me an example? For instance, can you recall the very first time that you
had such a dream? How old were you?"
The patient hesitated a long time, and finally said, "Sixteen, I think." His manner was
still docile; he showed considerable fear of the subject, but no defensiveness or hostility
toward Haber. "I'm not sure."
"Tell me about the first time you're sure of." "I was seventeen. I was still living at home,
and my mother's sister was staying with us. She was getting a divorce and wasn't
working, just getting Basic Support. She was kind of in the way. It was a regular three-
room flat, and she was always there. Drove my mother up the wall. She wasn't
considerate, Aunt Ethel, I mean. Hogged the bathroomâwe still had a private bathroom
in that flat. And she kept, oh, making a sort of joking play for me. Half joking. Coming
into my bedroom in her topless pajamas, and so on. She was only about thirty. It got me
kind of uptight. I didn't have a girl yet and . . . you know. Adolescents. It's easy to get a
kid worked up. I resented it. I mean, she was my aunt."
He glanced at Haber to make sure that the doctor knew what he had resented, and did
not disapprove of his resentment. The insistent permissiveness of the late Twentieth
The Retroactive Reality of Dreams
- George Orr describes a vivid dream in which his aunt died in a car crash, only to wake up and find that she had never been living with his family at all.
- Orr explains that his dreams change reality retroactively, leaving him as the only person who remembers the previous version of existence.
- Dr. Haber initially suspects Orr is a devious schizophrenic but is struck by the patient's lack of typical schizoid arrogance.
- Haber validates Orr's experience by asserting that mental events are facts and that dreams leave measurable marks on the world.
- Orr expresses a profound fear of his power, arguing that he has no right to meddle with the world through his irrational and selfish unconscious mind.
- The conflict centers on Orr's desire for stability versus the chaotic, uncontrollable nature of his 'effective' dreams.
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.
Century had produced fully as much sex-guilt and sex-fear in its heirs as had the
insistent repressiveness of the late Nineteenth Century. Orr was afraid that Haber might
be shocked at his not wanting to go to bed with his aunt. Haber maintained his
noncommittal but interested expression, and Orr plowed on.
"Well, I had a lot of sort of anxiety dreams, and this aunt was always in them. Usually
disguised, the way people are in dreams sometimes; once she was a white cat, but I
knew she was Ethel, too. Anyhow, finally one night when she'd got me to take her to the
movies, and tried to get me to handle her, and then when we got home she kept flopping
around on my bed and saying how my parents were asleep and so on, well, after I finally
got her out of my room and got to sleep, I had this dream. A very vivid one. I could
recall it completely when I woke up. I dreamed that Ethel had been killed in a car crash
in Los Angeles, and the telegram had come. My mother was crying while she was trying
to cook dinner, and I felt sorry for her, and kept wishing I could do something for her,
but I didn't know what to do. That was all. ... Only when I got up, I went into the living
room. No Ethel on the couch. There wasn't anybody else in the apartment, just my
parents and me. She wasn't there. She never had been there. I didn't have to ask. I
remembered. I knew that Aunt Ethel had been killed in a crash on a Los Angeles
freeway six weeks ago, coming home after seeing a lawyer about getting a divorce. We
had got the news by telegram. The whole dream was just sort of reliving something like
what had actually happened. Only it hadn't happened. Until the dream. I mean, I also
knew that she'd been living with us, sleeping on the couch in the living room, until last
night."
"But there was nothing to show that, to prove it?"
"No. Nothing. She hadn't been. Nobody remembered that she had been, except me. And
I was wrong. Now."
Haber nodded judiciously and stroked his beard. What had seemed a mild drug-
habituation case now appeared to be a severe aberration, but he had never had a delusion
system presented to him quite so straightforwardly. Orr might be an intelligent
schizophrenic, feeding him a line, putting him on, with schizoid inventiveness and
deviousness; but he lacked the faint inward arrogance of such people, to which Haber
was extremely sensitive.
"Why do you think your mother didn't notice that reality had changed since last night?"
"Well, she didn't dream it. I mean, the dream really did change reality. It made a
different reality, retroactively, which she'd been part of all along. Being in it, she had no
memory of any other. I did, I remembered both, because I was ⌠there ... at the moment
of the change. This is the only way I can explain it, I know it doesn't make sense. But I
have got to have some explanation, or else face the fact that I am insane."
No, this fellow was no milquetoast.
"I'm not in the judgment business, Mr. Orr. I'm after facts. And the events of the mind,
believe me, to me are facts. When you see another man's dream as he dreams it recorded
in black and white on the electroencephalograph, as I've done ten thousand times, you
don't speak of dreams as 'unreal.' They exist; they are events; they leave a mark behind
them. O.K. I take it that you had other dreams that seemed to have this same sort of
effect?"
"Some. Not for a long time. Only under stress. But it seemed to ... to be happening
oftener. I began to get scared."
Haber leaned forward. "Why?"
Orr looked blank.
"Why scared?"
"Because I don't want to change things!" Orr said, as if stating the superobvious. "Who
am I to meddle with the way things go? And it's my unconscious mind that changes
things, without any intelligent control. I tried autohypnosis but it didn't do any good.
Dreams are incoherent, selfish, irrationalâimmoral, you said a minute ago. They come
The Palace of Dreams
- George Orr confesses his belief that his dreams have the power to alter reality, specifically claiming responsibility for his aunt's death through a dream.
- Dr. Haber dismisses the literal reality of Orr's claims, interpreting them as an elaborate psychological metaphor for a lack of control in his life.
- The dialogue reveals Orr's history of drug dependency used as a tool to suppress these 'effective' or reality-altering dreams.
- Haber proposes a radical therapeutic approach: using hypnosis and a 'trancap' to induce controlled, intentional dreaming under medical supervision.
- Orr remains skeptical and defensive, fearing that his dreams cannot be safely contained even within a laboratory setting.
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.
from the unsocialized part of us, don't they, at least partly? 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. I killed her. In a car crash a thousand miles away six weeks ago.
I am responsible for her death."
Haber stroked his beard again. "Therefore," he said slowly, "the dream-suppressant
drugs. So that you will avoid further responsibilities."
"Yes. The drugs kept the dreams from building up and getting vivid. It's only certain
ones, very intense ones, that are. . . ." He sought a word, "effective."
"Right. O.K. Now, let's see. You're unmarried; you're a draftsman for the Bonneville-
Umatilla Power District How do you like your work?"
"Fine."
"How's your sex life?"
"Had one trial marriage. Broke up last summer, after a couple of years."
"Did you pull out, or she?"
"Both of us. She didn't want a kid. It wasn't full-marriage material."
"And since then?"
"Well, there're some girls at my office, I'm not a ... not a great stud, actually."
"How about interpersonal relationships in general? Do you feel you relate satisfactorily
to other people, that you have a niche in the emotional ecology of your environment?"
"I guess so."
"So that you could say that there's nothing really wrong with your life. Right? O.K. Now
tell me this; do you want, do you seriously want, to get out of this drug dependency?"
"Yes."
"O.K., good. Now, you've been taking drugs because you want to keep from dreaming.
But not all dreams are dangerous; only certain vivid ones. You dreamed of your Aunt
Ethel as a white cat, but she wasn't a white cat next morningâright? Some dreams are
all rightâsafe."
He waited for Orr's assenting nod.
"Now, think about this. How would you feel about testing this whole thing out, and
perhaps learning how to dream safely, without fear? Let me explain. You've got the
subject of dreaming pretty loaded emotionally. You are literally afraid to dream because
you feel that some of your dreams have this capacity to affect real life, in ways you can't
control. Now, that may be an elaborate and meaningful metaphor, by which your
unconscious mind is trying to tell your conscious mind something about reality âyour
reality, your lifeâwhich you aren't ready, rationally, to accept. But we can take the
metaphor quite literally; there's no need to translate it, at this point, into rational terms.
Your problem at present is this: you're afraid to dream, and yet you need to dream. You
tried suppression by drugs; it didn't work. O.K., let's try the opposite. Let's get you to
dream, intentionally. Let's get you to dream, intensely and vividly, right here. Under my
supervision, under controlled conditions. So that you can get control over what seems to
you to have got out of hand."
"How can I dream to order?" Orr said with extreme discomfort.
"In Doctor Haber's Palace of Dreams, you can! Have you been hypnotized?"
"For dental work."
"Good. O.K. Here's the system. I put you into hypnotic trance and suggest that you're
going to sleep, that you're going to dream, and what you're going to dream. You'll wear a
trancap to ensure that you have genuine sleep, not just hypnotrance. While you're
dreaming I watch you, physically and on the EEG, the whole time. I wake you, and we
talk about the dream experience. If it's gone off safely, perhaps you'll feel a bit easier
about facing the next dream."
"But I won't dream effectively here; it only happens in one dream out of dozens or
hundreds." Orr's defensive rationalizations were quite consistent.
"You can dream any style dream at all here. Dream content and dream affect can be
controlled almost totally by a motivated subject and a properly trained hypnotizer. I've
been doing it for ten years. And you'll be right there with me, because you'll be wearing
a trancap. Ever worn one?"
Orr shook his head.
"You know what they are, though."
The Birth of the Dream Machine
- Dr. Haber explains the evolution of electronic brain stimulation (ESB) from Russian and Israeli origins to mass-produced medical applications.
- The doctor details his development of the 'Augmentor,' a device designed to break the vicious cycle of depression and sleep deprivation.
- The machine works by recording, augmenting, and replaying a patient's own healthy brain-wave impulses to induce specific sleep states.
- Haber successfully cured a severely depressed patient by using the device to regulate and prolong her dreaming sleep.
- George Orr submissively agrees to the treatment, signing a consent form for a combination of hypnosis and electronic induction.
- Haber notes Orr's passive and 'childish' temperament, which triggers a protective yet bullying instinct in the doctor.
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.
"They send a signal through electrodes that stimulates the . . . the brain to go along with
it."
"That's roughly it The Russians have been using it for fifty years, the Israelis refined on
it, we finally climbed aboard and mass-produced it for professional use in calming
psychotic patients and for home use in inducing sleep or alpha trance. Now, I was
working a couple of years ago with a severely depressed patient on OTT at Linnton.
Like many depressives she didn't get much sleep and was particularly short of d-state
sleep, dreaming-sleep; whenever she did enter the d-state she tended to wake up.
Vicious-circle effect: more depressionâless dreams; less dreamsâmore depression.
Break it. How? No drug we have does much to increase d-sleep. ESBâelectronic brain
stimulation? But that involves implanting electrodes, and deep, for the sleep centers;
rather avoid an operation. I was using the trancap on her to encourage sleep. What if you
made the diffuse, low-frequency signal more specific, directed it locally to the specific
area within the brain; oh yes, sure, Dr. Haber, that's a snap! But actually, once I got the
requisite electronics research under my belt, it only took a couple of months to work out
the basic machine. Then I tried stimulating the subject's brain with a recording of brain
waves from a healthy subject in the appropriate states, the various stages of sleep and
dreaming. Not much luck. Found a signal from another brain may or may not pick up a
response in the subject; had to learn to generalize, to make a sort of average, out of
hundreds of normal brain-wave records. 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. Now all that
involved an enormous amount of feedback analysis, so that a simple EEG-plus-trancap
grew into this," and he gestured to the electronic forest behind Orr. He had hidden most
of it behind plastic paneling, for many patients were either scared of machinery or
overidentified with it, but still it took up about a quarter of the office. "That's the Dream
Machine," he said with a grin, "or, prosaically, the Augmentor; and what it'll do for you
is ensure that you do go to sleep and that you dreamâas briefly and lightly, or as long
and intensively, as we like. Oh, incidentally, the depressive patient was discharged from
Linnton this last summer as fully cured." He leaned forward. "Willing to give it a try?"
"Now?"
"What do you want to wait for?"
"But I can't fall asleep at four-thirty in the afternoonâ" Then he looked foolish. Haber
had been digging in the overcrowded drawer of his desk, and now produced a paper, the
Consent to Hypnosis form required by HEW. Orr took the pen Haber held out, signed
the form, and put it submissively down on the desk.
"All right. Good. Now, tell me this, George. Does your dentist use a Hypnotape, or is he
a do-it-yourself man?" 'Tape. I'm 3 on the susceptibility scale." "Right in the middle of
the graph, eh? Well, for suggestion as to dream content to work well, we'll want fairly
deep trance. We don't want a trance dream, but a genuine sleep dream; the Augmentor
will provide that; but we want to be sure the suggestion goes pretty deep. So, to avoid
spending hours in just conditioning you to enter deep trance, we'll use v-c induction.
Ever seen it done?"
Orr shook his head. He looked apprehensive, but he offered no objection. There was an
acceptant, passive quality about him that seemed feminine, or even childish. Haber
recognized in himself a protective/bullying reaction toward this physically slight and
The Mechanics of Dominance
- Dr. Haber utilizes a visual-cutaneous (v-c) induction method to rapidly hypnotize Orr, viewing the patient as an easily dominated subject.
- The narrative explores the neurophysiological distinctions between waking, trance, non-REM sleep (s-state), and vivid dreaming (d-state).
- Haber explains that the 'Augmentor' is designed to bypass the temporal gulf of normal sleep to trigger immediate, emotion-laden dreams.
- The doctor uses a combination of scientific 'patter' and physical manipulation of the vagus nerve and carotid artery to force compliance.
- Haber experiences a distinct thrill of power and professional superiority as he physically and mentally overwhelms his patient.
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 goâ'
compliant man. To dominate, to patronize him was so easy as to be almost irresistible.
"I use it on most patients. It's fast, safe, and sureâby far the best method of inducing
hypnosis, and the least trouble for both hypnotist and subject." Orr would certainly have
heard the scare stories about subjects being brain-damaged or killed by overprolonged or
inept v-c induction, and though such fears did not apply here, Haber must pander to
them and calm them, lest Orr resist the whole induction. So he went on with the patter,
describing the fifty-year history of the v-c induction method and then veering off the
subject of hypnosis altogether, back to the subject of sleep and dreams, in order to get
Orr's attention off the induction process and on to the aim of it. "The gap we have to
bridge, you see, is the gulf that exists between the waking or hypnotized-trance
condition and the dreaming state. That gulf has a common name: sleep. Normal sleep,
the s-state, non-REM sleep, whichever name you like. Now, there are, roughly speaking,
four mental states with which we're concerned: waking, trance, s-sleep, and d-state. If
you look at mentation processes, the s-state, the d-state, and the hypnotic state all have
something in common: sleep, dream, and trance all release the activity of the
subconscious, the undermind; they tend to employ primary-process thinking, while
waking mentation is secondary processârational. But now look at the EEG records of
the four states. Now it's the d-state, the trance, and the waking state that have a lot in
common, while the s-stateâsleepâis utterly different. And you can't get straight from
trance into true d-state dreaming. The s-state must intervene. Normally, you only enter
d-state four or five times a night, every hour or two, and only for a quarter of an hour at
a time. The rest of the time you're in one stage or another of normal sleep. And there
you'll dream, but usually not vividly; mentation in s-sleep is like an engine idling, a kind
of steady muttering of images and thoughts. What we're after are the vivid, emotion-
laden, memorable dreams of the d-state. Our hypnosis plus the Augmentor will ensure
that we get them, get across the neurophysiological and temporal gulf of sleep, right into
dreaming. So we'll need you on the couch here. My field was pioneered by Dement,
Aserinsky, Berger, Oswald, Hartmann, and the rest, but the couch we get straight from
Papa Freud. . . . But we use it to sleep on, which he objected to. Now, what I want, just
for a starter, is for you to sit down here on the foot of the couch. Yes, that's it. You'll be
there a while, so make yourself comfortable. You said you'd tried autohypnosis, didn't
you? All right, Just go ahead and use the techniques you used for that. How about deep
breathing? Count ten while you inhale, hold for five; yes, right, excellent. Would you
mind looking up at the ceiling, straight up over your head. O.K., right."
As Orr obediently tipped his head back, Haber, close beside him, reached out quickly
and quietly and put his left hand behind the man's head, pressing firmly with thumb and
one finger behind and below each ear; at the same time with right thumb and finger he
pressed hard on the bared throat, just below the soft, blond beard, where the vagus nerve
and carotid artery run. He was aware of the fine, sallow skin under his fingers; he felt
the first startled movement of protest, then saw the clear eyes closing. 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 goâ"
The Augmentor and the Trance
- Dr. Haber successfully induces a deep hypnotic state in George Orr within minutes.
- The doctor establishes a physical trigger on Orr's throat to ensure immediate future compliance.
- Haber fits Orr with a modified 'trancap' featuring electrodes to monitor and record brain activity.
- The EEG reveals that Orr possesses a remarkably complex and diverse brain pattern rather than a simple or schizoid one.
- Haber views the brain's electrical impulses as a form of entertainment, calling it the 'All-Night Movie' on 'Channel One.'
- The ultimate goal is to utilize the Augmentor computer to analyze and manipulate Orr's unique mental state.
It was a scene he never tired of, the All-Night Movie, the show on Channel One.
And Orr fell backward on the couch like a man shot dead, his right hand dropping lax
from his side.
Haber knelt by him at once, keeping his right hand lightly on the pressure spots and
never stopping the quiet, quick flow of suggestion. "You're in trance now, not asleep but
deeply in hypnotic trance, and you will not come out of it and awaken until I tell you to
do so. You're in trance now, and going deeper all the time into trance, but you can still
hear my voice and follow my instructions. After this, whenever I simply touch you on
the throat as I'm doing now, you'll enter the hypnotic trance at once." He repeated the
instructions, and went on. "Now when I tell you to open your eyes you'll do so, and see a
crystal ball floating in front of you. I want you to fix your attention on it closely, and as
you do so you will continue to go deeper into trance. Now open your eyes, yes, good,
and tell me when you see the crystal ball."
The light eyes, now with a curious inward gaze, looked past Haber at nothing. "Now,"
the hypnotized man said very softly.
"Good. Keep gazing at it, and breathing regularly; soon you'll be in very deep
trance. . . ."
Haber glanced up at the clock. The whole business had only taken a couple of minutes.
Good; he didn't like to waste time on means, getting to the desired end was the thing.
While Orr lay staring at his imaginary crystal ball, Haber got up and began fitting him
with the modified trancap, constantly removing and replacing it to readjust the tiny
electrodes and position them on the scalp under the thick, light-brown hair. He spoke
often and softly, repeating suggestions and occasionally asking bland questions so that
Orr would not drift off into sleep yet and would stay in rapport. As soon as the cap was
in place he switched on the EEG, and for a while he watched it, to see what this brain
looked like.
Eight of the cap's electrodes went to the EEG; inside the machine, eight pens scored a
permanent record of the brain's electrical activity. On the screen which Haber watched,
the impulses were reproduced directly, jittering white scribbles on dark gray. He could
isolate and enlarge one, or superimpose one on another, at will. It was a scene he never
tired of, the All-Night Movie, the show on Channel One.
There were none of the sigmoid jags he looked for, the concomitant of certain schizoid
personality types. There was nothing unusual about the total pattern, except its diversity.
A simple brain produces a relatively simple jig-jog set of patterns and is content to
repeat them; this was not a simple brain. Its motions were subtle and complex, and the
repetitions neither frequent nor unvaried. The computer of the Augmentor would analyze
The Mechanics of Dreaming
- Dr. Haber uses hypnotic suggestion and a trigger word to induce a specific dream state in his patient, George Orr.
- The Augmentor machine monitors and records Orr's brain activity, transitioning from waking alpha waves to deep sleep stages.
- Haber attempts to influence the content of Orr's dream by suggesting a vivid image of a galloping horse.
- The patient enters 'd-sleep' rapidly, showing physical signs of dreaming such as rapid eye movement and theta rhythms.
- Upon waking, Orr confirms the success of the suggestion by identifying the horse from a mural in the office as his dream subject.
- The experiment demonstrates Haber's ability to manipulate and amplify the brain's own emissions during the dreaming process.
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.
them, but until he saw the analysis Haber could isolate no singular factor except the
complexity itself.
On commanding the patient to cease seeing the crystal ball and close his eyes, he
obtained almost at once a strong, clear alpha trace at 12 cycles. He played about a little
more with the brain, getting records for the computer and testing hypnotic depth, and
then said, "Now, Johnâ" No, what the hell was the subject's name? "George. Now
you're going to go to sleep in a minute. You're going to go sound asleep and dream; but
you won't go to sleep until I say the word 'Antwerp'; when I say that, you'll go to sleep,
and sleep until I say your name three times. Now when you sleep, you're going to have a
dream, a good dream. One clear, pleasant dream. Not a bad dream at all, a pleasant one,
but very clear and vivid. You'll be sure to remember it when you wake up. It will be
aboutâ" He hesitated a moment; he hadn't planned anything, relying on inspiration.
"About a horse. A big bay horse galloping in a field. Running around. Maybe you'll ride
the horse, or catch him, or maybe just watch him. But the dream will be about a horse. A
vividâ" what was the word the patient had used?â" effective dream about a horse.
After that you won't dream anything else; and when I speak your name three times you'll
wake up feeling calm and rested. Now, I am going to send you to sleep by ... saying . . .
Antwerp."
Obedient, the little dancing lines on the screen began to change. They grew stronger and
slower; soon the sleep spindles of stage 2 sleep began to appear, and a hint of the long,
deep delta rhythm of stage 4. 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.
The Augmentor had got a full record of the waking brain's patterns; now it was
recording and analyzing the s-sleep patterns; soon it would be picking up the beginning
of the patient's d-sleep patterns, and would be able even within this first dream to feed
them back to the sleeping brain, amplifying its own emissions. Indeed it might be doing
so now. Haber had expected a wait, but the hypnotic suggestion, plus the patient's long
semi-deprivation of dreams, were putting him into the d-state at once: no sooner had he
reached stage 2 than he began the re-ascent. The slowly swaying lines on the screen
jittered once here and there; jigged again; began to quicken and dance, taking on a rapid,
unsynchronized rhythm. Now the pons was active, and the trace from the hippocampus
showed a five-second cycle, the theta rhythm, which had not showed up clearly in this
subject. The fingers moved a little; the eyes under closed lids moved, watching; the lips
parted for a deep breath. The sleeper dreamed.
It was 5:06.
At 5:11 Haber pressed the black OFF button on the Augmentor. At 5:12, noticing the
deep jags and spindles of s-sleep reappearing, he leaned over the patient and said his
name clearly thrice.
Orr sighed, moved his arm in a wide, loose gesture, opened his eyes, and wakened.
Haber detached the electrodes from his scalp in a few deft motions. "Feel O.K.?" he
asked, genial and assured.
"Fine."
"And you dreamed. That much I can tell you. Can you tell me the dream?"
"A horse," Orr said huskily, still bewildered by sleep. He sat up. "It was about a horse.
That one," and he waved his hand toward the picture-window-size mural that decorated
Haber's office, a photograph of the great racing stallion Tammany Hall at play in a
grassy paddock.
"What did you dream about it?" Haber said, pleased. He had not been sure
hypnosuggestion would work on dream content in a first hypnosis.
The Shifting Mural
- George Orr confronts Dr. Haber about a mural in the office that seemingly transformed from a mountain landscape into a horse following Orr's dream.
- Dr. Haber experiences a moment of internal panic and cognitive dissonance as he realizes the reality of the room has indeed changed, though he quickly suppresses it.
- To maintain his professional authority and sanity, Haber gaslights Orr by insisting the picture has always been of the horse Tammany Hall.
- Orr reveals his unique burden of 'double memory,' where he remembers both the original reality and the new one created by his effective dreaming.
- Haber diagnoses Orr as psychotic to rationalize the anomaly and prescribes medication to suppress the potency of his dreams.
- The encounter ends with the unsettling observation that the newly manifested horse bears a striking physical resemblance to Dr. Haber himself.
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
"It was. ... I was walking in this field, and it was off in the distance for a while. Then it
came galloping at me, and after a while I realized it was going to run me down. I wasn't
scared at all, though. I figured perhaps I could catch its bridle, or swing up and ride it. I
knew that actually it couldn't hurt me because it was the horse in your picture, not a real
one. It was all a sort of game. . . . Dr. Haber, does anything about that picture strike you
as ... as unusual?"
"Well, some people find it overdramatic for a shrink's office, a bit overwhelming. A life-
size sex symbol right opposite the couch!" He laughed.
"Was it there an hour ago? I mean, wasn't that a view of Mount Hood, when I came inâ
before I dreamed about the horse?"
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
It had been a mountain
A horse it was a horse it wasâ
He was staring at George Orr, staring blankly at him, several seconds must have passed
since Orr's question, he must not be caught out, he must inspire confidence, he knew the
answers.
"George, do you remember the picture there as being a photograph of Mount Hood?"
"Yes," Orr said in his rather sad but unshaken way. "I do. It was. Snow on it."
"Mhm," Haber nooded judicially, pondering. The awful chill at the pit of his chest had
passed. "You don't?"
The man's eyes, so elusive in color yet clear and direct in gaze: they were the eyes of a
psychotic.
"No, I'm afraid I don't. It's Tammany Hall, the triple-winner back in '89. I miss the races,
it's a shame the way the lower species get crowded out by our food problems. Of course
a horse is the perfect anachronism, but I like the picture; it has vigor, strengthâtotal
self-realization in animal terms. It's a sort of ideal of what a psychiatrist strives to
achieve in human psychological terms, a symbol. It's the source of my suggestion of
your dream content, of course, I happened to be looking at it. . .." Haber glanced
sidelong at the mural. Of course it was the horse. "But listen, if you want a third opinion
we'll ask Miss Crouch; she's worked here two years."
"She'll say it always was a horse," Orr said calmly but ruefully. "It always was. Since my
dream. Always has been. I thought that maybe, since you suggested the dream to me,
you might have the double memory, like me. But I guess you don't." But his eyes, no
longer downcast, looked again at Haber with that clarity, that forbearance, that quiet and
despairing plea for help.
The man was sick. He must be cured. "I'd like you to come again, George, and tomorrow
if possible."
"Well, I workâ"
"Get off an hour early, and come here at four. You're under VTT. Tell your boss, and
don't feel any false shame about it At one time or another 82 per cent of the population
gets VTT, not to mention the 31 per cent that gets OTT. So be here at four and we'll get
to work. We're going to get somewhere with this, you know. Now, here's a prescription
for meprobamate; it'll keep your dreams low-keyed without suppressing the d-state
entirely. You can refill it at the autodrug every three days. If you have a dream, or any
other experience that frightens you, call me, day or night. But I doubt you will, using
that; and if you're willing to work hard at this with me, you won't be needing any drug
much longer. You'll have this whole problem with your dreams licked, and be out in the
clear. Right?"
Orr took the IBM prescription card. "It would be a relief," he said. He smiled, a
tentative, unhappy, yet not humorless smile. "Another thing about the horse," he said.
Haber, a head taller, stared down at him.
"It looks like you," Orr said.
Haber looked up quickly at the mural. It did. Big, healthy, hairy, reddish-brown, bearing
down at a full gallopâ
The Lathe of Heaven
- Dr. Haber experiences a moment of unease after a patient suggests a dream horse resembled him, highlighting a growing tension in their dynamic.
- The narrative introduces a philosophical warning from Chuang Tse regarding the 'lathe of heaven' and the dangers of over-extending human reason.
- George Orr navigates a dystopian Portland characterized by extreme overpopulation, where subway commuters are physically suspended by the pressure of the crowd.
- Global warming has fundamentally altered the geography and climate, turning Portland into a permanent, tepid 'downpour of warm soup' with 114 inches of annual rain.
- The shift in habitable zones has moved the 'New Cities' to former deserts, leaving older urban centers like Portland to rot in a state of 'pervading foulness.'
- International tensions persist in this bleak future, evidenced by headlines regarding nuclear strikes and military intervention near the Afghan border.
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).
"Perhaps the horse in your dream resembled me?" he asked, shrewdly genial.
"Yes, it did," the patient said.
When he was gone, Haber sat down and looked up uneasily at the mural photograph of
Tammany Hall. It really was too big for the office. Goddamn but he wished he could
afford an office with a window with a view!
3
Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by
learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let
understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot
do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.
âChuang Tse: XXIII
George Orr left work at 3:30 and walked to the subway station; he had no car. By
saving, he might have afforded a VW Steamer and the mileage tax on it, but what for?
Downtown was closed to automobiles, and he lived downtown. He had learned to drive,
back in the eighties, but had never owned a car. He rode the Vancouver subway back
into Portland. The trains were already jam-packed; 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). A man next to him holding a newspaper had never been able to
lower his arms, but stood with his face muffled in the sports section. The headline,
"BIG A-l STRIKE NEAR AFGHAN BORDER," and the subhead, "Threat of
Afghan Intervention," stared Orr eye to I for six stops. The newspaper-holder fought his
way off and was replaced by a couple of tomatoes on a green plastic plate, beneath
which was an old lady in a green plastic coat, who stood on Orr's left foot for three more
stops.
He struggled off at the East Broadway stop, and shoved along for four blocks through
the ever-thickening off-work crowd to Willamette East Tower, a great, showy, shoddy
shaft of concrete and glass competing with vegetable obstinacy for light and air with the
jungle of similar buildings all around it. Very little light and air got down to street level;
what there was was warm and full of fine rain. Rain was an old Portland tradition, but
the warmthâ70° F. on the second of Marchâwas modern, a result of air pollution.
Urban and industrial effluvia had not been controlled soon enough to reverse the
cumulative trends already at work in the mid-Twentieth Century; it would take several
centuries for the CO2 to clear out of the air, if it ever did. New York was going to be one
of the larger casualties of the Greenhouse Effect, as the polar ice kept melting and the
sea kept rising; indeed all Boswash was imperiled. There were some compensations. San
Francisco Bay was already on the rise, and would end up covering all the hundreds of
square miles of landfill and garbage dumped into it since 1848. As for Portland, with
eighty miles and the Coast Range between it and the sea, it was not threatened by rising
water: only by falling water.
It had always rained in western Oregon, but now it rained ceaselessly, steadily, tepidly. It
was like living in a downpour of warm soup, forever.
The New CitiesâUmatilla, John Day, French Glenâ were east of the Cascades, in what
had been desert thirty years before. It was fiercely hot there still in summer, but it rained
only 45 inches a year, compared with Portland's 114 inches. Intensive farming was
possible: the desert blossomed. French Glen now had a population of 7 million.
Portland, with only 3 million and no growth potential, had been left far behind in the
March of Progress. That was nothing new for Portland. And what difference did it
make? Undernourishment, overcrowding, and pervading foulness of the environment
The Palace of Dreams
- George Orr observes the decaying state of the world, marked by disease in Old Cities and systemic violence in New Cities.
- Orr visits Dr. Haber, noting that the doctor's office is filled with synthetic materials and lacks genuine substance.
- Dr. Haber is characterized as a man with a real desire to help, yet one who is fundamentally disconnected from the reality of others.
- The dialogue reveals a complex geopolitical landscape where shifting alliances like the 'Isragypts' struggle with spreading global warfare.
- Orr submits to Haber's psychiatric treatment, reflecting his own passivity and tendency to trust the authority of others over his own instincts.
- The session concludes with Orr waking from a dream-state, disoriented by the transition back to the physical world.
The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.
were the norm. There was more scurvy, typhus, and hepatitis in the Old Cities, more
gang violence, crime, and murder in the New Cities. The rats ran one and the Mafia ran
the other. George Orr stayed in Portland because he had always lived there and because
he had no reason to believe that life anywhere else would be better, or different.
Miss Crouch, smiling uninterestedly, showed him right in. Orr had thought that
psychiatrists' offices, like rabbit holes, always had a front and a back door. This one
didn't, but he doubled that patients were likely to run into one another coming and going,
here. Up at the Medical School they had said that Dr. Haber had only a small psychiatric
practice, being essentially a research man. That had given him the notion of someone
successful and exclusive, and the doctor's jovial, masterful manner had confirmed it. But
today, less nervous, he saw more. The office didn't have the platinum-and-leather
assurance of financial success, nor the rag-and-bottle assurance of scientific disinterest.
The chairs and couch were vinyl, the desk was metal plasticoated with a wood finish.
Nothing whatever was genuine. Dr. Haber, white-toothed, bay-maned, huge, boomed
out, "Good afternoon!"
That geniality was not faked, but it was exaggerated. There was a warmth to the man, an
outgoingness, which was real; but it had got plasticoated with professional mannerisms,
distorted by the doctor's unspontaneous use of himself. Orr felt in him a wish to be liked
and a desire to be helpful; the doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else
existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them. He boomed "Good afternoon!"
so loud because he was never sure he would get an answer. Orr wanted to say something
friendly, but nothing personal seemed suitable; he said, "It looks as if Afghanistan might
get into the war."
"Mhm, that's been in the cards since last August." He should have known that the doctor
would be better informed on world affairs than himself; he was generally semi-informed
and three weeks out of date. "I don't think that'll shake the Allies," Haber went on,
"unless it pulls Pakistan in on the Iranian side. Then India may have to send in more than
token support to the Isragypts." That was teleglot for the New Arab Republic/Israel
alliance. "I think Gupta's speech in Delhi shows that he's preparing for that eventuality."
"It keeps spreading," Orr said, feeling inadequate and despondent. "The war, I mean."
"Does it worry you?"
"Doesn't it worry you?"
"Irrelevant," said the doctor, smiling his broad, hairy, bear's smile, like a big bear-god;
but he was still wary, since yesterday.
"Yes, it worries me." But Haber had not earned that answer; the questioner cannot
withdraw himself from the question, assuming objectivityâas if the answers were an
object. Orr did not speak these thoughts, however; he was in a doctor's hands, and surely
the doctor knew what he was doing.
Orr had a tendency to assume that people knew what they were doing, perhaps because
he generally assumed that he did not.
"Sleep well?" Haber inquired, sitting down under the left rear hoof of Tammany Hall.
"Fine, thanks."
"How do you feel about another go in the Palace of Dreams?" He was watching keenly.
"Sure, that's what I'm here for, I guess."
He saw Haber rise and come around the desk, he saw the large hand come out toward his
neck, and then nothing happened.
". . . George . . ."
His name. Who called? No voice he know. Dry land, dry air, the crash of a strange voice
in his ear. Daylight, and no direction. No way back. He woke.
The half-familiar room; the half-familiar, big man, in his voluminous russet gernreich,
with his red-brown beard, and white smile, and opaque dark eyes. "It looked like a short
dream but a lively one, on the EEG," said the deep voice. "Let's have it. Sooner the
recall, the completer it is."
The Power of Suggestion
- George Orr recounts a bizarre dream involving a stable and a pile of manure that resembles a local mountain.
- The mural in Dr. Haber's office has physically changed to match the brown and reddish tones of Orr's dream.
- Dr. Haber appears to have no memory of the previous reality, existing entirely within the newly created timeline.
- Haber expresses excitement over Orr's ability to 'dream to order' using the Augmentor device.
- Orr feels vulnerable and exploited as Haber celebrates the 'infinite' creative resources of the human brain.
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.
Orr sat up, feeling rather dizzy. He was on the couch, how had he got there? "Let's see. It
wasn't much. The horse again. Did you tell me to dream of the horse again, when I was
hypnotized?"
Haber shook his head, meaning neither yes nor no, and listened.
"Well, this was a stable. This room. Straw and a manger and a pitchfork in the corner,
and so on. The horse was in it. He . . ."
Haber's expectant silence permitted no evasion.
"He did this tremendous pile of shit. Brown, steaming. Horseshit. It looked kind of like
Mount Hood, with that little hump on the north side and everything. It was all over the
rug, and sort of encroaching on me, so I said, 'It's only the picture of the mountain.' Then
I guess I started to wake up."
Orr raised his face, looking past Dr. Haber at the mural behind him, the wall-sized
photograph of Mount Hood.
It was a serene picture in rather muted, arty tones: the sky gray, the mountain a soft
brown or reddish-brown, with speckles of white near the summit, and the foreground all
dusky, formless treetops.
The doctor was not looking at the mural. He was watching Orr with those keen, opaque
eyes. He laughed when Orr was done, not long or loudly, but perhaps a little excitedly.
"We're getting somewhere, George!"
"Where?"
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. He felt exposed,
used. And to what end?
Evidently the doctor had no memory at all of the horse-mural, nor of the conversation
they had had concerning it; he was altogether in this new present, and all his memories
led to it. So he could not do any good at all. But be was striding up and down the office
now, talking even louder than usual. "Well! (a) you can and do dream to order, you
follow the hypnosuggestions; (b) you respond splendidly to the Augmentor. Therefore
we can work together, fast and efficiently, without narcosis. I'd rather work without
drugs. What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any
response it can make to chemical stimulation; that's why I developed the Augmentor, to
provide the brain a means of self-stimulation. The creative and therapeutic resources of
the brainâwhether waking or sleeping or dreamingâare practically infinite. If we can
The Burden of Effective Dreams
- Dr. Haber encourages George Orr to embrace and creatively employ his mental powers rather than suppressing them through drugs or avoidance.
- Orr experiences a profound sense of isolation when he realizes Haber does not explicitly confirm the reality-altering nature of his dreams.
- The protagonist struggles with the paradoxical state of knowing he is both insane and sane, a tension that threatens his actual mental stability.
- Orr requests a posthypnotic suggestion to stop 'dreaming effectively' as a way to escape his dependency on narcotics.
- Haber dismisses the idea of suppression and pivots the conversation toward the psychology of daydreams and 'Messiah' fantasies.
- The dynamic reveals a disconnect between Orr's fear of his world-changing power and Haber's ambition to harness that power for 'doing good'.
No way out. Orr was where he had been for monthsâalone: knowing he was insane and knowing he was not insane, simultaneously and intensely.
just find the keys to all the locks. The power of dreaming alone is quite undreamt of!"
He laughed his big laugh, he had made that little joke many times. Orr smiled
uncomfortably, it struck a bit close to home. "I am sure now that your therapy lies in this
direction, to use your dreams, not to evade and avoid them. To face your fear and, with
my help, see it through. You're afraid of your own mind, George, That's a fear no man
can live with. But you don't have to. You haven't seen the help your own mind can give
you, the ways you can use it, employ it creatively. All you need to do is not to hide from
your own mental powers, not to suppress them, but to release them. This we can do
together. Now, doesn't that strike you as right, as the right thing to do?"
"I don't know," Orr said.
When Haber spoke of using, employing his mental powers, he had thought for a moment
that the doctor must mean his power of changing reality by dreaming; but surely if he'd
meant that he would have said it clearly? Knowing that Orr desperately needed
confirmation, he would not causelessly withhold it if he could give it.
Orr's heart sank. The use of narcotics and pep pills had left him emotionally off-balance;
he knew that, and therefore kept trying to combat and control his feelings. But this
disappointment was beyond his control. He had, he now realized, allowed himself a little
hope. He had been sure, yesterday, that the doctor was aware of the change from
mountain to horse. It hadn't surprised or alarmed him that Haber tried to hide his
awareness, in the first shock; no doubt he had been unable to admit it even to himself, to
encompass it. It had taken Orr himself a long time to bring himself to face the fact that
he was doing something impossible. Yet he had let himself hope that Haber, knowing the
dream, and being there as it was dreamed, at the center, might see the change, might
remember and confirm.
No good. No way out. Orr was where he had been for monthsâalone: knowing he was
insane and knowing he was not insane, simultaneously and intensely. It was enough to
drive him insane.
"Would it be possible," he said diffidently, "for you to give me a posthypnotic
suggestion not to dream effectively? Since you can suggest that I do. . . . That way I
could get off drugs, at least for a while."
Haber settled down behind his desk, hunched like a bear. "I very much doubt it would
work, even through one night," he said quite simply. And then suddenly booming again,
"Isn't that the same fruitless direction you've been trying to go, George? Drugs or
hypnosis, it's still suppression. You can't run away from your own mind. You see that,
but you're not quite willing yet to face it. That's all right. Look at it this way: twice now
you've dreamed, right here, on that couch. Was it so bad? Did it do any harm?"
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 funâso 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
daydreamsâa 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
The Price of Dreams
- George Orr expresses a desire for escape from urban overcrowding and the relentless pressure of modern headlines.
- The dialogue reveals a stark economic reality where natural land has become an impossibly expensive luxury for the average person.
- Dr. Haber maintains strict control over the hypnotic process, refusing Orr's request for conscious recall of his suggestions.
- Haber uses a paternalistic and authoritative tone to ensure Orr's compliance, despite Orr's underlying hesitation.
- Orr's dream of President Kennedy and a change in weather suggests his subconscious is beginning to alter external reality.
- The session concludes with Orr feeling physically and mentally exhausted by the manipulative nature of the therapy.
Orr did not entirely believe him, but he was an uncontradictable as a preacher; and besides, he wished he could believe him,
rescued the pneumatic virgin from the sinking ship, or written Beethoven's Tenth
Symphony for him. Which style do you favor?"
"Ohâescape," 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 consideredâand 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. Thatâthe dream
âI 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 upâI saw him in profile, like the
old fifty-cent piecesâand 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."
The Exhaustion of Effective Dreams
- Dr. Haber proposes switching to nighttime sessions to increase the frequency of hypnotic dream suggestion.
- Orr experiences a physical and mental toll from 'effective' dreams, feeling broken and abraded by the effort.
- The protagonist notes that his dreams are becoming more frequent and intense under the influence of the Augmentor.
- A shift in the weather occurs after a dream about Kennedy, though Orr is unsure if he or the doctor caused it.
- Orr suffers from increasing dizziness and fatigue as he navigates the crowded city and subway system.
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.
"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
The Weight of the River
- The narrator reflects on the inherent perversity of tunneling under a river, viewing it as a wrong turn in human engineering.
- Portland's Willamette River is described as a 'docile draft animal,' heavily controlled by concrete banks and flood systems.
- George Orr experiences a crushing psychological and physical weight while traveling through the 'infrafluvial dark' of the Broadway Tunnel.
- The transit system is characterized as a decaying, noisy relic built hastily during the collapse of the private car economy.
- Orr struggles with the nature of his own consciousness, questioning why he cannot recall his experiences under hypnosis.
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.
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.
There were nine train and truck tunnels under the Willamette, sixteen bridges across it,
and concrete banks along it for twenty-seven miles. Flood control on both it and its great
confluent the Columbia, a few miles downstream from central Portland, was so highly
developed that neither river could rise more than five inches even after the most
prolonged torrential rains. The Willamette was a useful element of the environment, like
a very large, docile draft animal harnessed with straps, chains, shafts, saddles, bits,
girths, hobbles. If it hadn't been useful of course it would have been concreted over, like
the hundreds of little creeks and streams that ran in darkness down from the hills of the
city under the streets and buildings. But without it, Portland would not have been a port;
the ships, the long strings of barges, the big rafts of lumber still came up and down it. So
the trucks and trains and the few private cars had to go over the river or under it. Above
the heads of those now riding the GPRT train in the Broadway Tunnel were tons of
rock and gravel, tons of water running, the piles of wharves and the keels of ocean-
going ships, the huge concrete supports of elevated freeway bridges and approaches, a
convoy of steamer trucks laden with frozen battery-produced chickens, one jet plane at
34,000 feet, the stars at 4.3+ light-years. George Orr, pale in the flickering fluorescent
glare of the train car in the infrafluvial dark, swayed as he stood holding a swaying steel
handle on a strap among a thousand other souls. 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.
The smash and jostle of people getting off at the Union Station stop knocked this
sententious notion out of his mind; he concentrated wholly on keeping hold of the
handle on the strap. Still feeling giddy, he was afraid that if he lost hold and had to
submit entirely to force (c), he might get sick.
The train started up again with a noise evenly compounded of deep abrasive roars and
high piercing screams.
The whole GPRT system was only fifteen years old, but it had been built late and hastily,
with inferior materials, during, not before, the crack-up of the private car economy. In
fact the train cars had been built in Detroit; and they lasted like it, and sounded like it. A
city man and subway rider, Orr did not even hear the appalling noise. His aural nerve
endings were in fact considerably dulled in sensitivity though he was only thirty, and La
any case the noise was merely the usual background of the nightmare. He was thinking
again, having established his claim to the handle of the strap.
Ever since he had got interested in the subject perforce, the mind's lack of recall of most
dreams had puzzled him. Nonconscious thinking, whether in infancy or in dream,
apparently is not available to conscious recall. But was he unconscious during hypnosis?
Not at all: wide awake, until told to sleep. Why could he not remember, then? It worried
The Weight of Validation
- Orr realizes that Dr. Haber witnessed the reality-altering effects of his dream, confirming he is not insane.
- His sudden surge of joy and relief physically radiates outward, momentarily easing the suffering of those around him on the subway.
- Orr's cognitive process is described as 'slogging' and 'plodding,' feeling connections like a plumber rather than using abstract logic.
- Back at his apartment, Orr questions why Haber withheld the truth about the effectiveness of the dreams if he truly intended to help.
- Orr speculates that Haber may be frightened by the power of the dreams and is cautiously gathering more information.
- Despite the validation, Orr remains deeply anxious about the ethics and consequences of his power, wishing only for it to stop.
He did not see connections, which is said to be the hallmark of intellect. He felt connectionsâlike a plumber.
him. He wanted to know what Haber was doing. The first dream this afternoon, for
example: Had the doctor merely told him to dream about the horse again? And he
himself had added the horseshit, which was embarrassing. Or, if the doctor had specified
the horseshit, that was embarrassing in a different way. And perhaps Haber was lucky
that he hadn't ended up with a big brown steaming pile of manure on the office
carpeting. In a sense, of course, he had: the picture of the mountain.
Orr stood upright as if he had been goosed, as the train screamed into Alder Street
Station. The mountain, he thought, as sixty-eight people pushed and shoved and scraped
past him to the doors. The mountain. He told me to put back the mountain in my dream.
So I had the horse put back the mountain. But if he told me to put back the mountain
then he knew it had been there before the horse. He knew. He did see the first dream
change reality. He saw the change. He believes me. I am not insane!
So great a joy filled Orr that, among the forty-two persons who had been jamming into
the car as he thought these things, the seven or eight pressed closest to him felt a slight
but definite glow of benevolence or relief. The woman who had failed to get his strap
handle away from him felt a blessed surcease of the sharp pain in her corn; the man
squashed against him on the left thought suddenly of sunlight; the old man sitting
crouched directly in front of him forgot, for a little, that he was hungry.
Orr was not a fast reasoner. In fact, he was not a reasoner. He arrived at ideas the slow
way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of
imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence. He did not
see connections, which is said to be the hallmark of intellect. He felt connectionsâlike a
plumber. He was not really a stupid man, but he did not use his brains half as much as he
might have done, or half as fast. It was not until he had got off the subway at Ross Island
Bridge West, and had walked up the hill several blocks and taken the elevator eighteen
floors to his one-room 8-1/2 X 11 flat in the twenty-story independent-income steel-and-
sleazy-concrete Corbett Condominium (Budget Living in Style Down Town!), and had
put a soybean loaf slice in the infrabake, and had taken a beer out of the wallfridge, and
had stood some while at his windowâhe paid double for an outside roomâ looking up
at the West Hills of Portland crammed with huge glittering towers, heavy with lights and
life, that he thought at last: Why didn't Dr. Haber tell me that he knows I dream
effectively?
He mulled over this a while. He slogged around it, tried to lift it, found it very bulky.
He thought: Haber knows, now, that the mural has changed twice. Why didn't he say
anything? He must know I was afraid of being insane. He says he's helping me. It would
have helped a lot if he'd told me that he can see what I see, told me that it's not just
delusion.
He knows now, Orr thought after a long slow swallow of beer, that it's stopped raining.
He didn't go to see, though, when I told him it had. Maybe he was afraid to. That's
probably it. He's scared by this whole thing and wants to find out more before he tells
me what he really thinks about it. Well, I can't blame him. If he weren't scared of it, that
would be the odd thing.
But I wonder, once he gets used to the idea, what he'll do ... I wonder how he'll stop my
dreams, how he'll keep me from changing things. I've got to stop; this is far enough, far
enoughâŚ
He shook his head and turned away from the bright, life-encrusted hills.
4
Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection
is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious
inmost quality of Being.
âH. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia
The Fossilized Parking Structure
- The law office is housed in a repurposed 1973 parking garage, a relic of an era when downtown Portland was dominated by automobile infrastructure.
- The building's architecture retains a disorienting helical slant and the lingering scent of gasoline, symbolizing a fossilized past.
- Miss Lelache, a cynical lawyer, views her new client as a 'born victim'âa meek, stuttering man she finds revoltingly simple.
- The client is under Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment (VTT) for drug-related infractions, a program designed to avoid criminal prosecution.
- The legal dispute centers on whether hypnotically induced dreaming ordered by a psychiatrist constitutes an unconstitutional invasion of privacy.
- Lelache warns that challenging government-referred psychiatrists is dangerous and could lead to 'Obligatory Therapy' in a mental hospital or jail.
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.
The law office of Forman, Esserbeck, Goodhue and Rutti was in a 1973 automobile
parking structure, converted to human use. Many of the older buildings of downtown
Portland were of this lineage. At one time indeed most of downtown Portland had
consisted of places to park automobiles. At first these had mostly been plains of asphalt
punctuated by paybooths or parking meters, but as the population went up, so had they.
Indeed the automatic-elevator parking structure had been invented in Portland, long long
ago; and before the private car strangled in its own exhaust, ramp-style parking
buildings had gone up to fifteen and twenty stories. Not all these had been torn down
since the eighties to make room for high-rise office and apartment buildings; some had
been converted. This one, 209 S.W. Burnside, still smelled of ghostly gasoline fumes. 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. All the floors had a curious
slant, a skewness, due to the basic helical-ramp construction of the building; in the
offices of Forman, Esserbeck, Goodhue and Rutti, one was never entirely convinced that
one was standing quite upright.
Miss Lelache sat behind the screen of bookcases and files that semi-separated her semi-
office from Mr. Pearl's semi-office, and thought of herself as a Black Widow.
There she sat, poisonous; hard, shiny, and poisonous; waiting, waiting.
And the victim came.
A born victim. Hair like a little girl's, brown and fine, little blond beard; soft white skin
like a fish's belly; meek, mild, stuttering. Shit! If she stepped on him he wouldn't even
crunch.
"Well I, I think it's a, it's a matter of, of rights of privacy sort of," he was saying.
"Invasion of privacy, I mean. But I'm not sure. That's why I wanted advice."
"Well. Shoot," said Miss Lelache. The victim could not shoot. His stuttering pipe had
dried up.
"You're under Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment," Miss Lelache said, referring to the note
Mr. Esserbeck had sent in previously, "for infraction of Federal regulations controlling
dispensation of medications at autodrugstores."
"Yes. If I agree to psychiatric treatment I won't get prosecuted."
"That's the gist of it, yes," the lawyer said dryly. The man struck her as not exactly
feeble-minded, but revoltingly simple. She cleared her throat.
He cleared his throat. Monkey see, monkey do. Gradually, with a lot of backing and
filling, he explained that he was undergoing a therapy which consisted essentially of
hypnotically induced sleep and dreaming. He felt that the psychiatrist, by ordering him
to dream certain dreams, might be infringing upon his rights of privacy as defined in the
New Federal Constitution of 1984.
"Well. Something like this came up last year in Arizona," said Miss Lelache. "Man under
VTT tried to sue his therapist for implanting homosexual tendencies in him. Of course
the shrink was simply using standard conditioning techniques, and the plaintiff actually
was a terrific repressed homo; he got arrested "for trying to bugger a twelve-year-old
boy in broad daylight in the middle of Phoenix Park, before the case even got to court
He wound up in Obligatory Therapy in Tehachapi. Well. What I'm getting at is that
you've got to be cautious in making this sort of allegation. Most psychiatrists who get
Government referrals are cautious men themselves, respectable practitioners. Now if you
can provide any instance, any occurrence, that might serve as real evidence; but mere
suspicions won't do. In fact, they might land you in Obligatory, that's the Mental
Hospital in Linnton, or in jail."
"Could they . . . maybe just give me another psychiatrist?"
The Dreams of Reality
- Miss Lelache, a lawyer specializing in privacy rights, warns her client that challenging a doctor's authority is nearly impossible for someone labeled a 'mental case.'
- The client, George Orr, reveals his desperate situation: he believes his dreams have the power to alter reality, a claim he knows sounds insane.
- Orr explains that Dr. Haber is using a sophisticated machine to force him into an intensified dream state (the 'd-state') through hypnotic suggestion.
- While Orr believes Haberâs motives are high-minded, he feels his autonomy is being violated as the doctor dictates the content of his dreams.
- Lelache remains skeptical of the supernatural claims but looks for a legal angle, such as whether the doctor is conditioning the patient to perform immoral acts.
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.
"Well. Not without real cause. The Medical School referred you to this Haber; and
they're good, up there, you know. If you brought a complaint against Haber the men who
heard it as specialists would very likely be Med School men, probably the same ones
that interviewed you. They won't take a patient's word against a doctor's with no
evidence. Not in this kind of case."
"A mental case," the client said sadly.
"Exactly."
He said nothing for a while. At last he raised his eyes to hers, clear, light eyes, a look
without anger and without hope; he smiled and said, "Thank you very much, Miss
Lelache. I'm sorry to have wasted your time."
"Well, wait!" she said. He might be simple, but he certainly didn't look crazy; he didn't
even look neurotic. He just looked desperate. "You don't have to give up quite so easily.
I didn't say that you have no case. You say that you do want to get off drugs, and that Dr.
Haber is giving you a heavier dose of phenobarb, now, than you were taking on your
own; that might warrant investigation. Though I strongly doubt it. But defense of rights
of privacy is my special line, and I want to know if there's been a breach of privacy. I
just said you hadn't told me your caseâif you have one. What, specifically, has this
doctor done?"
"If I tell you," the client said with mournful objectivity, "you'll think I'm crazy."
"How do you know I will?"
Miss Lelache was countersuggestible, an excellent quality in a lawyer, but she knew she
carried it a bit far.
"If I told you," the client said in the same tone, "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. Wouldn't
you?"
Miss Lelache gazed at him a while, her chin on her hands. "Well. Go on," she said at
last, sharply. He was quite right about what she was thinking, but damned if she was
going to admit it. Anyway, so what if he was crazy? What sane person could live in this
world and not be crazy?
He looked down at his hands for a minute, evidently trying to collect his thoughts. "You
see," he said, "he has this machine. A device like the EEG recorder, but it provides a
kind of analysis and feedback of the brain waves."
"You mean he's a Mad Scientist with an Infernal Machine?"
The client smiled feebly. "I make it sound that way. No, I believe that he has a very good
reputation as a research scientist, and that he's genuinely dedicated to helping people.
I'm sure he doesn't intend any harm to me or anyone. His motives are very high." He
encountered the disenchanted gaze of the Black Widow a moment, and stuttered. "The,
the machine. Well, I can't tell you how it works, but anyway he's using it on me to keep
my brain in the d-state, as he calls itâthat's one term for the kind of special sleep you
have when you're dreaming. It's quite different from ordinary sleep. He sends me to
sleep hypnotically, and then turns this machine on so that I start dreaming at onceâone
doesn't usually. Or that's how I understand it. The machine makes sure that I dream, and
I think it intensifies the dream-state, too. And then I dream what he's told me to dream in
hypnosis."
"Well. It sounds like a foolproof method for an old-fashioned psychoanalyst to get
dreams to analyze. But instead of that he's telling you what to dream, by hypnotic
suggestion? So I assume he's conditioning you via dreams, for some reason. Now, it's
well established that under hypnotic suggestion a person can and will do almost
anything, whether or not his conscience would permit it in a normal state: that's been
known since the middle of the last century, and legally established since Somerville v.
Projansky in '88. Well. Do you have any grounds for believing that this doctor has been
using hypnosis to suggest that you perform anything dangerous, anything you'd find it
morally repugnant to do?"
The Power of Effective Dreaming
- A client named George Orr expresses moral distress over his psychiatrist, Dr. Haber, using him as an instrument to alter reality through dreams.
- Orr argues that while the changes might seem beneficial or benign, neither he nor the doctor has the right to manipulate existence.
- Miss Lelache, the lawyer, initially views Orr as a delusional casualty of the times but finds herself unsettled by his peculiar solidity and moral certainty.
- Orr provides a concrete example of reality shifting: the sudden existence of government-leased cabins in wilderness areas that were previously strictly protected.
- The conflict highlights a paradox where the new reality includes a complete, consistent history that everyone remembers, yet Orr retains the memory of the original timeline.
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.
The client hesitated. "Dangerous, yes. If you accept that a dream can be dangerous. But
he doesn't direct me to do anything. Only to dream them."
"Well, are the dreams he suggests morally repugnant to you?"
"He's not. . . not an evil man. He means well. What I object to is his using me as an
instrument, a meansâeven if his ends are good. I can't judge himâmy own dreams had
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 drugs, to be cured. But he's not curing me. He's
encouraging me."
After a pause, Miss Lelache said, "To do what?"
"To change reality by dreaming that it's different," the client said, doggedly, without
hope.
Miss Lelache sank the point of her chin between her hands again and stared for a while
at the blue clipbox on her desk at the very nadir of her range of vision. She glanced up
surreptitiously at the client There he sat, mild as ever, but she now thought that he
certainly wouldn't squash if she stepped on him, nor crunch, nor even crack. He was
peculiarly solid.
People who come to a lawyer tend to be on the defensive if not on the offensive; they
are, naturally, out for somethingâa legacy, a property, an injunction, a divorce, a
committal, whatever. She could not figure what this fellow, so inoffensive and
defenseless, was out for. He made no sense at all and yet he didn't sound as if he wasn't
making sense.
"All right," she said cautiously. "So what's wrong with what he's making your dreams
do?"
"I have no right to change things. Nor he to make me do it."
God, he really believed it, he was completely off the deep end. And yet his moral
certainty hooked her, as if she were a fish swimming around in the deep end, too.
"Change things how? What things? Give me an example!" She felt no mercy for him; as
she should have felt for a sick man, a schiz or paranoid with delusions of manipulating
reality. Here was "another casualty of these times of ours that try men's souls," as
President Merdle, with his happy faculty for fouling a quotation, had said in his State of
the Union message; and here she was being mean to a poor lousy bleeding casualty with
holes in his brain. But she didn't feel like being kind to him. He could take it.
"The cabin," he said, having pondered a little. "My second visit to him, he was asking
about daydreams, and I told him that sometimes I had daydreams about having a place in
the Wilderness Areas, you know, a place in the country like in old novels, a place to get
away to. Of course I didn't have one. Who does? But last week, he must have directed
me to dream that I did. Because now I do. A thirty-three-year lease cabin on Government
land, over in the Siuslaw National Forest, near the Neskowin. I rented a batcar and drove
over Sunday to see it. It's very nice. But . . ."
"Why shouldn't you have a cabin? Is that immoral? Lots of people have been getting into
those lotteries for those leases since they opened up some of the Wilderness Areas for
them last year. You're just lucky as hell."
"But I didn't have one," he said. "Nobody did. The Parks and Forests were reserved
strictly as wilderness, what there is left of them, with camping only around the borders.
There were no Government-lease cabins. Until last Friday. When I dreamed that there
were."
"But look, Mr. Orr, I knowâ"
"I know you know," he said gently. "I know, too. All about how they decided to lease
parts of the National Forests last spring. And I applied, and got a winning number in the
lottery, and so on. Only I also know that that was not true until last Friday. And Dr.
Haber knows it, too."
The Mechanics of Effective Dreaming
- George Orr explains that his dreams retroactively alter reality, changing history from its origins to make the dream's content appear natural.
- The dreamer and his therapist, Dr. Haber, are the only individuals who retain memories of both the original and the newly created realities.
- Orr describes the 'pink dog' paradox, where a dream must rewrite the laws of nature or causality to accommodate an impossible request.
- Miss Lelache remains skeptical of Orr's claims, dismissing them as tropes from late-night science fiction television.
- Orr seeks legal protection, fearing that Dr. Haber is using his unique ability for unauthorized experimental purposes rather than therapy.
- The lawyer identifies a potential civil rights case regarding the use of experimental machinery and lack of informed consent.
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.
"Then your dream last Friday," she said, jeering, "changed reality retrospectively for the
entire State of Oregon and affected a decision in Washington last year and erased
everybody's memory but yours and your doctor's? Some dream! Can you remember it?"
"Yes," he said, morose but firm. "It was about the cabin, and the creek that's in front of
it. I don't expect you to believe all this, Miss Lelache. I don't think even Dr. Haber has
really caught on to it yet; he won't wait and get the feel of it. If he did, he might be more
cautious about it. You see, it works like this. If he told me under hypnosis to dream that
there was a pink dog in the room, I'd do it; but the dog couldn't be there so long as pink
dogs aren't in the order of nature, aren't part of reality. What would happen is, either I'd
get a white poodle dyed pink, and some plausible reason for its being there, or, if he
insisted that it be a genuine pink dog, then my dream would have to change the order of
nature to include pink dogs. Everywhere. Since the Pleistocene or whenever dogs
first appeared. They would always have come black, brown, yellow, white, and pink.
And one of the pink ones would have wandered in from the hall, or would be his collie,
or his receptionist's Pekinese, or something. Nothing miraculous. Nothing unnatural.
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. And nobody
would be aware of anything new, except meâand him. I keep the two memories, of the
two realities. So does Dr. Haber. He's there at the moment of change, and knows what
the dream's about. He doesn't admit that he knows, but I know he does. For everybody
else, there have always been pink dogs. For me, and him, there haveâand there
haven't."
"Dual time-tracks, alternate universes," Miss Lelache said. "Do you see a lot of old
late-night TV shows?"
"No," said the client, almost as dryly as she. "I don't ask you to believe this. Certainly
not without evidence."
"Well. Thank God!"
He smiled, almost a laugh. He had a kind face; he looked, for some reason, as if he liked
her.
"But look, Mr. Orr, how the hell can I get any evidence about your dreams? Particularly
if you destroy all the evidence every time you dream by changing everything ever since
the Pleistocene?"
"Can you," he said, suddenly intense, as if hope had come to him, "can you, acting as my
lawyer, ask to be present at one of my sessions with Dr. Haberâif you were willing?"
"Well. Possibly. It could be managed, if there's good cause. But look, calling in a lawyer
as witness in the event of a possible privacy-infringement case is going to absolutely
wreck your therapist-patient relationship. Not that it sounds like you've got a very good
one going, but that's hard to judge from outside. The fact is, you have to trust him, and
also, you know, he has to trust you, in a way. If you throw a lawyer at him because you
want to get him out of your head, well, what can he do? Presumably he's trying to help
you."
"Yes. But he's using me for experimentalâ" Orr got no further: Miss Lelache had
stiffened, the spider had seen, at last, her prey.
"Experimental purposes? Is he? What? This machine you talked aboutâis it
experimental? Has it HEW approval? What have you signed, any releases, anything
beyond the VTT forms and the hypnosis-consent form? Nothing? That sounds like you
might have just cause for complaint, Mr. Orr."
"You might be able to come observe a session?"
"Maybe. The line to follow would be civil rights, of course, not privacy."
"You do understand that I'm not trying to get Dr. Haber into trouble?" he said, looking
worried. "I don't want to do that. I know he means well. It's just that I want to be cured,
not used."
The Augmentor Investigation
- A lawyer proposes using her credentials as an ACLU observer for HEW to investigate the doctor's experimental device without compromising her client's relationship.
- The protagonist confirms that he is the only patient currently being used as a subject for the experimental 'Augmentor' device.
- A moment of genuine human connection occurs between the lawyer and her client, transcending their professional and racial differences.
- The setting shifts to the Oregon Oneirological Institute, a high-tech facility where Dr. William Haber operates in a controlled, clinical environment.
- The narrative introduces a contrast between the chaotic outside world and the serene, air-conditioned interior of the research institute.
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.
"If his motives are good, and if he's using an experimental device on a human subject,
then he should take it quite as a matter of course, without resentment; if it's on the level,
he won't get into any trouble. I've done jobs like this twice. Hired by HEW to do it.
Watched a new hypnosis-inducer in practice up at the Med School, it didn't work, and
watched a demonstration of how to induce agoraphobia by suggestion, so people will be
happy in crowds, out at the Institute in Forest Grove. That one worked but didn't get
approved, it came under the brainwashing laws, we decided. Now, I can probably get an
HEW order to investigate this thingummy your doctor's using. That lets you out of the
picture. I don't come on as your lawer at all. In fact maybe I don't even know you. I'm an
official accredited ACLU observer for HEW. Then, if we don't get anywhere with this,
that leaves you and him in the same relationship as before. The only catch is, I've got to
get invited to one of your sessions."
"I'm the only psychiatric patient he's using the Augmentor on, he told me so. He said
he's still working on itâperfecting it."
"It really is experimental, whatever he's doing to you with it, then. Good. All right. I'll
see what I can do. It'll take a week or more to get the forms through."
He looked distressed.
"You won't dream me out of existence this week, Mr. Orr," she said, hearing her
chitinous voice, clicking her mandibles.
"Not willingly," he said, with gratitudeâno, by God, it wasn't gratitude, it was liking.
He liked her. He was a poor damn crazy psycho on drugs, he would like her. She liked
him. 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. Christ!
5
When the Great Way is lost, we get benevolence and righteousness.
âLao Tse: XVIII
Smiling, William Haber strode up the steps of the Oregon Oneirological Institute and
through the high, polarized-glass doors into the dry cool of the air conditioning. It was
only March 24, and already like a sauna-bath outside; but within all was cool, clean,
serene. Marble floor, discreet furniture, reception desk of brushed chrome, well-
enameled receptionist: "Good morning, Dr. Haber!"
In the hall Atwood passed him, coming from the research wards, red-eyed and tousled
from a night of monitoring sleepers' EEC's; the computers did a lot of that now, but there
were still tunes an unprogrammed mind was needed. "Morning, Chief," Atwood
The Director's Inner Sanctum
- Dr. Haber transitions into his role as Director of a complex research institute, supported by his loyal assistant, Miss Crouch.
- The doctor draws inspiration from a panoramic view of the Pacific Northwest landscape, linking atmospheric pressure to psychological well-being.
- Haber prioritizes 'relevance' over pure science, believing knowledge is only valuable if it has a direct therapeutic or social application.
- He defines human morality and identity through a person's influence and function within the sociopolitical whole.
- Despite his administrative burdens, Haber maintains one patient, George Orr, to stay grounded in the 'human reality' of his research.
- The upcoming session with Orr is complicated by the presence of a government inspector monitoring the use of the 'Augmentor' device.
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.
mumbled.
And from Miss Crouch in his own office, "Good morning, Doctor!" He was glad he'd
brought Penny Crouch with him when he moved to the office of Director of the Institute
last year. She was loyal and clever, and a man at the head of a big and complex research
institution needs a loyal and clever woman in his outer office.
He strode on into the inner sanctum.
Dropping briefcase and file folders on the couch, he stretched his arms, and then went
over, as he always did when he first entered his office, to the window. It was a large
corner window, looking out east and north over a great sweep of world: the curve of the
much-bridged Willamette close in beneath the hills; the city's countless towers high and
milky in the spring mist, on either side of the river; the suburbs receding out of sight till
from their remote outbacks the foothills rose; and the mountains. Hood, immense yet
withdrawn, breeding clouds about her head; going northward, the distant Adams, like a
molar tooth; and then the pure cone of St. Helens, from whose long gray sweep of slope
still farther northward a little bald dome stuck out, like a baby looking round its mother's
skirt: Mount Rainier.
It was an inspiring view. It never failed to inspire Dr. Haber. Besides, after a week's solid
rain, barometric pressure was up and the sun was out again, above the river mist. Well
aware from a thousand EEG readings of the links between the pressure of the
atmosphere and the heaviness of the mind, he could almost feel his psycho-soma being
buoyed up by that bright, drying wind. Have to keep that up, keep the climate
improving, he thought rapidly, almost surreptitously. There were several chains of
thought formed or forming in his mind simultaneously, and this mental note was not part
of any of them. It was quickly made and as quickly filed away in memory, even as he
snapped on his desk recorder and began to dictate one of the many letters that the
running of a Government-connected science research institute entailed. It was hackwork,
of course, but it had to be done, and he was the man to do it. He did not resent it, though
it cut drastically into his own research time. He was in the labs only for five or six hours
a week now, usually, and had only one patient of his own, though of course he was
supervising the therapy of several others.
One patient, however, he did keep. He was a psychiatrist, after all. He had gone into
sleep research and oneirology in the first place to find therapeutic applications. He was
not interested in detached knowledge, science for science' sake: there was no use
learning anything if it was of no use. Relevance was his touchstone. He would always
keep one patient of his own, to remind him of that fundamental commitment, to keep
him in contact with the human reality of his research in terms of the disturbed
personality structure of individual people. For there is nothing important except people.
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.
His current patient, Orr, was coming in at four this afternoon, for they had given up the
attempt at night sessions; and, as Miss Crouch reminded him at lunch tune, an HEW
inspector was going to observe today's session, making sure there was nothing illegal,
immoral, unsafe, unkind, unetc., about the operation of the Augmentor. God damn
Government prying.
That was the trouble with success, and its concomitants of publicity, public curiosity,
professional envy, peer-group rivalry. If he'd still been a private researcher, plugging
The Lawyer and the Augmentor
- Dr. Haber resents the government's intrusion into his private psychotherapy practice but understands the necessity of cooperation for securing grants.
- The HEW inspector, Miss Lelache, presents a harsh and clattering exterior that Haber interprets as a mask for underlying timidity.
- Haber explains that his 'Augmentor' device is more precise than existing technology, capable of inducing specific brain rhythms like alpha waves without training.
- Unlike generalized stimuli like strobe lights or drumbeats, the Augmentor feeds specific signals to targeted areas of the brain to control sleep cycles.
- The legal inspection involves a mandatory recording device that emits a 'teep' sound every five seconds to ensure compliance with government regulations.
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....
along in the sleep lab at P.S.U. and a second-rate office in Willamette East Tower,
chances were that nobody would have taken any notice of his Augmentor until he
decided it was ready to market, and he would have been let alone to refine and perfect
the device and its applications. Now here he was doing the most private and delicate part
of his business, psychotherapy with a disturbed patient, so the Government had to send a
lawyer barging in not understanding half of what went on and misunderstanding the rest.
The lawyer arrived at 3:45, and Haber came striding into the outer office to greet himâ
her, it turned outâ and to get a friendly warm impression established right away. It went
better if they saw you were unafraid, cooperative, and personally cordial. A lot of
doctors let their resentment show when they had an HEW inspector; and those doctors
did not get many Government grants.
It was not altogether easy to be cordial and warm with this lawyer. 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.... In the second ten seconds,
Haber suspected that the whole affair was indeed a mask, as the ring said: a lot of sound
and fury signifying timidity. That, however, was none of his business. He would never
know the woman behind the mask, and she did not matter, so long as he could make the
right impression on Miss Lelache the lawyer.
If it didn't go cordially, at least it didn't go badly; she was competent, had done this kind
of thing before, and had done her homework for this particular job. She knew what to
ask and how to listen.
"This patient, George Orr," she said, "he's not an addict, correct? Is he diagnosed as
psychotic or disturbed, after three weeks' therapy?"
"Disturbed, as the Health Office defines the word. Deeply disturbed and with artificial
reality-orientations, but improving under current therapy."
She had a pocket recorder and was taking all this down: every five seconds, as the law
required, the thing went teep.
"Will you describe the therapy you're employing please, teep and explain the role this
device plays in it? Don't tell me how it teep works, that's in your report, but what it does.
Teep for instance, how does its use differ from the Elektroson or the trancap?"
"Well, those devices, as you know, generate various low-frequency pulses which
stimulate nerve cells in the cerebral cortex. Those signals are what you might call
generalized; their effect on the brain is obtained in a manner basically similar to that of
strobe lights at a critical rhythm, or an aural stimulus like a drumbeat. The Augmentor
delivers a specific signal which can be picked up by a specific area. For instance, a
subject can be trained to produce alpha rhythm at will, as you know; but the Augmentor
can induce it without any training, and even when he's in a condition not normally
conducive to the alpha rhythm. It feeds a 9-cycle alpha rhythm through appropriately
placed electrodes, and within seconds the brain can accept that rhythm and begin
producing alpha waves as steadily as a Zen Buddhist in trance. Similarly, and more
usefully, any stage of sleep can be induced, with its typical cycles and regional
activities."
"Will it stimulate the pleasure center, or the speech center?"
The Augmentor and Autostimulation
- Dr. Haber defends his 'Augmentor' device as a non-invasive tool that induces natural brain states rather than imposing external stimuli.
- He compares the precision of his machine to a personal tailor, contrasting it with the 'sledgehammer' approach of electrode implantation.
- Haber admits to experimenting with 'auto-stimulation,' using a subject's own recorded brain rhythms to trigger specific mental states.
- The doctor speculates on future therapeutic uses, such as 'teaching' damaged brains new habits by imposing healthier neural patterns.
- Haber strategically omits the current status of his more controversial research to avoid legal scrutiny from the HEW representative.
- The specific case involves an 'oneirophobe'âa patient who is pathologically afraid to dreamârequiring controlled conditioning.
The difference between it and electrode implantation isâoh, hellâa scalpel to a sledgehammer!
Oh, the moralistic gleam in an ACLU eye, whenever that pleasure-center bit came up!
Haber concealed all irony and irritation, and answered with friendly sincerity, "No. It's
not like ESB, you see. It's not like electrical stimulation, or chemical stimulation, of any
center; it involves no intrusion on special areas of the brain. It simply induces the entire
brain activity to change, to shift into another of its own, natural states. It's a bit like a
catchy tune that sets your feet tapping. So the brain enters and maintains the condition
desired for study or therapy, as long as need be I called it the Augmentor to point up its
noncreative function. Nothing is imposed from outside. Sleep induced by the Augmentor
is precisely, literally, the kind and quality of sleep normal to that particular brain. The
difference between it and the electrosleep machines is like a personal tailor compared to
mass-produced suits. The difference between it and electrode implantation isâoh, hell
âa scalpel to a sledgehammer!"
"But how do you make up the stimuli you use? Do you teep record an alpha rhythm, for
instance, from one subject to use on another teep?"
He had been evading this point. He did not intend to lie, of course, but there was simply
no use talking about uncompleted research till it was done and tested; it might give a
quite wrong impression to a nonspecialist. He launched into an answer easily, glad to
hear his own voice instead of her snapping and bangle-clattering and teeping; it was
curious how he only heard the annoying little sound when she was talking. "At first I
used a generalized set of stimuli, averaged out from records of many subjects. The
depressive patient mentioned in the report was treated successfully thus. But I felt the
effects were more random and erratic than I liked. I began to experiment. On animals, of
course. Cats. We sleep researchers like cats, you know; they sleep a lot! Well, with
animal subjects I found that the most promising line was to use rhythms previously
recorded from the subject's own brain. A kind of auto-stimulation via recordings.
Specificity is what I'm after, you see. A brain will respond to its own alpha rhythm at
once, and spontaneously. Now of course there are therapeutic vistas opened up along the
other line of research. It might be possible to impose a slightly different pattern
gradually upon the patient's own: a healthier or completer pattern. One recorded
previously from that subject, possibly, or from a different subject. This could prove
tremendously helpful in cases of brain damage, lesion, trauma; it might aid a damaged
brain to re-establish its old habits in new channelsâsomething which the brain struggles
long and hard to do by itself. It might be used to 'teach' an abnormally functioning brain
new habits, and so forth. However, that's all speculative, at this point, and if and when I
return to research on that line I will of course reregister with HEW." That was quite true.
There was no need to mention that he was doing research along that line, since so far it
was quite inconclusive and would merely be misunderstood. "The form of
autostimulation by recording that I'm using in this therapy may be described as having
no effect on the patient beyond that exerted during the period of the machine's
functioning: five to ten minutes." He knew more of any HEW lawyer's specialty than she
knew of his; he saw her nodding slightly at that last sentence, it was right down her
alley.
But then she said, "What does it do, then?" "Yes, I was coming to that," Haber said, and
quickly readjusted his tone, since the irritation was showing through. "What we have in
this case is a subject who is afraid to dream: an oneirophobe. My treatment is basically a
simple conditioning treatment in the classic tradition of modern psychology. The patient
is induced to dream here, under controlled conditions; dream content and emotional
The Augmentor and George Orr
- Dr. Haber explains how the Augmentor accelerates therapy by bypassing slow sleep cycles to trigger immediate dreaming.
- The device acts as a safety mechanism to ensure the patient experiences only positive, controlled dreams during conditioning.
- Haber introduces George Orr to Miss Lelache, describing him as a man in a severe anxiety state with protective delusions.
- The doctor displays a sense of dominance and irritation when Orr flinches, viewing the patient's resistance as a personal inconvenience.
- Haber uses a dramatic induction method to rehypnotize Orr, aiming to prove the machine's safety to the HEW observer.
The contrast amused Haber: the harsh fierce woman, the meek characterless man.
affect are manipulated by hypnotic suggestion. The subject is being taught that he can
dream safely, pleasantly, et cetera, a positive conditioning which will leave him free of
his phobia. The Augmentor is an ideal instrument for this purpose. It ensures that he will
dream, by instigating and then reinforcing his own typical d-state activity. It might take a
subject up to an hour and a half to go through the various stages of s-sleep and reach the
d-state on his own, an impractical length for daytime therapy sessions, and moreover
during deep sleep the force of hypnotic suggestions concerning dream content might be
partly lost. This is undesirable; while he's in conditioning, it's essential that he have no
bad dreams, no nightmares. Therefore the Augmentor provides me with both a time-
saving device and a safety factor. The therapy could be achieved without it; but it would
probably take months; with it, I except to take a few weeks. It may prove to be as great a
timesaver, in appropriate cases, as hypnosis itself has proved to be in psychoanalysis and
in conditioning therapy."
Teep, said the lawyer's recorder, and Bong said his own desk communicator in a soft,
rich, authoritative voice. Thank God. "Here's our patient now. Now I suggest, Miss
Lelache, that you meet him, and we may chat a bit if you like; then perhaps you can fade
off to that leather chair in the corner, right? Your presence shouldn't make any real
difference to the patient, but if he's constantly reminded of it, it could slow things down
badly. He's a person in a fairly severe anxiety state, you see, with a tendency to interpret
events as personally threatening, and a set of protective delusions built upâas you'll see.
Oh yes, and the recorder off, that's right, a therapy session's not for the record. Right?
O.K., good. Yes, hello, George, come on in! This is Miss Lelache, the participant from
HEW. She's here to see the Augmentor in use." The two were shaking hands in the most
ridiculously stiff way. Crash clank! went the lawyer's bracelets. The contrast amused
Haber: the harsh fierce woman, the meek characterless man. They had nothing in
common at all.
"Now," he said, enjoying running the show, "I suggest that we get on with business,
unless there's anything special on your mind, George, that you want to talk about first?"
He was, by his own apparently unassertive movements, sorting them out: the Lelache to
the chair in the far corner, Orr to the couch. "O.K., then, good. Let's run off a dream.
Which will incidentally constitute a record for HEW of the fact that the Augmentor
doesn't loosen your toenails, or harden your arteries, or blow your mind, or indeed have
any side effects whatsoever except perhaps a slight compensatory decrease in dreaming
sleep tonight." As he finished the sentence he reached out and placed his right hand on
Orr's throat, almost casually.
Orr flinched from the contact as if he had never been hypnotized.
Then he apologized. "Sorry. You come at me so suddenly."
It was necessary to rehypnotize him completely, employing the v-c induction method,
which was perfectly legal of course but rather more dramatic than Haber liked to use in
front of an observer from HEW; he was furious with Orr, in whom he had sensed
growing resistance for the last five or six sessions. Once he had the man under, he put on
a tape he had cut himself, of all the boring repetition of deepening trance and
posthypnotic suggestion for rehypnotizing: "You are comfortable and relaxed now. You
The Suggestion of Space
- Dr. Haber uses a hypnotic tape and a 'trancap' to induce a deep state of suggestibility in George Orr.
- The doctor dismisses Orr's concerns about global overpopulation as a psychological metaphor for a personal fear of intimacy.
- Haber argues that historical fears of population growth were overblown and that modern society is functioning adequately despite lower standards of living.
- A specific keyword, 'Antwerp', is established as the trigger to send the patient into a dream-state.
- Haber attempts to manipulate Orr's subconscious to dream that humanity needs more people around for competition and support.
- The presence of the lawyer, Lelache, forces Haber to use abstract suggestions rather than direct commands, complicating his experimental method.
Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulationâovercrowdingâreflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind.
are sinking deeper into trance," and so on and so on. While it played he went back to his
desk and sorted through papers with a calm, serious face, ignoring the Lelache. She kept
still, knowing the hypnotic routine must not be interrupted; she was looking out the
window at the view, the towers of the city.
At last Haber stopped the tape and put the trancap on Orr's head. "Now, while I'm
hooking you up let's talk about what kind of dream you're going to dream, George. You
feel like talking about that, don't you?"
Slow nod from the patient.
"Last time you were here we were talking about some things that worry you. You said
you like your work, but you don't like riding the subway to work. You keep feeling
crowded in on, you saidâsqueezed, pressed together. You feel as if you had no elbow
room, as if you weren't free."
He paused, and the patient, who was always taciturn in hypnosis, at last responded
merely: "Overpopulation."
"Mhm, that was the word you used. That's your word, your metaphor, for this feeling of
unfreedom. Well, now, let's discuss that word. You know that back in the eighteenth
century Malthus was pressing the panic button about population growth; and there was
another fit of panic about it thirty, forty years ago. And sure enough population has gone
up; but all the horrors they predicted just haven't come to pass. It's just not as bad as they
said it would be. We all get by just fine here in America, and if our living standard has
had to lower in some ways it's even higher in others than it was a generation ago. Now
perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulationâovercrowdingâreflects not an outward
reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does
that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contactâof being close to people, of
being touched. So you've found a kind of excuse for keeping reality at a distance." The
EEG was running, and as he talked he made the connections to the Augmentor. "Now,
George, we'll be talking a little longer and then when I say the key word 'Antwerp' you'll
drop off to sleep; when you wake up you'll feel refreshed and alert. You won't recall
what I'm saying now, but you will recall your dream. It'll be a vivid dream, vivid and
pleasant, an effective dream. You'll dream about this thing that worries you,
overpopulation: you'll have a dream where you find out that it isn't really that that
worries you. People can't live alone, after all; to be put in solitary is the worst kind of
confinement! We need people around us. To help us, to give help to, to compete with, to
sharpen our wits against" And so on and so on. The lawyer's presence cramped his style
badly; he had to put it all in abstract terms, instead of just telling Orr what to dream. Of
course, he wasn't falsifying his method in order to deceive the observer; his method
simply wasn't yet invariable. He varied it from session to session, seeking for the sure
way to suggest the precise dream he wanted, and always coming up against the
resistance that seemed to him sometimes to be the overliteralness of primary-process
The Third State of Being
- Dr. Haber attempts a vague, abstract suggestion to bypass Orr's unconscious resistance and 'balkiness' during the dream state.
- Haber demonstrates the physiological shift from orthodox sleep to the d-state, or dreaming sleep, for the lawyer Lelache.
- The text describes dreaming as a 'third state of being' where the autonomic system is fully mobilized while muscle tone remains nil.
- Orr's EEG shows anomalous 'brainstorm' peaks similar to those found in individuals engaged in intense creative or artistic work.
- Haber uses the Augmentor to systematically observe and analyze these unique neural patterns that occur during Orr's dreams.
- The lawyer expresses awe and skepticism regarding the intensity of Orr's physical reactions and the influence of the machine.
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.
thinking, and sometimes to be a positive balkiness in Orr's mind. Whatever prevented it,
the dream almost never came out the way Haber had intended; and this vague, abstract
kind of suggestion might work as well as any. Perhaps it would rouse less unconscious
resistance in Orr.
He gestured to the lawyer to come over and watch the EEG screen, at which she had
been peering from her corner, and went on: "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 at last he said, "Antwerp!"âand
pointed to the EEG traces so that the Lelache would see the almost instantaneous
change. "Watch the slowing down all across the graph," he murmured. "There's a high-
voltage peak, see, there's another. . . . Sleep spindles. He's already going into the second
stage of orthodox sleep, s-sleep, whichever term you've run into, the kind of sleep
without vivid dreams that occurs in between the d-states all night. But I'm not letting
him go on down into deep fourth-stage, since he's here to dream. I'm turning on the
Augmentor. Keep your eye on those traces. Do you see?"
"Looks like he was waking up again," she murmured doubtfully.
"Right! But it's not waking. Look at him." Orr lay supine, his head fallen back a little so
that his short, fair beard jutted up; he was sound asleep, but there was a tension about his
mouth; he sighed deeply.
"See his eyes move, under the lids? That's how they first caught this whole phenomenon
of dreaming sleep, back in the 1930's; they called it rapid-eye-movement sleep, REM,
for years. Ifs a hell of a lot more than that, though. It's a third state of being. 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.
Cortical, subcortical, hippocampal, and midbrain areas all as active as in waking,
whereas they're inactive in s-sleep. His respiration and blood pressure are up to waking
levels or higher. Here, feel the pulse." He put her fingers against Orr's lax wrist. "Eighty
or eighty-five, he's going. He's having a humdinger, whatever it is. . . ."
"You mean he's dreaming?" She looked awed.
"Right."
"Are all these reactions normal?"
"Absolutely. We all go through this performance every night, four or five times, for at
least ten minutes at a time. This is a quite normal d-state EEG on the screen. The only
anomaly or peculiarity about it that you might be able to catch is an occasional high
peaking right through the traces, a kind of brainstorm effect I've never seen in a d-state
EEG before. Its pattern seems to resemble an effect that's been observed in
electroencephalograms of men hard at work of a certain sort: creative or artistic work,
painting, writing verse, even reading Shakespeare. What this brain is doing at those
moments, I don't yet know. But the Augmentor gives me the opportunity to observe
them systematically, and so eventually to analyze them out."
"There's no chance that the machine is causing this effect?"
The Shift of Reality
- Haber experiments with the Augmentor to manipulate and observe Orr's specific brain states during dreaming.
- The doctor attempts to categorize Orr's unique neurophysiological condition by comparing his theta rhythms to other brains.
- Haber experiences a physical reactionâa dry mouth and a sense of arrivalâas the dream begins to alter reality.
- The shift is not private; the woman in the room also witnesses the physical world changing outside the window.
- The urban landscape begins to dissolve, with towers vanishing as the dream's influence overwrites the current existence.
She was staring in dismay, shock, terror, out the window at the view.
"No." As a matter of fact, he had tried stimulating Orr's brain with a playback of one of
these peak traces, but the dream resulting from that experiment had been incoherent, a
mishmash of the previous dream, during which the Augmentor had recorded the peak,
and the present one. No need to mention inconclusive experiments. "Now that he's well
into this dream, in fact, I'll cut the Augmentor out. Watch, see if you can tell when I cut
off the input." She couldn't "He may produce a brainstorm for us anyhow; keep an eye
on those traces. You may catch it first in the theta rhythm, there, from the hippocampus.
It occurs in other brains, undoubtedly. Nothing's new. If I can find out what other brains,
in what state, I may be able to specify much more exactly what this subject's trouble is;
there may be a psychological or neurophysiological type to which he belongs. You see
the research possibilities of the Augmentor? No effect on the patient except that of
temporarily putting his brain into whichever of its own normal states the physician
wants to observe. Look there!" She missed the peak, of course; EEG-reading on a
moving screen took practice. "Blew his fuse. Still in the dream now. . . . He'll tell us
about it presently." He could not go on talking. His mouth had gone dry. He felt it: the
shift, the arrival, the change.
The woman felt it too. She looked frightened. Holding the heavy brass necklace up close
to her throat like a talisman, she was staring in dismay, shock, terror, out the window at
the view.
He had not expected that. He had thought that only he could be aware of the change.
But she had heard him tell Orr what to dream; she had stood beside the dreamer; she was
there at the center, like him. And like him had turned to look out the window at the
vanishing towers fade like a dream, leave not a wrack behind, the insubstantial miles of
The Remaking of Reality
- Haber realizes that despite witnessing multiple shifts in reality caused by Orr's dreams, he has subconsciously accepted the new timelines as the only truth.
- The creation of the Oregon Oneirological Institute was a retroactive change that Haber had completely integrated into his own memory until this moment.
- Haber experiences a moment of violent panic when he realizes the HEW observer, Heather Lelache, might have witnessed the world shifting in real-time.
- He observes that Lelache is too traumatized and confused by the visual paradox to immediately process what she has seen.
- Haber quickly adopts a mundane, conversational tone about the weather and geography to gaslight the observer and stabilize the situation.
- The power dynamic shifts as Haber resolves to protect his 'experiment' from outside interference at any cost.
He had been there, had seen the walls change around him, had known the world was being remade, and had forgotten it.
suburb dissolving like smoke on the wind, the city of Portland, which had had a
population of a million people before the Plague Years but had only about a hundred
thousand these days of the Recovery, a mess and jumble like all American cities, but
unified by its hills and its misty, seven-bridged river, the old forty-story First National
Bank building dominating the downtown skyline, and far beyond, above it all, the serene
and pale mountains. . . .
She saw it happen. And he realized that he had never once thought that the HEW
observer might see it happen. It hadn't been a possibility, he hadn't given it a thought.
And this implied that he himself had not believed in the change, in what Orr's dreams
did. Though he had felt it, seen it, with bewilderment, fear, and exultation, a dozen times
now; though he had watched the horse become a mountain (if you can watch the overlap
of one reality with another), though he had been testing, and using, the effective power
of Orr's dreams for nearly a month now, yet he had not believed in what was happening.
This whole day, from his arrival at work on, he had not given one thought to the fact
that, a week ago, he had not been the Director of the Oregon Oneirological Institute,
because there had been no Institue. Ever since last Friday, there had been an Institute for
the last eighteen months. And he had been its founder and director. And this being the
way it wasâfor him, for everyone on the staff, and his colleagues at the Medical
School, and the Government that funded itâhe had accepted it totally, just as they did,
as the only reality. He had suppressed his memory of the fact that, until last Friday, this
had not been the way it was.
That had been Orr's most successful dream by far. It had begun in the old office across
the river, under that damned mural photograph of Mount Hood, and had ended in this
office . . . and he had been there, had seen the walls change around him, had known the
world was being remade, and had forgotten it. He had forgotten it so completely that he
had never even wondered if a stranger, a third person, might have the same experience.
What would it do to the woman? Would she understand, would she go mad, what would
she do? Would she keep both memories, as he did, the true one and the new one, the old
one and the true one?
She must not. She would interfere, bring in other observers, spoil the experiment
completely, wreck his plans.
He would stop her at any cost. He turned to her, ready for violence, his hands clenched.
She was just standing there. Her brown skin had gone livid, her mouth was open. She
was dazed. She could not believe what she had seen out that window. She could not and
did not.
Haber's extreme physical tension relaxed a little. He was fairly sure, looking at her, that
she was so confused and traumatized as to be harmless. But he must move quickly, all
the same.
"He'll sleep for a while now," he said; his voice sounded almost normal, though
hoarsened by the tightness of his throat muscles. He had no idea what he was going to
say, but plunged ahead; anything to break the spell. "I'll let him have a short s-sleep
period now. Not too long, or his dream recall will be poor. It's a nice view, isn't it? These
easterly winds we've been having, they're godsend. In fall and whiter I don't see the
mountains for months at a go. But when the clouds clear off, there they are. It's a great
place, Oregon. Most unspoiled state in the Union. Wasn't exploited much before the
Crash. Portland was just beginning to get big in the late seventies. Are you a native
Oregonian?"
After a minute she nodded groggily. The matter-of-fact tone of his voice, if nothing else,
was getting through to her.
"I'm from New Jersey originally. It was terrible there when I was a kid, the
environmental deterioration. The amount of tearing down and cleaning up the East Coast
had to do after the Crash, and is still doing, is unbelievable. Out here, the real damage of
The Weight of Six Billion
- Haber struggles to reconcile two conflicting realities: one where the global population is seven billion and another where it is less than one billion.
- The lawyer, Miss Lelache, experiences a profound sense of disorientation as her memories of a crowded world clash with the current reality.
- Haber realizes that individuals will reject the evidence of their own senses if others do not acknowledge a miracle or anomaly.
- To protect his power, Haber deliberately manipulates the situation to ensure Orr does not wake and confirm the reality-altering dream.
- The conversation shifts to the technicalities of the Augmentor machine and patents as a way to normalize the surreal atmosphere.
- Lelache expresses an intuitive unease regarding Haber's profession of watching and controlling the dreams of others.
Of course, Haber thought, a man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.
overpopulation and environmental mismanagement hadn't yet been done, except in
California. The Oregon ecosystem was still intact." It was dangerous, this talking right
on the critical subject, but he could not think of anything else: he was as if compelled.
His head was too full, holding the two sets of memories, two full systems of
information: one of the real (no longer) world with a human population of nearly seven
billion and increasing geometrically, and one of the real (now) world with a population
of less than one billion and still not stabilized.
My God, he thought, what has Orr done?
Six billion people.
Where are they?
But the lawyer must not realize. Must not. "Ever been East, Miss Lelache?"
She looked at him vaguely and said, "No."
"Well, why bother. New York's doomed in any case, and Boston; and anyhow the future
of this country is out here. This is the. growing edge. This is where it's at, as they used to
say when I as a kid! I wonder, by the way, if you know Dewey Furth, at the HEW office
here."
"Yes," she said, still punch-drunk, but beginning to respond, to act as if nothing had
happened. A spasm of relief went through Haber's body. He wanted to sit down
suddenly, to breathe hard. The danger was past. She was rejecting the incredible
experience. She was asking herself now, what's wrong with me? Why on earth did I look
out the window expecting to see a city of three million? Am I having some sort of crazy
spell?
Of course, Haber thought, a man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if
those with him saw nothing.
"It's stuffy in here," he said with a touch of solicitude in his voice, and went to the
thermostat on the wall. "I keep it warm; old sleep-researcher's habit; body temperature
falls during sleep, and you don't want a lot of subjects or patients with nose colds. But
this electric heat's too efficient, it gets too warm, makes me feel groggy. ... He should be
waking soon." But he did not want Orr to recall his dream clearly, to recount it, to
confirm the miracle. "I think I'll let him go a bit longer, I don't care about the recall on
this dream, and he's right down in third-stage sleep now. Let him stay there while we
finish talking. Was there anything else you wanted to ask about?"
"No. No, I don't think so." Her bangles clashed uncertainly. She blinked, trying to pull
herself together. "If you'll send in the full description of your machine there, and its
operation, and the current uses you're putting it to, and the results, all that, you know, to
Mr. Furth's office, that should be the end of it. ... Have you taken out a patent on the
device?"
"Applied for one."
She nodded. "Might be worth while." She had wandered, clashing and clattering faintly,
over toward the sleeping man, and now stood looking at him with an odd expression on
her thin, brown face.
"You have a queer profession," she said abruptly. "Dreams; watching people's brains
work; telling them what to dream. ... I suppose you do a lot of your research at night?"
"Used to. The Augmentor may save us some of that; we'll be able to get sleep whenever
we want, of the kind we want to study, using it. But a few years ago there was a period
when I never went to bed before 6 A.M. for thirteen months." He laughed. "I boast about
that now. My record. These days I let my staff carry most of the graveyard-shift load.
Compensations of middle age!"
The Mystery of the Plague
- Haber discusses the inherent privacy and mystery of sleep, viewing it as a scientific problem yet to be fully solved.
- Upon waking from a directed dream, Orr displays a singular, monumental poise that momentarily unnerves both Haber and Lelache.
- Orr reveals he dreamed of 'the Plague,' a catastrophic global event that drastically reduced the human population.
- Haber recounts the grim history of the Plague Years, including the loss of his entire family and the societal chaos that ensued.
- The dialogue highlights a moral conflict: Haber justifies the Plague as a solution to overpopulation and famine, while Orr remains haunted by the cost.
- Haber attempts to maintain control over the session by framing Orr's distress as a necessary step in his psychological treatment.
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.
"Sleeping people are so remote," she said, still looking at Orr. "Where are they? . . ."
"Right here," Haber said, and tapped the EEG screen. "Right here, but out of
communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy.
The sleeper turns his back on everyone. 'The mystery of the individual is strongest in
sleep,' a writer in my field said. But of course a mystery is merely a problem we haven't
solved yet! . . . He's due to wake now. George . . . George . . . Wake up, George."
And he woke as he generally did, fast, shifting from one state to the other without
groans, stares, and relapses. He sat up and looked first at Miss Lelache, then at Haber,
who had just removed the trancap from his head. He got up, stretching a little, and went
over to the window. He stood looking out.
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. Caught, neither Haber nor the
woman spoke.
Orr turned around and looked at Haber.
"Where are they?" he said. "Where did they all go?"
Haber saw the woman's eyes open wide, saw the tension rise in her, and knew his peril.
Talk, he must talk! "I'd judge from the EEG," he said, and heard his voice come out deep
and warm, just as he wanted it, "that you had a highly charged dream just now, George.
It was disagreeable; it was in fact very nearly a nightmare. The first 'bad' dream you've
had here. Right?"
"I dreamed about the Plague," Orr said; and he shivered from head to foot, as if he were
going to be sick.
Haber nodded. He sat down behind his desk. With his peculiar docility, his way of doing
the habitual and acceptable thing, Orr came and sat down opposite in the big leather
chair placed for interviewees and patients.
"You had a real hump to get over, and the getting over it wasn't easy. Right? This was
the first time, George, that I've had you handle a real anxiety in a dream. This time,
under my direction as suggested to you in hypnosis, you approached one of the deeper
elements in your psychic malaise. The approach was not easy, or pleasant In fact, that
dream was a heller, wasn't it?"
"Do you remember the Plague Years?" Orr inquired, not aggressively, but with a tinge of
something unusual in his voice: sarcasm? And he looked round at the Lelache, who had
retired to her chair in the corner.
"Yes, I do. I was already a grown man when the first epidemic struck. I was twenty-two
when that first announcement was made in Russia, that chemical pollutants in the
atmosphere were combining to form virulent carcinogens. The next night they released
the hospital statistics from Mexico City. Then they figured out the incubation period, and
everybody began counting. Waiting. And there were the riots, and the fuck-ins, and the
Doomsday Band, and the Vigilantes. And my parents died that year. My wife the next
year. My two sisters and their children after that. Everyone I knew." Haber spread out his
hands. "Yes, I remember those years," he said heavily. "When I must."
"They took care of the overpopulation problem, didn't they?" said Orr, and this time the
edge was clear. "We really did it."
"Yes. They did. There is no overpopulation now. Was there any other solution, besides
nuclear war? There is now no perpetual famine in South America, Africa, and Asia.
When transport channels are fully restored, there won't be even the pockets of hunger
that are still left. They say a third of humanity still goes to bed hungry at night; but in
1980 it was 92 per cent. There are no floods now in the Ganges caused by the piling up
of corpses of people dead of starvation. There's no protein deprivation and rickets among
the working-class children of Portland, Oregon. As there wasâbefore the Crash."
"The Plague," Orr said.
Haber leaned forward across the big desk. "George. Tell me this. Is the world
overpopulated?"
The Manipulation of Reality
- Dr. Haber attempts to gaslight George Orr by convincing him that his memories of a global overpopulation crisis were merely irrational, inward anxieties.
- Haber views Orr's emotional fragility as a tactical advantage to discredit him in front of the legal observer, Miss Lelache.
- Orr challenges Haber's narrative by describing a horrific dream of burying plague victims, asserting that his 'imagination' has rewritten history.
- The tension peaks when Orr asks the lawyer if she also remembers two conflicting versions of reality, threatening Haber's control over the situation.
- Haber abruptly terminates the session to prevent the lawyer from validating Orr's dual memories and to re-establish his dominance over the therapeutic environment.
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.
"No," the man said. 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.
He was near cracking. All the better. If he went to pieces, the lawyer would be still less
inclined to believe anything he said that fitted with whatever she might recall.
"But half an hour ago, George, you were profoundly worried, anxious, because you
believed that overpopulation was a present threat to civilization, to the whole Terran
ecosystem. Now I don't expect that anxiety to be gone, far from it. But I believe its
quality has changed, since your living through it in the dream. You are aware, now, that
it had no basis in reality. The anxiety still exists, but with this difference: you know now
that it is irrationalâthat it conforms to an inward desire, rather than to outward reality.
Now that's a beginning. A good beginning. A damn lot to have accomplished in one
session, with one dream! Do you realize that? You've got a handle, now, to come at this
whole thing with. You've got on top of something that's been on top of you, crushing
you, making you feel pressed down and squeezed in. It's going to be a faker fight from
now on, because you're a freer man. Don't you feel that? Don't you feel, right now,
already, just a little less crowded?"
Orr looked at him, then at the lawyer again. He said nothing.
There was a long pause.
"You look beat," Haber said, a verbal pat on the shoulder. He wanted to calm Orr down,
to get him back into his normal self-effacing state, in which he would lack the courage
to say anything about his dream powers in front of the third person; or else to get him to
break right down, to behave with obvious abnormality. But he wouldn't do either. "If
there wasn't an HEW observer lurking in the corner, I'd offer you a shot of whisky. But
we'd better not turn a therapy session into a wing-ding, eh?"
"Don't you want to hear the dream?"
"If you want."
"I was burying them. In one of the big ditches ... I did work in the Interment Corps,
when I was sixteen, after my parents got it. ... Only in the dream the people were all
naked and looked like they'd died of starvation. Hills of them. I had to bury them all. I
kept looking for you, but you weren't there."
"No," Haber said reassuringly, "I haven't figured in your dreams yet, George."
"Oh, yes. With Kennedy. And as a horse." "Yes; very early in the therapy," Haber said,
dismissing it. "This dream then did use some actual recall material from your experience
â"
"No. I never buried anybody. Nobody died of the Plague. There wasn't any Plague. It's
all in my imagination. I dreamed it."
Damn the stupid little bastard! He had got out of control. Haber cocked his head and
maintained a tolerant, noninterfering silence; it was all he could do, for a stronger move
might make the lawyer suspicious.
"You said you remembered the Plague; but don't you also remember that there wasn't
any Plague, that nobody died of pollutant cancer, that the population just kept on getting
bigger and bigger? No? You don't remember that? What about you, Miss Lelacheâdo
you remember it both ways?"
But at this Haber stood up: "Sorry, George, but I can't let Miss Lelache be drawn into
this. She's not qualified. It would be improper for her to answer you. This is a
psychiatric session. She's here to observe the Augmentor, and nothing further. I must
insist on this."
Orr was quite white; the cheekbones stood out in his face. He sat staring up at Haber. He
said nothing.
"We've got a problem here, and there's only one way to lick it, I'm afraid. Cut the
Gordian knot. No offense, Miss Lelache, but as you can see, you're the problem. We're
simply at a stage where our dialogue can't support a third member, even a
nonparticipant. Best thing to do is just call it off. Right now. Start again tomorrow at
four. O.K., George?"
The Architect of Reality
- George Orr questions whether other dreamers are unknowingly reshaping reality, suggesting that most people are lucky to remain ignorant of these shifts.
- Dr. Haber dismisses Orr's concerns as a complex 'delusion pattern' to the legal observer, Miss Lelache, while secretly managing his own exhaustion.
- Haber experiences a moment of linguistic dissociation, feeling as though his professional explanations have become a deluge of meaningless speech.
- After erasing the session's recording, Haber discovers that reality has indeed shifted: his bottle of medicinal alcohol has been replaced by rare, high-quality bourbon.
- The world's population has been drastically reduced from seven billion to one hundred thousand, a change Haber toasts as his own 'creation.'
- The text concludes with a philosophical reflection on the cyclical nature of birth, death, and the insatiable desires that drive the creation of worlds.
"To a better world!" Dr. Haber said, raising his glass to his creation, and finished his whisky in a lingering, savoring swallow.
Orr stood up, but didn't head for the door. "Did you ever happen to think, Dr. Haber," he
said, quietly enough but stuttering a little, "that there, there might be other people who
dream the way I do? That reality's being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed,
all the tuneâonly we don't know it? Only the dreamer knows it, and those who know
his dream. If that's true, I guess we're lucky not knowing it. This is confusing enough."
Genial, noncommittal, reassuring, Haber talked him to the door, and out of it.
"You hit a crisis session," he said to Lelache, shutting the door behind him. He wiped his
forehead, let weariness and worry appear in his face and tone. "Whew! What a day to
have an observer present!"
"It was extremely interesting," she said, and her bracelets chattered a little.
"He's not hopeless," Haber said. "A session like this one gives even me a pretty
discouraging impression. But he has a chance, a real chance, of working out of this
delusion pattern he's caught in, this terrific dread of dreaming. The trouble is, it's a
complex pattern, and a not unintelligent mind caught in it; he's all too quick at weaving
new nets to trap himself in. ... If only he'd been sent for therapy ten years ago, when he
was in his teens; but of course the Recovery had barely got underway ten years ago. Or
even a year ago, before he started deteriorating his whole reality-orientation with drugs.
But he tries, and keeps trying; and he may yet win through to a sound reality-
adjustment."
"But he's not psychotic, you said," Lelache remarked, a little dubiously.
"Correct. I said, disturbed. If he cracks, of course, he'll crack completely; probably in the
catatonic schizophrenic line. A disturbed person isn't less liable to psychosis than a
normal one." He could not talk any more, the words were drying up on his tongue,
turning to dry shreds of nonsense. It seemed to him that he had been spewing out a
deluge of meaningless speech for hours and now he had no more control over it at all.
Fortunately Miss Lelache had had enough, too, evidently; she clashed, snapped, shook
hands, left.
Haber went first to the tape recorder concealed in a wall panel near the couch, on which
he recorded all therapy sessions: nonsignaling recorders were a special privilege of
psychotherapists and the Office of Intelligence. He erased the record of the past hour.
He sat down in his chair behind the big oak desk, opened the bottom drawer, removed
glass and bottle, and poured a hefty slug of bourbon. My God, there hadn't been any
bourbon half an hour agoânot for twenty years! Grain had been far too precious, with
seven billion mouths to feed, to go for spirits. There had been nothing but pseudobeer, or
(for a doctor) absolute alcohol; that's what the bottle in his desk had been, half an hour
ago.
He drank off half the shot in a gulp, then paused. He looked over at the window. After a
while he got up and stood in front of the window looking out over the roofs and trees.
One hundred thousand souls. Evening was beginning to dim the quiet river, but the
mountains stood immense and clear, remote, in the level sunlight of the heights.
"To a better world!" Dr. Haber said, raising his glass to his creation, and finished his
whisky in a lingering, savoring swallow.
6
It may remain for us to learn . . . that our task is only beginning, and that there will never
be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable and unthinkable
Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we
cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking; â that the forces integrating
worlds are the errors of the Past; â that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of
insatiable desire; â and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the
inextinguishable passions of vanished lives.
âLafcadio Hearn, Out of the East
A Born Tool
- George Orr returns to a spacious apartment in an old frame house that exists in place of a cramped condominium tower from a previous reality.
- Orr experiences a profound internal crisis, feeling terrified and bewildered by his lack of agency and the loss of his natural 'sureness of foot.'
- He recognizes that Dr. Haber is using him as a tool but feels too weak and devoid of character to resist or take control of his own destiny.
- Orr's only sense of purpose is tied to Haber's claim that his unique dream configuration is an invaluable contribution to human knowledge.
- Despite his desire to escape, Orr feels trapped by Haber's scientific authority and the hope that his 'terrible gift' might eventually be used for good.
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.
George Orr's apartment was on the top floor of an old frame house a few blocks up the
hill on Corbett Avenue, a shabby part of town where most of the houses were getting on
for a century, or well beyond it. He had three large rooms, a bathroom with a deep claw-
foot tub, and a view between roofs to the river, up and down which passed ships,
pleasure boats, logs, gulls, great turning flights of pigeons.
He perfectly remembered his other flat, of course, the one-room 8-1/2 X 11 with the
pullout stove and balloonbed and co-op bathroom down the linoleum hall, on the
eighteenth floor of the Corbett Condominium tower, which had never been built.
He got off the trolley at Whiteaker Street and walked up the hill, and up the broad, dark
stairs; he let himself in, dropped his briefcase on the floor and his body on the bed, and
let go. He was terrified, anguished, exhausted, bewildered. "I've got to do something,
I've got to do something," he kept telling himself frantically, but he did not know what to
do. He had never known what to do. He had always done what seemed to want doing,
the next thing to be done, without asking questions, without forcing himself, without
worrying about it. But that sureness of foot had deserted him when he began taking
drugs, and by now he was quite astray. He must act, he had to act. He must refuse to let
Haber use him any longer as a tool. He must take his destiny in his own hands.
He spread out his hands and looked at them, then sank his face into them; it was wet
with tears. Oh hell, hell, he thought bitterly, what kind of man am I? Tears in my beard?
No wonder Haber uses me. How could he help it? 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.
I must get away from Haber, he thought, trying to be firm and decisive, but even as he
thought it he knew he wouldn't. Haber had him hooked, and with more than one hook.
A dream configuration so unusual, indeed unique, Haber had said, was invaluable to
research: Orr's contribution to human knowledge was going to prove immense. Orr
believed that Haber meant this and knew what he was talking about. The scientific
aspect of it all was in fact the only hopeful one, to his mind; it seemed to him that
perhaps science might wring some good out of his peculiar and terrible gift, put it to
Caught in the Power Maze
- Orr grapples with the moral weight of six billion nonexistent people erased by his previous dream.
- Haber uses legal threats and drug prescriptions to coerce Orr into continuing the experimental therapy.
- Orr fears that dreaming without Haber's hypnotic restraint will result in an uncontrollable nightmare.
- Orr realizes that the potential for absolute power is corrupting Haber's scientific integrity.
- Heather Lelache contacts Orr to reveal that Haber has been promoted to a high-level government directorship.
He was caught. Rat in a trap. Running a maze for the mad scientist, and no way out.
some good ends, compensating a little for the enormous harm it had done.
The murder of six billion nonexistent people.
Orr's head ached fit to split. He ran cold water in the deep, cracked washbasin, and
dunked his whole face in for half a minute at a time, coming up red, blind, and wet as a
newborn baby.
Haber had a moral line on him, then, but where he really had him caught was on the
legal hook. If Orr quit Voluntary Therapy, he became liable to prosecution for obtaining
drugs illegally and would be sent to jail or the nut hatch. No way out there. And if he
didn't quit, but merely cut sessions and failed to cooperate, Haber had an effective
instrument of coercion: the dream-suppressing drugs, which Orr could obtain only on his
prescription. He was more uneasy than ever at the idea of dreaming spontaneously,
without control, now. In the state he was in, and having been conditioned to dream
effectively every time in the laboratory, he did not like to think what might happen if he
dreamed effectively without the rational restraints imposed by hypnosis. It would be a
nightmare, a worse nightmare than the one he had just had in Haber's office; of that he
was sure, and he dared not let it happen. He must take the dream suppressants. That was
the one thing he knew he must do, the thing that must be done. But he could do it only
so long as Haber let him, and therefore he must cooperate with Haber. He was caught.
Rat in a trap. Running a maze for the mad scientist, and no way out. No way, no way.
Be he's not a mad scientist, Orr thought dully, he's a pretty sane one, or he was. It's the
chance of power that my dreams give him that twists him around. He keeps acting a part,
and this gives him such an awfully big part to play. So that now he's using even his
science as a means, not an end. . . . But his ends are good, aren't they? He wants to
improve life for humanity. Is that wrong?
His head was aching again. He was underwater when the telephone rang. He hastily tried
to rub his face and hair dry, and returned to the dark bedroom, groping. "Hello, Orr
here."
"This is Heather Lelache," said a soft, suspicious alto.
An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and
flowered all in one moment with its roots in his loins and its flowers in his mind.
"Hello," he said again.
"Do you want to meet me some time to talk about this?"
"Yes. Certaintly."
"Well. I don't want you thinking that there's any case to be made using that machine
thing, the Augmentor. That seems to be perfectly in line. It's had extensive laboratory
trial, and he's had all the proper checks and gone through the proper channels, and now
it's registered with HEW.
He's a real pro, of course. I didn't realize who he was when you first talked to me. A man
doesn't get to that sort of position unless he's awfully good."
"What position?"
"Well. The directorship of a Government-sponsored research institute!"
The Goose and the Augmentor
- Orr reflects on the manipulative nature of Dr. Haber, who uses Orr's effective dreaming to secure personal promotions and institutional power.
- The protagonist realizes that his dreams have fundamentally altered reality, such as changing his employment and erasing entire cities from existence.
- Orr experiences a profound sense of self-loathing, comparing himself to a 'vapid stupid goose' being exploited for golden eggs.
- Miss Lelache observes Orr's physical and mental exhaustion following a session involving a dream about a plague.
- Despite his desperation, Miss Lelache refuses to disclose Haber's hypnotic suggestions to Orr, citing professional ethics.
- The narrative highlights the disorientation of living in a shifting reality where memories of non-existent water projects clash with current facts.
The goose. Precisely. That describes me perfectly, Orr thought. A damned white vapid stupid goose.
He liked the way she began her fierce, scornful sentences so often with a weak,
conciliatory "well." She cut the ground out from under them before they ever got going,
let them hang unsupported in the void. She had courage, great courage.
"Oh, yes, I see," he said vaguely. Dr. Haber had got his directorship the day after Orr had
got his cabin. The cabin dream had been during the one all-night session they had had;
they never tried another. Hypnotic suggestion of dream content was insufficient to a
night's dreaming, and at 3 A.M. Haber had at last given up and, hooking Orr to the
Augmentor, had fed him deep-sleep patterns the rest of the night, so that they could both
relax. But the next afternoon they had had a session, and the dream Orr had dreamed
during it had been so long, so confused and complicated, that he had never been
altogether sure of what he had changed, what good works Haber had been
accomplishing that time. He had gone to sleep in the old office and had wakened in the
O.O.I, office: Haber had got himself a promotion. But there had been more to it than that
âthe weather was a little less rainy, it seemed, since that dream; perhaps other things
had changed. He was not sure. He had protested against doing so much effective
dreaming in so short a time. Haber had at once agreed not to push him so fast, and had
let him go without a session for five days. Haber was, after all, a benevolent man. And
besides, he didn't want to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.
The goose. Precisely. That describes me perfectly, Orr thought. A damned white vapid
stupid goose. He had lost a bit of what Miss Lelache was saying. "I'm sorry," he said, "I
missed something. I'm kind of thick-headed just now, I think."
"Are you all right?"
"Yes, fine. Just sort of tired."
"You had an upsetting dream, about the Plague, didn't you. You looked awful after it. Do
these sessions leave you this way every time?"
"No, not always. This was a bad one. I guess you could see that. Were you arranging for
us to meet?"
"Yes. Monday for lunch, I said. You work downtown, don't you, at Bradford Industries?"
To his mild wonder he realized that he did. The great water projects of Bonneville-
Umatilla did not exist, to bring water to the giant cities of John Day and French Glen,
which did not exist. There were no big cities in Oregon, except Portland. He was not a
draftsman for the District, but for a private tools firm downtown; he worked in the Stark
Street office. Of course. "Yes," he said. "I'm off from one to two. We could meet at
Dave's, on Ankeny."
"One to two is fine. So's Dave's. I'll see you there Monday."
"Wait," he said. "Listen. Will youâwould you mind telling me what Dr. Haber said, I
mean, what he told me to dream when I was hypnotized? You heard all that, didn't you?"
"Yes, but I couldn't do that, I'd be interfering in his treatment. If he wanted you to know
he'd tell you. It would be unethical, I can't."
"I guess that's right."
"Yes. I'm sorry. Monday, then?"
"Goodby," he said, suddenly overwhelmed with depression and foreboding, and put the
The Weight of Double Memory
- George Orr realizes that even strong people like his lawyer cannot bear the burden of his reality-altering truth.
- He retreats into a state of sensory deprivation on his bare floor, seeking a place beyond the reach of dreams.
- Dr. Haber uses phenothiazines to suppress the intensity of Orr's dreams, though he warns that only death truly stops them.
- Orr experiences a profound cognitive dissonance between his current reality of abundance and his memory of a starving world.
- The protagonist's physical body has changed to reflect the new timeline, yet he retains the psychological hunger of his previous life.
- Social structures like marriage and population laws have shifted significantly across the different versions of his history.
Nothing will keep a man from dreaming, he had said, but death.
receiver back without hearing her say goodby. She couldn't help him. She was
courageous and strong, but not that strong. Perhaps she had seen or sensed the change,
but she had put it away from her, refused it. Why not? It was a heavy load to bear, that
double memory, and she had no reason to undertake it, no motive for believing even for
a moment a driveling psycho who claimed that his dreams came true.
Tomorrow was Saturday. A long session with Haber, four o'clock until six or longer. No
way out.
It was time to eat, but Orr wasn't hungry. He had not turned on the lights in his high,
twilit bedroom, or in the living room which he had never got around to furnishing in the
three years he'd lived here. He wandered in there now. The windows looked out on lights
and the river, the air smelled of dust and early spring. There was a woodframe fireplace,
an old upright piano with eight ivories missing, a pile of carpeting mill ends by the
hearth, and a decrepit Japanese bamboo table ten inches high. Darkness lay softly on the
bare pine floor, unpolished, unswept.
George Orr lay down in that mild darkness, full length, face down, the small of the dusty
wooden floor in his nostrils, the hardness of it upholding his body. He lay still, not
asleep; somewhere else than sleep, farther on, father out, a place where there are no
dreams. It was not the first time he had been there.
When he got up, it was to take a chlorpromazine tablet and go to bed. Haber had tried
him with phenothiazines this week; they seemed to work well, to let him enter the d-
state at need but to weaken the intensity of the dreams so that they never rose to the
effective level. That was fine, but Haber said that the effect would lessen, just as with all
the other drugs, until there was no effect at all. Nothing will keep a man from dreaming,
he had said, but death.
This night, at least, he slept deep, and if he dreamed the dreams were fleeting, without
weight. He didn't wake until nearly noon on Saturday. He went to his refrigerator and
look in it; he stood contemplating it a while. There was more food in it than he had ever
seen in a private refrigerator in his life. In his other life. The one lived among seven
billion others, where the food, such as it was, was never enough. Where an egg was the
luxury of the month â"Today we ovulate!" his halfwife had used to say when she
bought their egg ration. . . . Curious, in this life they hadn't had a trial marriage, he and
Donna. There was no such thing, legally speaking, in the post-Plague years. There was
full marriage only. In Utah, since the birth rate was still lower than the death rate, they
were even trying to reinstitute polygamous marriage, for religious and patriotic reasons.
But he and Donna hadn't had any kind of marriage this time, they had just lived together.
But still it hadn't lasted. His attention returned to the food in the refrigerator.
He was not the thin, sharp-boned man he had been in the world of the seven billion; he
was quite solid, in fact. But he ate a starving man's meal, an enormous mealâ hard-
boiled eggs, buttered toast, anchovies, jerky, celery, cheese, walnuts, a piece of cold
halibut spread with mayonnaise, lettuce, pickled beets, chocolate cookiesâanything he
The Cost of Effective Dreams
- George Orr experiences a shift in reality where a global plague has reduced the human population by six billion, leaving the world quieter but still broken.
- Despite the massive loss of life, human nature remains unchanged, with global superpowers engaging in brutal, technologically advanced warfare in the Near East.
- The environment remains profoundly polluted, a legacy of the pre-Crash era that continues to claim the lives of one in four infants.
- Orr attempts to rationalize his power as a 'bad dream' but remains acutely aware that his effective dreaming is the engine behind these shifting timelines.
- George confronts Dr. Haber, pleading with him to stop using his dreams to 'improve' the world, arguing that the utilitarian tampering is fundamentally wrong.
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.
found on his shelves. After this orgy he felt physically a great deal better. He thought of
something, as he drank some genuine nonersatz coffee, that actually made him grin. He
thought: In that life, yesterday, I dreamed an effective dream, which obliterated six
billion lives and changed the entire history of humankind for the past quarter century.
But in this life, which I then created, I did not dream an effective dream. I was in
Haber's office, all right, and I dreamed; but it didn't change anything. It's been this way
all along, and I merely had a bad dream about the Plague Years. There's nothing wrong
with me; I don't need therapy.
He had never looked at it this way before, and it amused him enough that he grinned, but
not particularly happily.
He knew he would dream again.
It was already past two. He washed up, found his raincoat (real cotton, a luxury in the
other life), and set off on foot to the Institute, a couple of miles' walk, up past the
Medical School and then farther up, into Washington Park. He could have got there by
the trolleys, of course, but they were sporadic and roundabout, and anyhow there was no
rush. It was pleasant, passing through the warm March rain, the unbustling streets; the
trees were leafing out, the chestnuts ready to light their candles.
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. If had not changed anything
radically: only quantitatively.
The air was still profoundly and irremediably polluted: that pollution predated the Crash
by decades, indeed was its direct cause. It didn't harm anybody much now, except the
newborn. The Plague, in its leukemoid variety, still selectively, thoughtfully as it were,
picked off one out of four babies born and killed it within six months. Those who
survived were virtually cancer-resistant. But there are other griefs.
No factories spewed smoke, down by the river. No cars ran fouling the air with exhaust;
what few there were, were steamers or battery-powered.
There were no songbirds any more, either.
The effects of the Plague were visible in everything, it was itself still endemic, and yet it
hadn't prevented war from breaking out. In fact the fighting in the Near East was more
savage than it had been in the more crowded world. The U.S. was heavily committed to
the Israeli-Egyptian side in weapons, munitions, planes, and "military advisers" by the
regiment. China was in equally deep on the Iraq-Iran side, though she hadn't yet sent in
Chinese soldiers, only Tibetans, North Koreans, Vietnamese, and Mongolians. Russia
and India were holding uneasily aloof; but now that Afghanistan and Brazil were going
in with the Iranians, Pakistan might jump in on the Isragypt side. India would then panic
and line up with China, which might scare the USSR enough to push her in on the U.S.
side. This gave a line-up of twelve Nuclear Powers in all, six to a side. So went the
speculations. Meanwhile Jerusalem was rubble, and in Saudi Arabia and Iraq the civilian
population was living in burrows in the ground while tanks and planes sprayed fire in
the air and cholera in the water, and babies crawled out of the burrows blinded by
napalm.
They were still massacring whites in Johannesburg, Orr noticed on a headline at a corner
newspaper stand. Years now since the Uprising, and there were still whites to massacre
in South Africa! People are tough. . . .
The rain fell warm, polluted, gentle on his bare head as he climbed the gray hills of
Portland.
In the office with the great corner window that looked out into the rain, he said, "Please,
stop using my dreams to improve things, Dr. Haber. It won't work. It's wrong. I want to
be cured."
"That's the one essential prerequisite to your cure, George! Wanting it."
"You're not answering me."
The Conflict of Purpose
- Orr perceives Haber as a man composed of infinite layers of personality with no core or moral center.
- Haber defends his manipulation of reality as fulfilling man's fundamental purpose to improve and control the world.
- Orr argues for a passive, interconnected existence, comparing humanity to grass-blades rather than functional machine parts.
- Haber dismisses Orrâs philosophy as 'natural Buddhist' mysticism with a tone of intellectual contempt.
- Despite his moral objections, Orr submits to drug-induced hypnosis, feeling he has no choice but to let Haber use his dreams.
- The narrative shifts into a dream state where Orr walks a dark country road as a celestial body begins to grow unnaturally bright.
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.
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. Nowhere that he ever
stopped, had to stop, had to say Here I stay! No being, only layers.
"You're using my effective dreams to change the world. You won't admit to me that
you're doing it. Why not?"
"George, you must realize that you ask questions which from your point of view may
seem reasonable, but which from my point of view are literally unanswerable. We don't
see reality the same way."
"Near enough the same to be able to talk."
"Yes. Fortunately. But not always to be able to ask and answer. Not yet."
"I can answer your questions, and I do. . . . But anyway: look. You can't go on changing
things, trying to run things."
"You speak as if that were some kind of general moral imperative." He looked at Orr
with his genial, reflective smile, stroking his beard. "But in fact, isn't that man's very
purpose on earthâto do things, change things, run things, make a better world?"
"No!"
"What is his purpose, then?"
"I don't know. Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where
every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life
has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a
thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind
blowing on the grass."
There was a slight pause, and when Haber answered his tone was no longer genial,
reassuring, or encouraging. It was quite neutral and verged, just detectably, on contempt.
"You're of a peculiarly passive outlook for a man brought up in the Judaeo-Christian-
Rationalist West. A sort of natural Buddhist. Have you ever studied the Eastern
mysticisms, George?" The last question, with its obvious answer, was an open sneer.
"No. I don't know anything about them. I do know that it's wrong to force the pattern of
things. It won't do. It's been our mistake for a hundred years. Don't youâdon't you see
what happened yesterday?"
The opaque, dark eyes met his, straight on.
"What happened yesterday, George?"
No way. No way out.
Haber was using sodium pentothal on him now, to lower his resistance to hypnotic
procedures. He submitted to the shot, watching the needle slip with only a moment of
pain into the vein of his arm. This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had
never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.
Haber went off somewhere to run something while the drug took effect; but he was back
promptly in fifteen minutes, gusty, jovial, and indifferent. "All right! Let's get on with it,
George!"
Orr knew, with dreary clarity, what he would get on with today: the war. The papers
were full of it, even Orr's news-resistant mind had been full of it, coming here. The
growing war in the Near East. Haber would end it. And no doubt the killings in Africa.
For Haber was a benevolent man. He wanted to make the world better for humanity.
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means. Orr
lay back on the couch and shut his eyes. The hand touched his throat, "You will enter the
hypnotic state now, George," said Haber's deep voice. "You are. . . ."
dark.
In the dark.
Not quite night yet: late twilight on the fields. Clumps of trees looked black and moist.
The road he was walking on picked up the faint, last light from the sky; it ran long and
straight, an old country highway, cracked blacktop. A goose was walking ahead of him,
about fifteen feet in advance and visible only as a white, bobbing blur. Now and then it
hissed a little.
The stars were coming out, white as daisies. A big one was blooming just to the right of
the road, low over the dark country, tremulously white. When he looked up at it again it
had already become larger and brighter. It's enhuging, he thought. It seemed to grow
The Paradox of Peace
- George Orr experiences a violent, psychedelic dream of a space battle involving a bursting star and cosmic streaks of death.
- Dr. Haber reveals he has been secretly recording their sessions, claiming it is standard psychiatric practice.
- The recorded hypnotic suggestion was for a world at peace with no mass killings, genocides, or nuclear stockpiles.
- Orr argues that his dream of an extraterrestrial battle technically fulfilled the instruction for 'no more killing of humans by other humans.'
- The transition between realities is highlighted by the linguistic dissonance of 'Isragypt,' a word that no longer fits the current timeline.
- Haber's frustration grows as Orr's subconscious finds loopholes in his increasingly specific and grandiose hypnotic commands.
The ground swung up and down, great trembling wrinkles passing through the skin of Earth.
reddish as it brightened. It enreddenhuged. The eyes swam. Small blue-green streaks
zipped about it zigzagging Brownian round-ianroundian. A vast and creamy halo
pulsated about big star and tiny zips, fainter, clearer, pulsing. Oh no no no! he said as the
big star brightened hugendly BURST blinding. He fell to the ground, covering his head
with his arms as the sky burst into streaks of bright death, but could not turn onto his
face, must behold and witness. The ground swung up and down, great trembling
wrinkles passing through the skin of Earth. "Let be, let be!" he screamed aloud with his
face against the sky, and woke on the leather couch.
He sat up, and put his face in his sweaty, shaking hands.
Presently he felt Haber's hand heavy on his shoulder. "Bad time again? Damn, I thought
I'd let you off easy. Told you to have a dream about peace."
"I did."
"But it was disturbing to you?"
"I was watching a battle in space."
"Watching it? From where?"
"Earth." He recounted the dream briefly, omitting the goose. "I don't know whether they
got one of ours or we got one of theirs."
Haber laughed. "I wish we could see what goes on out there! We'd feel more involved.
But of course those encounters take place at speeds and distances that human vision
simply isn't equipped to keep up with. Your version's a lot more picturesque than the
actuality, no doubt. Sounds like a good science-fiction movie from the seventies. Used to
go to those when I was a kid. . . . But why do you think you dreamed up a battle scene
when the suggestion was peace?"
"Just peace? Dream about peaceâthat's all you said?"
Haber did not answer at once. He occupied himself with the controls of the Augmentor.
"O.K.," he said at last. "This once, experimentally, let's let you compare the suggestion
with the dream. Perhaps we'll find out why it came out negative. I saidâno, let's run the
tape." He went over to a panel in the wall.
"You tape the whole session?"
"Sure. Standard psychiatric practice. Didn't you know?"
How could I know if it's hidden, makes no noise signal, and you didn't tell me, Orr
thought; but he said nothing. Maybe it was standard practice, maybe it was Haber's
personal arrogance; but in either case he couldn't do much about it.
"Here we are, it ought to be about here. The hypnotic state now, George. You areâHere!
Don't go under, George!" The tape hissed. Orr shook his head and blinked. The last
fragments of sentences had been Haber's voice on the tape, of course; and he was still
full of the hypnosis-inducing drug.
"I'll have to skip a bit. All right." Now it was his voice on the tape again, saying, "â
peace. No more mass killing of humans by other humans. No fighting in Iran and Arabia
and Israel. No more genocides in Africa. No stockpiles of nuclear and biological
weapons, ready to use against other nations. No more research on ways and means of
killing people. A world at peace with itself. Peace as a universal life-style on Earth. You
will dream of that world at peace with itself. Now you're going to sleep. When I sayâ"
He stopped the tape abruptly, lest he put Orr to sleep with the key word.
Orr rubbed his forehead. "Well," he said, "I followed instructions."
"Hardly. To dream of a battle in cislunar spaceâ" Haber stopped as abruptly as the tape.
"Cislunar," Orr said, feeling a little sorry for Haber. "We weren't using that word, when I
went to sleep. How are things in Isragypt?"
The made-up word from the old reality had a curiously shocking effect, spoken in this
reality: like surrealism, it seemed to make sense and didn't, or seemed not to make sense
and did.
Haber walked up and down the long, handsome room. Once he passed his hand over his
red-brown, curly beard. The gesture was a calculated one and familiar to Orr, but when
The Price of Peace
- Dr. Haber explains that the threat of an alien invasion was the catalyst that forced humanity to end internal warfare and unite for survival.
- Orr argues that his subconscious is incapable of imagining a truly warless world, merely substituting human conflict for an extraterrestrial one.
- The dialogue highlights the disconnect between Haber's rational, humanitarian goals and the irrational, chaotic nature of the dreaming mind.
- Orr expresses deep fear and guilt over the 'monsters' his unconscious may have manifested on the Moon in the name of global peace.
- Haber dismisses Orr's anxiety by pointing to the efficiency of the international missile defense systems established over the last six years.
You're trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn't suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?
he spoke Orr felt that he was seeking and choosing his words carefully, not trusting, for
once, to his inexhaustible fund of improvisation. "It's curious that you used the Defense
of Earth as a symbol or metaphor of peace, of the end of warfare. Yet it's not unfitting.
Only very subtle. Dreams are endlessly subtle. Endlessly. For in fact it was that threat,
that immediate peril of invasion by noncommunicating, reasonlessly hostile aliens,
which forced us to stop fighting among ourselves, to turn our aggressive-defensive
energies outward, to extend the territorial drive to include all humanity, to combine our
weapons against a common foe. If the Aliens hadn't struck, who knows? We might,
actually, still be fighting in the Near East."
"Out of the frying pan into the fire," Orr said. "Don't you see, Dr. Haber, that that's all
you'll ever get from me? Look, it's not that I want to block you, to frustrate your plans.
Ending the war was a good idea, I agree with it totally. I even voted Isolationist last
election because Harris promised to pull us out of the Near East. But I guess I can't, or
my subconscious can't, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute
one kind of war for another. You said, no killing of humans by other humans. So I
dreamed up the Aliens. Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious
you're trying to use, not my rational mind. Maybe rationally I could conceive of the
human species not trying to kill each other off by nations, in fact rationally it's easier to
conceive of than the motives of war. But you're handling something outside reason.
You're trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn't suited to the
job. Who has humanitarian dreams?"
Haber said nothing, and showed no reaction, so Orr went on.
"Or maybe it's not just my unconscious, irrational mind, maybe it's my total self, my
whole being, that just isn't right for the job. I'm too defeatist, or passive, as you said,
maybe. I don't have enough desires. Maybe that has something to do with my having this
âthis capacity to dream effectively; but if it doesn't, there might be others who can do
it, people with minds more like your own, that you could work with better. You could
test for it; I can't be the only one; maybe I just happened to become aware of it. But I
don't want to do it. I want to get off the hook. I can't take it. I mean, look: all right, the
war's been over in the Near East for six years, fine, but now there are the Aliens, up on
the Moon. What if they land? What kind of monsters have you dredged up out of my
unconscious mind, in the name of peace? I don't even know!"
"Nobody knows what the Aliens look like, George," Haber said, in a reasonable,
reassuring tone. "We all have our bad dreams about 'em, God knows! But as you said,
it's been over six years now since their first landing on the Moon, and they still haven't
made it to Earth. By now, our missile defense systems are completely efficient. There's
no reason to think they'll break through now, if they haven't yet. The danger period was
during those first few months, before the Defense was mobilized on an international
cooperative basis."
The Abyss of the Unconscious
- Orr suspects Haber of psychological compartmentalization, lying to himself to justify manipulating reality through Orr's dreams.
- Orr warns that his deteriorating mental state could unleash a world of monsters and childhood horrors if he is forced to dream again.
- Haber dismisses Orr's fears as Victorian superstition, arguing that the unconscious is a source of creativity rather than depravity.
- The conflict highlights a fundamental disagreement: Haber believes evil is a social construct, while Orr believes it is inherent in the mind.
- The narrative shifts to a philosophical reflection on sleep as a frontier where the 'Possible' and the 'improbable' merge into a vast, dark universe.
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.
Orr sat a while, shoulders slumped. He wanted to yell at Haber, "Liar! Why do you lie to
me?" But the impulse was not a deep one. It led nowhere. For all he knew, Haber was
incapable of sincerity because he was lying to himself. He might be compartmenting his
mind into two hermetic halves, in one of which he knew that Orr's dreams changed
reality, and employed them for that purpose; in the other of which he knew that he was
using hypnotherapy and dream abreaction to treat a schizoid patient who believed that
his dreams changed reality.
That Haber could have thus got out of communication with himself was rather hard for
Orr to conceive; his own mind was so resistant to such divisions that he was slow to
recognize them in others. But he had learned that they existed. 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.
But that was in the old world, now. Not in the brave new one.
"I am cracking," he said. "You must see that. You're a psychiatrist. Don't you see that I'm
going to pieces? Aliens from outer space attacking Earth! Look: if you ask me to dream
again, what will you get? Maybe a totally insane world, the product of an insane mind.
Monsters, ghosts, witches, dragons, transformationsâall the stuff we carry around in us,
all the horrors of childhood, the night fears, the nightmares. How can you keep all that
from getting loose? I can't stop it. I'm not in control!"
"Don't worry about control! Freedom is what you're working toward," Haber said
gustily. "Freedom! Your unconscious mind is not a sink of horror and depravity. That's a
Victorian notion, and a terrifically destructive one. It crippled most of the best minds of
the nineteenth century, and hamstrung psychology all through the first half of the
twentieth. Don't be afraid of your unconscious mind! It's not a black pit of nightmares.
Nothing of the kind! It is the wellspring of health, imagination, creativity. What we call
'evil' is produced by civilization, its constraints and repressions, deforming the
spontaneous, free self-expression of the personality. The aim of psychotherapy is
precisely this, to remove those groundless fears and nightmares, to bring up what's
unconscious into the light of rational consciousness, examine it objectively, and find that
there is nothing to fear."
"But there is," Orr said very softly.
Haber let him go at last. He came out into the spring twilight, and stood a minute on the
steps of the Institute with his hands in his pockets, looking at the streetlights in the city
below, so blurred by mist and dusk that they seemed to wink and move like the tiny,
silvery shapes of tropical fish in a dark aquarium. A cable car was clanking up the steep
hill toward its turnaround here at the top of Washington Park, in front of the Institute. He
went out into the street and climbed aboard the car while it was turning. His walk was
evasive and yet aimless. He moved like a sleepwalker, like one impelled.
7
Daydream, which is to thought as the nebula is to the star, borders on sleep, and is
concerned with it as its frontier. An atmosphere inhabited by living transparencies:
there's a beginning of the unknown. But beyond it the Possible opens out, immense.
Other beings, other facts, are there. No supernaturalism, only the occult continuation of
infinite nature. . . . Sleep is in contact with the Possible, which we also call the
improbable. The world of the night is a world. Night, as night, is a universe. . . . The
dark things of the unknown world become neighbors of man, whether by true
communication or by a visionary enlargement of the distances of the abyss . . . and the
sleeper, not quite seeing, not quite unconscious, glimpses the strange animalities, weird
vegetations, terrible or radiant pallors, ghosts, masks, figures, hydras, confusions,
moonless moonlights, obscure unmakings of miracle, growths and vanishings within a
The Aquarium of Night
- Heather Lelache experiences a disorienting break in her perception of reality while walking through Portland.
- She finds herself drawn to a condemned parking structure that she momentarily believes is her place of employment.
- The protagonist struggles with conflicting memories of her office location, oscillating between a neo-Inca high-rise and a derelict building.
- Heather attempts to track down George Orr after he fails to show up for their scheduled lunch date.
- She expresses hesitation about contacting Dr. Haber, fearing the consequences of her own professional deceptions.
- George Orr remains missing and unreachable at both his home and place of work for several days.
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.
murky depth, shapes floating in shadow, the whole mystery which we call Dreaming,
and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality. The dream is the
aquarium of Night.
âV. Hugo, Travailleurs de la Mer
At 2:10 P.M. on March 30, Heather Lelache was seen leaving Dave's Fine Foods on
Ankeny Street and proceeding southward on Fourth Avenue, carrying a large black
handbag with brass catch, wearing a red vinyl rain-cloak. Look out for this woman. She
is dangerous.
It wasn't that she cared one way or the other about seeing that poor damned psycho, but
shit, she hated to look foolish in front of waiters. Holding a table for half an hour right in
the middle of the lunchtime crowdâ"I'm waiting for somebody."â"I'm sorry, I'm
waiting for somebody."âand so nobody comes and nobody comes, and so finally she
had to order and shove the stuff down in a big rush, and so now she'd have heartburn. On
top of pique, umbrage, and ennui. Oh, the French diseases of the soul.
She turned left on Morrison, and then suddenly stopped. What was she doing over here?
This wasn't the way to Forman, Esserbeck, and Rutti. Hastily she returned north several
blocks, crossed Ankeny, came to Burnside, and stopped again. What the hell was she
doing?
Going to the converted parking structure at 209 S.W. Burnside. What converted parking
structure? Her office was in the Pendleton Building, Portland's first post-Crash office
building, on Morrison. Fifteen stories, neo-Inca decor. What converted parking structure,
who the hell worked in a converted parking structure?
She went on down Burnside and looked. Sure enough, there it was. There were
Condemned signs all over it.
Her office was up there on the third level.
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. What had
happened last Friday at that psychiatric session?
She had to see that little bastard again. Mr. Either Orr. So he stood her up for lunch, so
what, she still had some questions to ask him. She strode south, click clack, pincers
snapping, to the Pendleton Building, and called him from her office. First at Bradford
Industries (no, Mr. Orr didn't come in today, no, he hasn't called in), then at his residence
(ring. ring. ring.).
She should call Dr. Haber again, maybe. But he was such a big shot, running the Palace
of Dreams up there in the park. And anyhow what was she thinking of: Haber wasn't
supposed to know she had any connection with Orr. Liar builds pitfall, falls in it. Spider
stuck in own web.
That night Orr did not answer his telephone at seven, nine, or eleven. He was not at
work Tuesday morning, nor at two o'clock Tuesday afternoon. At four-thirty Tuesday
The Black Widow's Pursuit
- Heather Lelache visits George Orr's dilapidated apartment in a once-magnificent house that has fallen into 'dirty magnificence.'
- She encounters the building manager, an aging hippie who remains a relic of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture.
- Finding Orr's apartment empty but for a glass of water and white heather, Heather begins to track his location through government contacts.
- Heather reflects on her own 'squamous' personality and her dissatisfaction with her career as a civil rights lawyer.
- The narrative reveals a grim history of the 'Plague Years' in the 1980s, which decimated the suburbs and left them as ghost towns of the dead.
- Heather sets out toward the coast in a rented steamer, embracing her role as a predator pursuing her prey.
Old hippies never die.
afternoon Heather Lelache left the offices of Forman, Esserbeck, and Rutti, and took the
trolley out to Whiteaker Street, walked up the hill to Corbett Avenue, found the house,
rang the bell: one of six infinitely thumbed bell pushes in a grubby little row on the
peeling frame of the cut-glass-paneled door of a house that had been somebody's pride
and joy in 1905 or 1892, and that had come on hard times since but was proceeding
toward ruin with composure and a certain dirty magnificence. No answer when she rang
Orr's bell. She rang M. Ahrens Manager. Twice. Manager came, was uncooperative at
first. But one thing the Black Widow was good at was the intimidation of lesser insects.
Manager took her upstairs and tried Orr's door. It opened. He hadn't locked it.
She stepped back. All at once she thought there might be death inside. And it was not her
place.
Manager, unconcerned with private property, barged on in, and she followed, reluctant.
The big, old, bare rooms were shadowy and unoccupied. It seemed silly to have thought
of death. Orr did not own much; there was no bachelor slop and disarray, no bachelor
prim tidiness either. There was little impress of his personality on the rooms, yet she saw
him living there, a quiet man living quietly. There was a glass of water on the table in
the bedroom, with a spray of white heather in it. The water had evaporated down about a
quarter inch.
"I dono where he's gone to," Manager said crossly, and looked at her for help. "You
think he hanaccident? Something?" Manager wore the fringed buckskin coat, the Cody
mane, the Aquarius emblem necklace of his youth: he apparently had not changed his
clothes for thirty years. He had an accusing Dylan whine. He even smelled of marijuana.
Old hippies never die.
Heather looked at him kindly, for his smell reminded her of her mother. She said,
"Maybe he went to the place he has over on the Coast. The thing is, he's not well, you
know, he's on Government Therapy. He'll get in trouble if he stays away. Do you know
where that cabin is, or if he has a phone there?"
"I dono."
"Can I use your phone?"
"Use his," said Manager, shrugging.
She called up a friend in Oregon State Parks and got him to look up the thirty-four
Siuslaw National Forest cabins which had been lotteried off and give her their location.
Manager hung around to listen in, and when she was done said, "Friends in high places,
huh?"
"It helps," the Black Widow answered, sibilant.
"Hope you dig George up. I like that cat. He borrows my Pharm Card," Manager said
and all at once gave a great snort of laughter which was gone at once. Heather left him
leaning morose against the peeling frame of the front door, he and the old house lending
each other mutual support.
Heather took the trolley back downtown, rented a Ford Steamer at Hertz, and took off on
99-W. She was enjoying herself. The Black Widow pursues her prey. Why hadn't she
been a detective instead of a goddam stupid third-class civil rights lawyer? She hated the
law. It took an agressive, assertive personality. She didn't have it. She had a sneaky, sly,
shy, squamous personality. She had French diseases of the soul.
The little car was soon free of the city, for the smear of suburbia that had once lain along
the western highways for miles was gone. During the Plague Years of the eighties, when
in some areas not one person in twenty remained alive, the suburbs were not a good
place to be. Miles from the supermart, no gas for the car, and all the split-level ranch
homes around you full of the dead. No help, no food. Packs of huge status-symbol dogs
âAfghans, Alsatians, Great Danesârunning wild across the lawns ragged with burdock
The Moon of the Lost
- The landscape is a mixture of urban decay and reclaiming nature, where looted suburbs have burned away to make room for fireweed and honeybees.
- The moon has been transformed from a symbol of human achievement into a symbol of loss and hostility following a brutal alien attack on lunar and orbital bases.
- Humanityâs post-plague recovery was abruptly halted by an encounter with a 'speechless, reasonless brutality' from the stars.
- Heather travels through the remnants of civilization and preserved virgin forests to reach a remote cabin settlement in the Siuslaw National Forest.
- Upon arrival, she finds George Orr in a state of extreme physical and mental degradation, leaving her fearful for her safety.
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.
and plantain. Picture window cracked. Who'll come and mend the broken glass? People
had huddled back into the old core of the city; and once the suburbs had been looted,
they burned. Like Moscow in 1812, acts of God or vandalism: they were no longer
wanted, and they burned. Fireweed, from which bees make the finest honey of all, grew
acre after acre over the sites of Kensington Homes West, Sylvan Oak Manor Estates, and
Valley Vista Park.
The sun was setting when she crossed the Tualatin River, still as silk between steep
wooded banks. After a while the moon came up, near full, yellow to her left as the road
went south. It worried her, looking over her shoulder on curves. It was no longer
pleasant to exchange glances with the moon. 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. A
stolen coin, the muzzle of one's gun turned against one, a round hole in the fabric of the
sky. The Aliens held the moon. Their first act of aggressionâthe first notice humanity
had of their presence in the solar systemâwas the attack on the Lunar Base, the horrible
murder by asphyxiation of the forty' men in the bubble-dome. And at the same time, the
same day, they had destroyed the Russian space platform, the queer beautiful thing like a
big thistledown seed that had orbited Earth, and from which the Russians were going to
step off to Mars. Only ten years after the remission of the Plague, the shattered
civilization of mankind had come back up like a phoenix, into orbit, to the Moon, to
Mars: and had met this. Shapeless, speechless, reasonless brutality. The stupid hatred of
the universe.
Roads were not kept up the way they were when the Highway was king; there were
rough bits and pot-holes. But Heather frequently got up to the speed limit (45 mph) as
she drove through the broad, moonlit-twilit valley, crossing the Yamhill River four times
or was it five, passing through Dundee and Grand Ronde, one a live village and the other
deserted, as dead as Karnak, and coming at last into the hills, into the forests. Van Duzer
Forest Corridor, ancient wooden road sign: land preserved long ago from the logging
companies. Not quite all the forests of America had gone for grocery bags, split-levels,
and Dick Tracy on Sunday morning. A few remained. A turnoff to the right: Siuslaw
National Forest. And no goddam Tree Farm either, all stumps and sick seedlings, but
virgin forest. Great hemlocks blackened the moonlit sky.
The sign she looked for was almost invisible in the branched and ferny dark that
swallowed the pallid headlights. She turned again, and bumped slowly down ruts and
over humps for a mile or so until she saw the first cabin, moonlight on a shingled roof. It
was a little past eight o'clock.
The cabins were on lots, thirty or forty feet between them; few trees had been sacrificed,
but the undergrowth had been cleared, and once she saw the pattern she could see the
little roofs catching moonlight, and across the creek a facing set. Only one window was
lighted, of them all. A Tuesday night in early spring: not many vacationers. When she
opened the car door she was startled by the loudness of the creek, a hearty and unceasing
roar. Eternal and uncompromising praise! She got to the lighted cabin, stumbling only
twice in the dark, and looked at the car parked by it: a Hertz batcar. Surely. But what if it
wasn't? It could be a stranger. Oh well, shit, they wouldn't eat her, would they. She
knocked.
After a while, swearing silently, she knocked again.
The stream shouted loudly, the forest held very still.
Orr opened the door. His hair hung in locks and snarls, his eyes were bloodshot, his lips
dry. He stared at her blinking. He looked degraded and undone. She was terrified of him.
"Are you ill?" she said sharply.
"No, I ... Come in. . . ."
She had to come in. There was a poker for the Franklin stove: she could defend herself
The Strength of the Uncarved
- Heather tracks down Orr to a remote cabin after he misses their lunch date and his therapy sessions.
- Orr is in a state of extreme sleep deprivation, having avoided sleep since the previous weekend out of fear.
- Despite his disheveled and psychotic appearance, Heather perceives in Orr a profound, unmovable integrity and strength.
- Heather reflects on her own life, realizing she has always been the one others lean on and is drawn to Orr's centered nature.
- The two share coffee and brandy in the cabin as Heather attempts to care for him in his fragile state.
He was the strongest person she had ever known, because he could not be moved away from the center.
with that. Of course, he could attack her with it, if he got it first.
Oh for Christsake she was as big as he was almost, and in lots better shape. Coward
coward. "Are you high?"
"No, I ..."
"You what? What's wrong with you?"
"I can't sleep,"
The tiny cabin smelt wonderfully of woodsmoke and fresh wood. Its furniture was the
Franklin stove with a two-plate cooker top, a box full of alder branches, a cabinet, a
table, a chair, an army cot. "Sit down," Heather said. "You look terrible. Do you need a
drink, or a doctor? I have some brandy in the car. You'd better come with me and we'll
find a doctor in Lincoln City."
"I'm all right. It's just mumble mumble get sleepy."
"You said you couldn't sleep."
He looked at her with red, bleary eyes. "Can't let myself. Afraid to."
"Oh Christ. How long has this been going on?"
"Mumble mumble Sunday."
"You haven't slept since Sunday?"
"Saturday?" he said enquiringly.
"Did you take anything? Pep pills?"
He shook his head. "I did fall asleep, some," he said quite clearly, and then seemed for a
moment to fall asleep, as if he were ninety. But even as she watched, incredulous, he
woke up again and said with lucidity, "Did you come here after me?"
"Who else? To cut Christmas trees, for Christsake? You stood me up for lunch
yesterday."
"Oh." He stared, evidently trying to see her. "I'm sorry," he said, "I haven't been in my
right mind."
Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man
whose personal dignity went so deep as to be nearly invisible.
"It's all right. I don't care! But you're skipping therapyâaren't you?"
He nodded. "Would you like some coffee?" he asked. It was more than dignity.
Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved.
The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the
uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is
everything.
Briefly she saw him thus, and what struck her most, of that insight, was his strength. He
was the strongest person she had ever known, because he could not be moved away from
the center. And that was why she liked him. She was drawn to strength, came to it as a
moth to light. She had had a good deal of love as a kid but no strength around her,
nobody to lean on ever: people had leaned on her. Thirty years she had longed to meet
somebody who didn't lean on her, who wouldn't ever, who couldn't....
Here, short, bloodshot, psychotic, and in hiding, here he was, her tower of strength.
Life is the most incredible mess, Heather thought. You never can guess what's next. She
took off her coat, while Orr got a cup from the cabinet shelf and canned milk from the
cupboard. He brought her a cup of powerful coffee: 97 per cent caffeine, 3 per cent free.
"None for you?"
"I've drunk too much. Gives me heartburn."
Her own heart went out to him entirely.
"What about brandy?"
He looked wistful.
"It won't put you to sleep. Jazz you up a bit. I'll go get it."
He flashlighted her back to the car. The creek shouted, the trees hung silent, the moon
glowered overhead, the Aliens' moon.
Back in the cabin Orr poured out a modest shot of the brandy and tasted it He shuddered.
"That's good," he said, and drank it off.
She watched him with approval. "I always carry a pint flask," she said. "I stuck it in the
glove compartment because if the fuzz stops me and I have to show my license it looks
kind of funny in my handbag. But I mostly have it right on me. Funny how it comes in
handy a couple of times every year."
"That's why you carry such a big handbag," Orr said, brandy-voiced.
"Damn right! I guess I'll put some in my coffee. It might weaken it." She refilled his
glass at the same time. "How have you managed to stay awake for sixty or seventy
hours?"
The Weight of Altered Reality
- Orr describes his desperate attempt to avoid sleep and dreaming by remaining upright, leading to exhaustion and hallucinations.
- The protagonist contemplates suicide as the only logical escape from his reality-altering power and Dr. Haber's influence.
- The woman reveals she is experiencing the 'two tracks' of reality, suffering physical injuries from navigating a world that has shifted around her.
- The conversation highlights the psychological toll of conflicting memories and the inability to distinguish between what is real and what has been changed.
- A discussion about the Near East war reveals discrepancies in personal history and global events caused by Orr's previous dreams.
- The woman attempts to ground Orr by insisting that certain tragedies, like her husband's death, are part of a long human history rather than his personal fault.
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!
"I haven't entirely. I just didn't lie down. You can get some sleep sitting up "but you can't
really dream. You have to be lying down to get into dreaming sleep, so your big muscles
can relax. Read that in books. It works pretty well. I haven't had a real dream yet. But
not being able to relax wakes you up again. And then lately I get some sort of like
hallucinations. Things wiggling on the wall."
"You can't keep that up!"
"No. I know. I just had to get away. From Haber." A pause. He seemed to have gone into
another streak of grogginess. He gave a rather foolish laugh. "The only solution I really
can see," he said, "is to kill myself. But I don't want to. It just doesn't seem right."
"Of course it isn't right!"
"But I have to stop it somehow. I have to be stopped."
She could not follow him, and did not want to. "This is a nice place," she said. "I haven't
smelled woodsmoke for twenty years."
"Flutes the air," he said, smiling feebly. He seemed to be quite gone; but she noticed he
was holding himself in an erect sitting posture on the cot, not even leaning back against
the wall. He blinked several times. "When you knocked," he said, "I thought it was a
dream. That's why I mumble mumble coming."
"You said you dreamed yourself this cabin. Pretty modest for a dream. Why didn't you
get yourself a beach chalet at Salishan, or a castle on Cape Perpetua?"
He shook his head frowning. "All I wanted." After blinking some more he said, "What
happened. What happened to you. Friday. In Haber's office. The session."
"That's what I came to ask you!"
That woke him up. "You were awareâ"
"I guess so. I mean, I know something happened. 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! See?" She exhibited a bruise, blackish under brown skin, on her forehead.
"The wall was there now but it wasn't there now. . . . How do you live with this going on
all the time? How do you know where anything is?"
"I don't," Orr said. "I get all mixed up. If it's meant to happen at all it isn't meant to
happen so often. It's too much. I can't tell any more whether I'm insane or just can't
handle all the conflicting information. I ... It ... You mean you really believe me?"
"What else can I do? I saw what happened to the city! I was looking out the window!
You needn't think I want to believe it I don't, I try not to. Christ, it's terrible. But that Dr.
Haber, he didn't want me to believe it either, did he? He sure did some fast talking. But
then, what you said when you woke up; and then running into walls, and going to the
wrong office. . . . Then I keep wondering, has he dreamed anything else since Friday,
things are all changed again, but I don't know it became I wasn't there, and I keep
wondering what things are changed, and whether anything's real at all. Oh shit, it's
awful."
"That's it. Listen, you know the warâthe war in the Near East?"
"Sure I know it. My husband was killed in it."
"Your husband?" He looked stricken. "When?"
"Just three days before they called it off. Two days before the Teheran Conference and
the U.S.-China Pact. One day after the Aliens blew up the Moon base."
He was looking at her as if appalled.
"What's wrong? Oh, hell, it's an old scar. Six years ago, nearly seven. And if he'd lived
we'd have been divorced by now, it was a lousy marriage. Look, it wasn't your fault!"
"I don't know what is my fault any more."
"Well, Jim sure wasn't. He was just a big handsome black unhappy son of a gun, bigshot
Air Force Captain at 26 and shot down at 27, you don't think you invented that, do you,
it's been happening for thousands of years. And it happened just exactly the same in that
The Burden of Effective Dreams
- George Orr explains that his 'effective' dreams are a natural ability he possessed before meeting Dr. Haber, though Haber now manipulates them.
- Orr reveals he inadvertently created an alien threat as a subconscious response to Haber's demand for world peace, providing humanity with a common enemy.
- Heather Lelache observes Orr's lack of bitterness or resentment despite Haber's dehumanizing treatment of him as a 'trained' subject.
- The narrative reflects on the existence of rare individuals who resist evil without being corrupted by it, existing across all cultures and eras.
- Orr criticizes Haber's dangerous idealism, noting that the doctor is blinded by his own ideas of how the world 'ought to be' rather than seeing reality.
- Heather concludes that legal intervention is nearly impossible because Haber is a powerful figure and Orr's claims sound like the delusions of a madman.
He's not interested in what's true, in what is, he can't see anything except his mindâhis ideas of what ought to be.
otherâ way, before Friday, when the world was so crowded. Just exactly. Only it was
early in the war . . . wasn't it?" Her voice sank, softened. "My God. It was early in the
war, instead of just before the cease-fire. That war went on and on. It was still going on
right now. And there weren't . . . there weren't any Aliensâwere there?"
Orr shook his head.
"Did you dream them up?"
"He made me dream about peace. Peace on earth, good will among men. So I made the
Aliens. To give us something to fight."
"You didn't. That machine of his does it."
"No. I can do fine without the machine, Miss Lelache. All it does is save him time,
getting me to dream right away. Although he's been working on it lately to improve it
some way. He's great on improving things."
"Please call me Heather."
"It's a pretty name."
"Your name's George. He kept calling you George, in that session. Like you were a real
clever poodle, or a rhesus monkey. Lie down, George. Dream this, George."
He laughed. His teeth were white, and his laugh pleasant, breaking through
dishevelment and confusion. "That's not me. That's my subconscious, see, he's talking
to. It is kind of like a dog or a monkey, for his purposes. It's not rational, but it can be
trained to perform."
He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are
there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never
go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly
unaffected by it?
Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure
compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without
knowing they follow it, the sharecropper's wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the
entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and
the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed
somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known
them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.
"Now look. Tell me, I need to know this: was it after you went to Haber that you started
having. . . ."
"Effective dreams. No, before. It's why I went. I was scared of the dreams, so I was
getting sedatives illegally to suppress dreaming. I didn't know what to do."
"Why didn't you take something these last two nights, then, instead of trying to keep
awake?"
"I used up all I had Friday night. I can't fill the prescription here. But I had to get away. I
wanted to get clear away from Dr. Haber. Things are more complicated than he's willing
to realize. He thinks you can make things come out right. And he tries to use me to make
things come out right, but he won't admit it; he lies because he won't look straight, he's
not interested in what's true, in what is, he can't see anything except his mindâhis ideas
of what ought to be."
"Well. I can't do anything for you, as a lawyer," Heather said, not following this very
well; she sipped her coffee and brandy, which would have grown hair on a Chihuahua.
"There wasn't anything fishy in his hypnotic directions, that I could see; he just told you
not to worry about overpopulation and stuff. And if he's determined to hide the fact that
he's using your dreams for peculiar purposes, he can; using hypnosis he could just make
sure you didn't have an effective dream while anybody else was watching. I wonder why
he let me witness one? Are you sure he believes in them himself? I don't understand him.
But anyway, it's hard for a lawyer to interfere between a psychiatrist and his patient,
especially when the shrink is a big shot and the patient is a nut who thinks his dreams
come trueâno, I don't want this in court! But look. Isn't there any way you could keep
yourself from dreaming for him? Tranquilizers, maybe?"
"I haven't got a Pharm Card while I'm on VTT. He'd have to prescribe them. Anyway, his
A Plan to Dream
- Heather proposes using hypnosis to influence Orr's dreams, aiming to make Dr. Haber less power-hungry and more benevolent.
- Orr expresses his fundamental passivity, noting that he does not 'do' anything; he simply dreams and reality follows.
- The conversation reveals that Orr has become hypnosis-resistant under Haber's care, possibly as a psychological defense against the doctor's control.
- Heather experiences a sense of vertigo and urgency after witnessing the literal erasure of her birthplace due to one of Orr's previous dreams.
- The two share a meager meal as they prepare to attempt a rogue hypnotic session to neutralize the threat Haber poses to the world.
I don't do anything. I never have done anything. I just dream. And then it is.
Augmentor could get me dreaming."
"It is invasion of privacy; but it won't make a case. . . . Listen. What if you had a dream
where you changed him?"
Orr stared at her through a fog of sleep and brandy.
"Made him more benevolentâwell, you say he is benevolent, that he means well. But
he's power-hungry. He's found a great way to run the world without taking any
responsibility for it. Well. Make him less power-hungry. Dream that he's a really good
man. Dream that he's trying to cure you, not use you!"
"But I can't choose my dreams. Nobody can."
She sagged. "I forgot. As soon as I accept this thing as real, I keep thinking it's
something you can control. But you can't. You just do it."
"I don't do anything," Orr said morosely. "I never have done anything. I just dream. And
then it is."
"I'll hypnotize you," Heather said suddenly.
To have accepted an incredible fact as true gave her a rather heady feeling: if Orr's
dreams worked, what else mightn't work? Also she had eaten nothing since noon, and
the coffee and brandy were hitting hard.
He stared some more.
"I've done it. Took psych courses in college, in pre-law. We all worked out both as
hypnotizers and subjects, in one course. I was a fair subject, but real good at putting the
others under. I'll put you under, and suggest a dream to you. About Dr. Haberâmaking
him harmless. I'll tell you just to dream that, nothing more. See? Wouldn't that be safeâ
as safe as anything we could try, at this point?"
"But I'm hypnosis-resistant. I didn't use to be, but he says I am now."
"Is that why he uses vagus-carotid induction? I hate to watch that, it looks like a murder.
I couldn't do that, I'm not a doctor, anyway."
"My dentist used to just use a Hypnotape. It worked fine. At least I think it did." He was
absolutely talking in his sleep and might have maundered on indefinitely.
She said gently, "It sounds like you're resisting the hypnotist, not the hypnosis. . . . We
could try it, anyhow. And if it worked, I could give you posthypnotic suggestion to
dream one small what d'you call it, effective, dream about Haber. So he'll come clean
with you, and try to help you. Do you think that might work? Would you trust it?"
"I could get some sleep, anyway," he said. "I ... will have to sleep sometime. I don't
think I can go through tonight. If you think you could do the hypnosis . . ."
"I think I can. But listen, have you got anything to eat here?"
"Yes," he said drowsily. After some while he came to. "Oh yes. I'm sorry. You didn't eat.
Getting here. There's a loaf of bread. . . ." He rooted in the cupboard, brought out bread,
margarine, five hard-boiled eggs, a can of tuna, and some shopworn lettuce. She found
two tin pie plates, three various forks, and a paring knife. "Have you eaten?" she
demanded. He was not sure. They made a meal together, she sitting in the chair at the
table, he standing. Standing up seemed to revive him, and he proved a hungry eater.
They had to divide everything in half, even the fifth egg.
"You are a very kind person," he said.
"Me? Why? Coming here, you mean? Oh shit, I was scared. By that world-changing bit
on Friday! I had to get it straight Look, I was looking right at the hospital I was born in,
across the river, when you were dreaming, and then all of a sudden it wasn't there and
never had been!"
Identity and Survival
- The woman recounts her complex heritage as the daughter of a militant Black Power activist and a hippie dropout from a wealthy family.
- She reflects on the irony of her surname, Lelache, which means 'The Coward' in French, and her father's eventual abandonment of the family for Africa.
- Her mother's life was marked by communal living and a struggle with drug addiction that ultimately led to her death from a dirty needle.
- Despite her radical upbringing, she was eventually raised by her wealthy white grandparents and became a lawyer, feeling like a 'token' in their world.
- The woman expresses a deep-seated identity crisis, feeling caught between her father's racial hatred and her mother's fetishization of blackness.
- The man responds to her existential struggle with a gentle perspective on her skin color before revealing his own fractured memories of surviving the Plague.
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 thought you were from the East," he said. Relevance was not his strong point at the
moment.
"No." She cleaned out the tuna can scrupulously and licked the knife. "Portland. Twice,
now. Two different hospitals. Christ! But born and bred. So were my parents. My father
was black and my mother was white. It's kind of interesting. He was a real militant
Black Power type, back in the seventies, you know, and she was a hippie. He was from a
welfare family in Albina, no father, and she was a corporation lawyer's daughter from
Portland Heights. And a dropout, and went on drugs, and all that stuff they used to do
then. And they met at some political rally, demonstrating. That was when demonstrations
were still legal. And they got married. But he couldn't stick it very long, I mean the
whole situation, not just the marriage. When I was eight he went off to Africa. To Ghana,
I think. He thought his people came originally from there, but he didn't really know.
They'd been in Louisiana since anybody knew, and Lelache would be the slaveowner's
name, it's French. It means The Coward. I took French in high school because I had a
French name." She snickered. "Anyway, he just went. And poor Eva sort of fell apart.
That's my mother. She never wanted me to call her Mother or Mom or anything, that
was middle-class nucleus family possessiveness. So I called her Eva. And we lived in a
sort of commune thing for a while up on Mount Hood, oh Christ! Was it cold in winter!
But the police broke it up, they said it was an anti-American conspiracy. And after that
she sort of scrounged a living, she made nice pottery when she could get the use of
somebody's wheel and kiln, but mostly she helped out in little stores and restaurants, and
stuff. Those people helped each other a lot. A real lot But she never could keep off the
hard drugs, she was hooked. She'd be off for a year and then bingo. She got through the
Plague, but when she was thirty-eight she got a dirty needle, and it killed her. And damn
if her family didn't show up and take me over. I'd never even seen them! And they put
me through college and law school. And I go up there for Christmas Eve dinner every
year. I'm their token Negro. But I'll tell you, what really gets me is, I can't decide which
color I am. I mean, my father was a black, a real blackâoh, he had some white blood,
but he was a blackâand my mother was a white, and I'm neither one. 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
never have figured out."
"Brown," he said gently, standing behind her chair.
"Shit color."
"The color of the earth."
"Are you a Portlander? Equal time."
"Yes."
"I can't hear you over that damn creek. I thought the wilderness was supposed to be
silent. Go on!"
"But I've had so many childhoods, now," he said. "Which one should I tell you about? In
one both my parents died in the first year of the Plague. In one there wasn't any Plague. I
don't know. . . . None of them were very interesting. I mean, nothing to tell. All I ever
did was survive."
"Well. That's the main thing."
The End of the World
- The characters compare their current reality to a previous timeline characterized by extreme overcrowding, poverty, and malnutrition.
- Orr reveals that his 'effective' dreams may be a desperate mechanism for survival or evolution in a failing world.
- Orr recounts a suppressed history where the world effectively ended in April 1998 due to total societal collapse.
- The previous timeline involved a global failure of food distribution, the rise of a police state, and widespread starvation.
- Orr describes a nuclear conflict in the Middle East that escalated into a global catastrophe.
- The narrative suggests that Orr's current reality is a reconstruction born from a moment of his own death and delirium.
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.
"It gets harder all the time. The Plague, and now the Aliens . . ." He gave a feckless
laugh, but when she looked around at him his face was weary and miserable.
"I can't believe you dreamed them up. I just can't. I've been scared of them for so long,
six years! But I knew you did, as soon as I thought about it, because they weren't in that
otherâtime-track or whatever it is. But actually, they aren't any worse than that awful
overcrowding. That horrible little flat I lived in, with four other women, in a Business
Girls Condominium, for Christsake! And riding that ghastly subway, and my teeth were
terrible, and there never was anything decent to eat, and not half enough either. Do you
know, I weighed 101 then, and I'm 122 now. I gained twenty-one pounds since Friday!"
"That's right. You were awfully thin, that first time I saw you. In your law office."
"You were, too. You looked scrawny. Only everybody else did, so I didn't notice it. Now
you look like you'd be a fairly solid type, if you ever got any sleep."
He said nothing.
"Everybody else looks a lot better, too, when you come to think of it. Look. If you can't
help what you do, and what you do makes things a little better, then you shouldn't feel
any guilt about it. Maybe your dreams are just a new way for evolution to act, sort of. A
hot line. Survival of the fittest and all. With crash priority."
"Oh, worse than that," he said in the same airy, foolish tone; he sat down on the bed. "Do
youâ" He stuttered several times. "Do you remember anything about April, four years
agoâin '98?"
"April? No, nothing special."
"That's when the world ended," Orr said. A muscular spasm disfigured his face, and he
gulped as if for air. "Nobody else remembers," he said.
"What do you mean?" she asked, obscurely frightened. April, April 1998, she thought,
do I remember April '98? She thought she did not, and knew she must; and she was
frightenedâby him? With him? For him?
"It isn't evolution. It's just self-preservation. I can'tâ Well, it was a lot worse. Worse
than you remember. It was the same world as that first one you remember, with a
population of seven billion, only itâit was worse. Nobody but some of the European
countries got rationing and pollution control and birth control going early enough, in the
seventies, and so when we finally did try to control food distribution it was too late,
there wasn't enough, and the Mafia ran the black market, everybody had to buy on the
black market to get anything to eat, and a lot of people didn't get anything. They rewrote
the Constitution in 1984, the way you remember, but things were so bad by then that it
was a lot worse, it didn't even pretend to be a democracy any more, it was a sort of
police state, but it didn't work, it fell apart right away. When I was fifteen the schools
closed. There wasn't any Plague, but there were epidemics, one after another, dysentery
and hepatitis and then bubonic. But mostly people starved. And then in '93 the war
started up in the Near East, but it was different. It was Israel against the Arabs and
Egypt. All the big countries got in on it. One of the African states came in on the Arab
side, and used nuclear bombs on two cities in Israel, and so we helped them retaliate,
and. . . ." He was silent for some while and then went on, apparently not realizing that
there was any gap in his telling, "I was trying to get out of the city. I wanted to get into
Forest Park. I was sick, I couldn't go on walking and I sat down on the steps of this
house up in the west hills, the houses were all burnt out but the steps were cement, I
remember there were some dandelions flowering in a crack between the steps. 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. And that everything else was dying. And then I
The Burden of Dreams
- George Orr experiences a profound existential crisis, claiming that the current world is an improbable dream and that humanity has already destroyed the true reality.
- Heather Lelache attempts to comfort Orr by arguing that everything that happens is part of a necessary, unified order, regardless of whether it is called 'real' or a 'dream.'
- Orr is so physically and mentally exhausted that he repeatedly falls into a deep, trance-like sleep while Heather tries to keep him conscious.
- Heather decides to use hypnosis on Orr to prevent his 'effective' dreams from altering reality, hoping to limit him to ordinary dreaming.
- As Orr enters a hypnotic state, Heather is suddenly struck by the terrifying weight of her responsibility and the incalculable power she is attempting to control.
- The narrative explores the philosophical tension between the desire to control fate and the belief that one is merely a part of a larger, preordained whole.
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.
had theâI had this dream." His voice had hoarsened; now it choked off.
"I was all right," he said at last. "I dreamed about being home. I woke up and I was all
right. I was in bed at home. Only it wasn't any home I'd ever had, the other time, the first
time. The bad time. Oh God, I wish I didn't remember it. I mostly don't. I can't. I've told
myself ever since that it was a dream. That it was a dream! But it wasn't. This is. This
isn't real. 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. There is nothing left. Nothing but
dreams."
She believed him, and denied her belief with fury. "So what? Maybe that's all it's ever
been! Whatever it is, it's all right. You don't suppose you'd be allowed to do anything
you weren't supposed to do, do you? Who the hell do you think you are! There is
nothing that doesn't fit, nothing happens that isn't supposed to happen. Ever! What does
it matter whether you call it real or dreams? It's all oneâ isn't it?"
"I don't know," Orr said in agony; and she went to him and held him as she would have
held a child in pain, or a dying man.
The head on her shoulder was heavy, the fair, square hand on her knee lay relaxed.
"You're asleep," she said. He made no denial. She had to shake him pretty hard to get
him even to deny it. "No I'm not," he said, starting and sitting upright. "No." He sagged
again.
"George!" It was true: the use of his name helped. He kept his eyes open long enough to
look at her. "Stay awake, stay awake just a little. I want to try the hypnosis. So you can
sleep." She had meant to ask him what he wanted to dream, what she should impress on
him hypnotically concerning Haber, but he was too far gone now. "Look, sit there on the
cot. Look at ... look at the flame of the lamp, that ought to do it. But don't go to sleep."
She set the oil lamp on the center of the table, amidst eggshells and wreckage. "Just keep
your eyes on it, and don't go to sleep! You'll relax and feel easy, but you won't go to
sleep yet, not till I say 'Go to sleep.' That's it. Now you're feeling easy and comfortable. .
. ." With a sense of play acting, she proceeded with the hypnotist's spiel. He went under
almost at once. She couldn't believe it, and tested him. "You can't lift your left hand,"
she said, "you're trying, but it's too heavy, it won't come. . . . Now it's light again, you
can lift it. There . . . well. In a minute now you're going to fall asleep. You'll dream
some, but they'll just be regular ordinary dreams like everybody has, not special ones,
notânot effective ones. All except one. You'll have one effective dream. In itâ" She
halted. All of a sudden she was scared; a cold qualm took her. What was she doing? This
was no play, no game, nothing for a fool to meddle in. He was in her power: and his
power was incalculable. What unimaginable responsibility had she undertaken?
A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a
part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any
A Burden of Benevolence
- Heather Lelache attempts to use George Orr's reality-altering power to neutralize the threat of Dr. Haber and the lunar aliens.
- The act of directing Orr's dreams forces Heather into a god-like role she finds both uncomfortable and dangerous.
- Orr's physical vulnerability is highlighted as he collapses into a deep, inert sleep immediately upon command.
- The geopolitical landscape has shifted toward a forced 'Human Brotherhood' under President Merdle, allowing for the return of foreign cultural goods.
- Heather finds solace and a grim reflection of her situation in a Russian novel about the inevitability of death during the Plague Years.
- Orr's serenity in sleep contrasts sharply with Heather's anxiety and the heavy responsibility of shaping the world's future.
He went like a half-stuffed pillow, softly, forward and sideways, till he was a large, warm, inert heap on the floor.
time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.
But she was caught in a role and couldn't back out of it now. "In that one dream, you'll
dream that . . . that Dr. Haber is benevolent, that he's not trying to hurt you and will be
honest with you," She didn't know what to say, how to say it, knowing that whatever she
said could go wrong. "And you'll dream that the Aliens aren't out there on the Moon any
longer," she added hastily; she could get that load off his shoulders, anyhow. "And in the
morning you'll wake up quite rested, everything will be all right. Now: Go to sleep."
Oh shit, she'd forgotten to tell him to lie down first.
He went like a half-stuffed pillow, softly, forward and sideways, till he was a large,
warm, inert heap on the floor.
He couldn't have weighed more than 150, but he might have been a dead elephant for all
the help he gave her getting him up on the cot. She had to do it legs first and then heave
the shoulders, so as not to tip the cot; he ended up on the sleeping bag, of course, not in
it She dragged it out from under him, nearly tipping over the cot again, and got it spread
out over him. He slept, slept utterly, through it all. She was out of breath, sweating, and
upset He wasn't.
She sat down at the table and got her breath. After a while she wondered what to do. She
cleaned up their dinner-leavings, heated water, washed the pie this, forks, knife, and
cups. She built up the fire in the stove. She found several books on a shelf, paperbacks
he'd picked up in Lincoln City probably, to beguile his long vigil. No mysteries, hell, a
good mystery was what she needed. There was a novel about Russia. One thing about
the Space Pact: the U.S. Government wasn't trying to pretend that nothing between
Jerusalem and the Philippines existed because if it did it might threaten the American
Way of Life; and so these last few years you could buy Japanese toy paper parasols, and
Indian incense, and Russian novels, and things, once more. Human Brotherhood was the
New Life-Style, according to President Merdle.
This book, by somebody with a name ending in "evsky", was about life during the
Plague Years in a little town in the Caucasus, and it wasn't exactly jolly reading, but it
caught at her emotions; she read it from ten o'clock till two-thirty. All that time Orr lay
fast asleep, scarcely moving, breathing lightly and quietly. She would look up from the
Caucasian village and see his face, gilt and shadowed in the dim lamplight, serene. If he
dreamed, they were quiet dreams and fleeting. After everybody in the Caucasian village
was dead except the village idiot (whose perfect passivity to the inevitable kept making
The Alien Invasion Begins
- A woman experiences a restless night in a cabin, haunted by the strange, child-like singing of a creek and the discomfort of sleeping on a cold floor.
- The morning brings a terrifying shift as the landscape trembles and distant sirens signal a global catastrophe.
- George reveals that the Aliens have landed, a direct result of the woman's previous instruction for him to dream them off the Moon.
- Oregon becomes the primary site of the interstellar invasion, ironically mirroring its status as the only mainland state attacked in WWII.
- The state's lack of military infrastructure leaves it defenseless, while neighboring states' defense systems inadvertently cause local destruction.
- Advanced Alien technology hijacks the guidance systems of American missiles, turning the nation's own weapons back upon Oregon.
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.
her think of her companion), she tried some rewarmed coffee, but it tasted like lye. She
went to the door and stood half inside, half outside for a while, listening to the creek
shouting and hollering eternal praise! eternal praise! It was incredible that it had kept up
that tremendous noise for hundreds of years before she was even born, and would go on
doing it until the mountains moved. And the strangest thing about it, now very late at
night in the absolute silence of the woods, was a distant note in it, far away upstream it
seemed, like the voices of children singingâ very sweet, very strange.
She got shivery; she shut the door on the voices of the unborn children singing in the
water, and turned to the small warm room and the sleeping man. She took down a book
on home carpentry which he had evidently bought to keep himself busy about the cabin,
but it put her to sleep at once. Well, why not? Why did she have to stay up? But where
was she supposed to sleep....
She should have left George on the floor. He never would have noticed. It wasn't fair, he
had both the cot and the sleeping bag.
She removed the sleeping bag from him, replacing it with his raincoat and her raincape.
He never stirred. She looked at him with affection, then got into the sleeping bag down
on the floor. Christ it was cold down here on the floor, and hard. She hadn't blown out
the light. Or did you turn out wick lamps? You should do one and shouldn't do the other.
She remembered that from the commune. But she couldn't remember which. Oooooh
SHIT it was cold down here!
Cold, cold. Hard. Bright. Too bright. Sunrise in the window through shift and flicker of
trees. Over the bed. The floor trembled. 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.
She sat up. The wolves howled for the world's end.
Sunrise poured in through the single window, hiding all that lay under its dazzling slant.
She felt through excess of light and found the dreamer sprawled on his face, still
sleeping. "George! Wake up! Oh, George, please wake up! Something is wrong!"
He woke. He smiled at her, waking.
"Something is wrongâthe sirensâwhat is it?"
Still almost in his dream, he said without emotion, "They've landed. "
For he had done just what she told him to do. She had told him to dream that the Aliens
were no longer on the Moon.
8
Heaven and Earth are not humane.
âLao Tse: V
In the Second World War the only part of the American mainland to suffer direct attack
was the State of Oregon. Some Japanese fire balloons set a piece of forest burning on the
coast. In the First Interstellar War the only part of the American mainland to be invaded
was the State of Oregon. One might lay the blame on her politicians; the historic
function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad, and no military
butter is ever put upon the state bread. Oregon had no stockpiles of anything but hay, no
missile launch pads, no NASA bases. She was obviously defenseless. The Anti-Alien
Ballistic Missiles defending her went up from the enormous underground installations in
Walla Walla, Washington, and Round Valley, California. From Idaho, most of which
belonged to the U.S. Air Force, huge supersonic XXTT-9900s went screaming west,
shattering every eardrum from Boise to Sun Valley, to patrol for any Alien ship that
might somehow slip through the infallible network of the AABMs.
Repelled by the Alien ships, which carried a device that took control of the missiles'
guidance systems, the AABMs turned around somewhere in the middle stratosphere and
returned, landing and exploding here and there over the State of Oregon. Holocausts
Chaos in Portland
- A nuclear strike on Mount Hood triggers a violent volcanic eruption, showering Portland in ash and lava.
- The city suffers from 'friendly fire' as allied nations' aircraft mistakenly shoot each other down and bomb civilian areas.
- Military forces methodically pulverize eleven square miles of the city's outskirts to destroy an alien ship that had already departed.
- Downtown Portland is covered in layers of broken glass, forcing refugees to walk through shards in thin shoes.
- Dr. William Haber remains isolated in his office, observing the destruction while reflecting on his preference for solitude over the terrifying reality of the crowds.
- The breakdown of infrastructure and the onset of the 'Alien Invasion' on April Fools' Day creates a landscape of total hysteria and dilapidation.
Very faintly he could hear elephants screaming, over in the zoo.
raged on the dry eastern slopes of the Cascades. Gold Beach and the Dalles were wiped
out by fire storms. Portland was not directly hit; but an errant nuclear-warhead AABM
striking Mount Hood near the old crater caused the dormant volcano to wake up. Steam
and ground tremors ensued at once, and by noon of the first day of the Alien Invasion,
April Fools' Day, a vent had opened on the northwestern side and was in violent
eruption. Lava flow set the snowless, deforested slopes blazing, and threatened the
communities of Zigzag and Rhododendron. A cinder cone began to form, and the air in
Portland, forty miles away, was soon thickening and gray with ash. As evening came and
the wind changed round to the south, the lower air cleared somewhat, revealing the
somber orange flicker of the eruption in the eastern clouds. The sky, full of rain and
ashes, thundered with the flights of XXTT-9900s vainly seeking Alien ships. Other
flights of bombers and fighters were still coming in from the East Coast and from fellow
nations of the Pact; these frequently shot each other down. The ground shook with
earthquake and the impact of bombs and plane crashes. One of the Alien ships had
landed only eight miles from the city limits, and so the southwestern outskirts of town
were pulverized, as jet bombers methodically devastated the eleven-square-mile area in
which the Alien ship was said to have been. As a matter of fact information had arrived
that it was no longer there. But something had to be done. Bombs fell by mistake on
many other parts of the city, as will happen with jet bombing. There was no glass left in
any window downtown. It lay, instead, in all the downtown streets, in small fragments,
an inch or two deep. Refugees from southwest Portland had to walk through it; women
carried their children and walked weeping with pain, in thin shoes full of broken glass.
William Haber stood at the great window of his office in the Oregon Oneirological
Institute watching the fires flare and wane down in the docks, and the bloody lightning
of the eruption. There was still glass in that window; nothing had landed or exploded yet
near Washington Park, and the ground tremors that cracked open whole buildings down
in the river bottoms so far had done nothing worse up in the hills than rattle the window
frames. Very faintly he could hear elephants screaming, over in the zoo. Streaks of an
unusual purplish light showed occasionally to the north, perhaps over the area where the
Willamette joins the Columbia; it was hard to locate anything for certain in the ashy,
misty twilight. Large sections of the city were blacked out by power failure; other parts
twinkled faintly, though the streetlights had not been turned on. No one else was in the
Institute Building. Haber had spent all day trying to locate George Orr. When his search
proved futile, and further search was made impossible by the hysteria and increasing
dilapidation of the city, he had come up to the Institute. He had had to walk most of the
way, and had found the experience unnerving. A man in his position, with so many calls
on his time, of course drove a batcar. But the battery gave out and he couldn't get to a
recharger because the crowds in the street were so thick. He had to get out and walk,
against the current of the crowd, facing them all, right in amongst them. That had been
distressing. He did not like crowds. But then the crowds had ceased and he was left
walking all alone in the vast expanses of lawn and grove and forest of the Park: and that
was a great deal worse.
Haber considered himself a lone wolf. He had never wanted marriage nor close
friendships, he had chosen a strenuous research carried out when others sleep, he had
avoided entanglements. He kept his sex life almost entirely to one-night stands,
semipros, sometimes women and sometimes young men; he knew which bars and
Solitude Amidst the Siege
- Dr. Haber experiences a profound existential crisis while isolated in the Institute, realizing that his prized independence feels like a terrifying apathy in total solitude.
- The physical environment of Portland is under active assault, with mysterious 'big ships' landing and mobile units scattering across the state.
- George Orr and Heather Lelache arrive at the Institute in a battered state after surviving a bombing and trekking through the park on foot.
- Despite the chaos and Orr's injuries, Haber immediately attempts to reassert his medical and professional authority over the situation.
- The military's inability to provide clear information or successfully combat the slow-moving invaders creates a backdrop of mounting dread.
He needed somebody, anybody, to talk to, he had to tell them what he felt so that he knew if he felt anything.
cinemas and saunas to go to for what he wanted. He got what he wanted and got clear
again, before he or the other person could possibly develop any kind of need for the
other. He prized his independence, his free will.
But he found it terrible to be alone, all alone in the huge indifferent Park, hurrying,
almost running, toward the Institute, because he did not have anywhere else to go. He
got there and it was all silent, all deserted.
Miss Crouch kept a transistor radio in her desk drawer. He got this, and kept it on softly
so he could hear the latest reports, or anyway hear a human voice.
Everything he needed was here; beds, dozens of them, food, the sandwich and soft-drink
machines for the all-night workers in the sleep labs. But he was not hungry. He felt
instead a kind of apathy. He listened to the radio, but it would not listen to him. He was
all alone, and nothing seemed to be real in solitude. He needed somebody, anybody, to
talk to, he had to tell them what he felt so that he knew if he felt anything. This horror of
being by himself was strong enough that it almost drove him out of the Institute and
down into the crowds again, but the apathy was still stronger than the fear. He did
nothing, and the night darkened.
Over Mount Hood the reddish glow sometimes spread enormously, then paled again.
Something big hit, in the southwest of town, out of view from his office; and soon the
clouds were lit from beneath with a livid glare that seemed to rise from that direction.
Haber was going out into the corridor to see what could be seen, carrying the radio with
him. People were coming up the stairs, he had not heard them. For a moment he merely
stared at them.
"Dr. Haber," one of them said.
It was Orr. "It's about time," Haber said bitterly. "Where the hell have you been all day?
Come on!"
Orr came up limping; the left side of his face was swollen and bloody, his lip was cut,
and he had lost half a front tooth. The woman with him looked less battered but more
exhausted: glassy-eyed, knees giving. Orr made her sit down on the couch in the office.
Haber said in a loud medical voice, "She get a blow on the head?"
"No. It's been a long day."
"I'm all right," the woman mumbled, shivering a little. Orr was quick and solicitous,
taking off her repulsively muddy shoes and putting the camel's-hair blanket from the
foot of the couch over her; Haber wondered who she was, but gave it only the one
thought. He was beginning to function again. "Let her rest there, she'll be all right. Come
here, clean yourself up. I spent the whole day looking for you. Where were you?"
"Trying to get back to town. There was some kind of bombing pattern we ran into, they
blew up the road just ahead of the car. Car bounced around a lot. Turned over, I guess.
Heather was behind me, and stopped in time, so her car was all right and we came on in
it. But we had to cut over to the Sunset Highway because 99 was all blown up, and then
we had to leave the car at a roadblock out near the bird sanctuary. So we walked in
through the Park."
"Where the hell were you coming from?" Haber had run hot water in his private
washroom sink, and now gave Orr a steaming towel to hold to his bloody face.
"Cabin. In the Coast Range."
"What's wrong with your leg?"
"Bruised it when the car turned over, I guess. Listen, are they in the city yet?"
"If the military knows, it's not telling. All they'll say is that when the big ships landed
this morning they split into small mobile units, something like helicopters, and scattered.
They're all over the western half of the state. They're reported to be slow-moving, but if
they're shooting them down, they don't report it."
Therapy in the Middle of Hell
- Orr describes witnessing a non-earthly, hopping silver craft near North Plains, confirming the alien presence.
- Haber forcibly administers sodium pentothal to Orr, intending to use his dreaming power to end the global chaos.
- Haber reveals he has mapped Orr's brain emissions, discovering a complex 97-second cycle he compares to a Beethoven fugue.
- The plan involves using the Augmentor to amplify Orr's dreams to shift the entire world into a different continuum.
- Haber blames Orr's 'irresponsibility' and missed appointment for the uncontrolled dream that caused the invasion and civilian deaths.
- The session is interrupted by a massive explosion that shakes the building, leaving the source of the destruction ambiguous.
It is incredibly complex, yet it's consistent and it recurs. Therefore I can feed it to you straight, and amplified.
"We saw one," Orr's face emerged from the towel, marked with purple bruises, but less
shocking now the blood and mud were off. "That's what it must have been. Little silvery
thing, about thirty feet up, over a pasture near North Plains. It seemed to sort of hop
along. Didn't look earthly. Are the Aliens fighting us, are they shooting planes down?"
"The radio doesn't say. No losses are reported, except civilians. Now come on, let's get
some coffee and food into you. And then, by God, we'll have a therapy session in the
middle of Hell, and put an end to this idiotic mess you've made." He had prepared a shot
of sodium pentothal, and now took Orr's arm and gave him the shot without warning or
apology.
"That's why I came here. But I don't know ifâ"
"If you can do it? You can. Come on!" Orr was hovering over the woman again. "She's
all right. She's asleep, don't bother her, it's what she needs. Come on!" He took Orr down
to the food machines, and got him a roast beef sandwich, an egg and tomato sandwich,
two apples, four chocolate bars, and two cups of coffee with. They sat down at a table in
Sleep Lab One, sweeping aside a Patience layout that had been abandoned at dawn when
the sirens began to howl. "O.K. Eat. Now, in case you think that clearing up this mess is
beyond you, forget it. I've been working on the Augmentor, and it can do it for you. I've
got the model, the template, of your brain emissions during effective dreaming. Where I
went wrong all month was in looking for an entity, an Omega Wave. There isn't one. It's
simply a pattern formed by the combination of other waves, and over this last couple of
days, before all hell broke loose, I finally worked it out. The cycle is ninety-seven
seconds. That means nothing to you, even though it's your goddamn brain doing it. Put it
this way, when you're dreaming effectively your entire brain is involved in a complexly
synchronized pattern of emissions that takes ninety-seven seconds to complete itself and
start again, a kind of counterpoint effect that is to ordinary d-state graphs what
Beethoven's Great Fugue is to Mary Had a Little Lamb. It is incredibly complex, yet it's
consistent and it recurs. Therefore I can feed it to you straight, and amplified. The
Augmentor's all set up, it's ready for you, it's really going to fit the inside of your head at
last! When you dream this time, you'll dream big, baby. Big enough to stop this crazy
invasion, and get us clean over into another continuum, where we can start fresh. That's
what you do, you know. You don't change things, or lives, you shift the whole
continuum."
"It's nice to be able to talk about it with you," Orr said, or something like it; he had eaten
the sandwiches incredibly fast, despite his cut mouth and broken tooth, and was now
engulfing a chocolate bar. There was irony, or something, in what he said, but Haber was
much too busy to bother about it.
"Listen. Did this invasion just happen, or did it happen because you missed an
appointment?"
"I dreamed it."
"You let yourself have an uncontrolled effective dream?" Haber let the heavy anger lie in
his voice. He had been too protective, too easy on Orr. Orr's irresponsibility was the
cause of the death of many innocent people, the wreckage and panic loose in the city: he
must face up to what he had done.
"It wasn't," Orr was just beginning, when a really big explosion hit. The building
jumped, rang, crackled, electronic apparatus leaped about by the row of empty beds,
coffee slopped in the cups. "Was that the volcano or the Air Force?" Orr said, and in the
Armageddon and the Augmentor
- Dr. Haber observes Orrâs abnormal calmness during a global catastrophe, questioning if Orr perceives the destruction as merely a dream.
- The physical environment of the office disintegrates as windows shatter and the air fills with the smell of ozone, sulfur, and death.
- Despite the immediate danger of the erupting Mount Hood and a burning world, Haber refuses to leave the Augmentor machine.
- Haber dismisses the presence of the lawyer, Miss Lelache, prioritizing the use of Orrâs dreaming power to alter the current reality.
- The scene concludes with Haber forcing Orr into a hypnotic state while the building itself begins to leap from the force of the disaster.
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.
midst of the natural dismay the explosion had caused him, Haber noticed that Orr
seemed quite undismayed. His reactions were utterly abnormal. On Friday he had been
going all to pieces over a mere ethical point; here on Wednesday in the midst of
Armageddon he was cool and calm. He seemed to have no personal fear. But he must
have. If Haber was afraid, of course Orr must be. He was suppressing fear. Or did he
think, Haber suddenly wondered, that because he had dreamed the invasion, it was all
just a dream?
What if it was?
Whose?
"We'd better get back upstairs," Haber said, getting up. He felt increasingly impatient
and irritable; the excitement was getting too extensive. "Who's the woman with you,
anyway?"
"That's Miss Lelache," Orr said, looking at him oddly. "The lawyer. She was here
Friday."
"How'd she happen to be with you?"
"She was looking for me, came to the cabin after me."
"You can explain all that later," Haber said. There was no time to waste on this trivia.
They had to get out, to get out of this burning exploding world.
Just as they entered Haber's office the glass burst out of the great double window with a
shrill, singing sound and a huge sucking-out of air; both men were impelled toward the
window as if toward the mouth of a vacuum cleaner. Everything then turned white:
everything. They both fell over.
Neither was aware of any noise.
When he could see again, Haber scrambled up, holding on to his desk. Orr was already
over by the couch, trying to reassure the bewildered woman. It was cold in the office:
the spring air had a moist chill in it, pouring in the empty windows, and it smelled of
smoke, burnt insulation, ozone, sulfur, and death. "We ought to get down into the
basement, don't you think?" Miss Lelache said in a reasonable tone, though she was
shivering hard.
"Go on," Haber said. "We've got to stay up here a while."
"Stay here?"
"The Augmentor's here. It doesn't plug in and out like a portable TV! Get on down into
the basement, we'll join you when we can."
"You're going to put him to sleep now?" the woman said, as the trees down the hill
suddenly burst into bright yellow balls of flame. 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.
"You're fucking right I am. Go on. Get down to the basement, I need the couch. Lie
down, George.... Listen, you, in the basement just past the janitor's room you'll see a
door marked Emergency Generator. Go in there, find the ON handle. Have your hand on
it, and if the lights fail, turn it on. It'll take a heavy pressure upward on the handle. Go
on!"
She went. She was still shaking, and smiling; as she went she caught Orr's hand for a
second and said, "Pleasant dreams, George."
"Don't worry," Orr said, "It's all right."
"Shut up," Haber snapped. He had switched on the Hypnotape he had recorded himself,
but Orr wasn't even paying attention, and the noise of explosions and things burning
made it hard to hear. "Shut your eyes!" Haber commanded, put his hand on Orr's throat,
and turned up the gain. "RELAXING," said his own huge voice. "YOU FEEL
COMFORTABLE AND RELAXED. YOU WILL ENTER THEâ" The building leaped
A Peaceful Alien Intrusion
- Amidst a burning city and an apparent invasion, Haber attempts to use Orr's dreaming power to force a state of global peace.
- A metallic, ovoid alien craft breaches Haber's office, revealing a creature that resembles a giant, armored sea turtle.
- The alien communicates through a toneless translator in its elbow, reciting the Golden Rule and pleading for an end to human self-destruction.
- The visitor clarifies that its species is nonaggressive and lacks weapons, despite the terrifying nature of their arrival.
- The alien expresses intense interest in Orr's brain activity, identifying him as 'iahklu' and questioning if all humans possess this trait.
- The encounter highlights a profound linguistic and conceptual gap between the humans' defensive fear and the aliens' hasty attempts at diplomacy.
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.
like a spring lamb and settled down askew. Something appeared in the dirty-red, opaque
glare outside the glassless window: an ovoid, large object, moving in a sort of hopping
fashion through the air. It came directly toward the window. "We've got to get out!"
Haber shouted over his own voice, and then realized that Orr was already hypnotized.
He snapped the tape off and leaned down so he could speak in Orr's ear. "Stop the
invasion!" he shouted. "Peace, peace, dream that we're at peace with everybody! Now
sleep! Antwerp!" and he switched on the Augmentor.
But he had no time to look at Orr's EEG. The ovoid shape was hovering directly outside
the window. Its blunt snout, lit luridly by reflections of the burning city, pointed straight
at Haber. He cowered down by the couch, feeling horribly soft and exposed, trying to
protect the Augmentor with his inadequate flesh, stretching out his arms across it. He
craned over his shoulder to watch the Alien ship. It pressed closer. The snout, looking
like oily steel, silver with violet streaks and gleams, filled the entire window. There was
a crunching, racking sound as it jammed itself into the frame. Haber sobbed aloud with
terror, but stayed spread out there between the Alien and the Augmentor.
The snout, halting, emitted a long thin tentacle which moved about questingly in the air.
The end of it, rearing like a cobra, pointed at random, then settled in Haber's direction.
About ten feet from him, it hung in the air and pointed at him for some seconds. Then it
withdrew with a hiss and crack like a carpenter's flexible rule, and a high, humming
noise came from the ship. The metal sill of the window screeched and buckled. The
ship's snout whirled around and fell off onto the floor. From the hole that gaped behind
it, something emerged.
It was, Haber thought in emotionless horror, a giant turtle. Then he realized that it was
encased in a suit of some kind, which gave it a bulky, greenish, armored, inexpressive
look like a giant sea turtle standing on its hind legs.
It stood quite still, near Haber's desk. Very slowly it raised its left arm, pointing at him a
metallic, nozzled instrument.
He faced death.
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.
Haber stared, his heart faltering.
The huge, heavy, metallic arm came up again. "We are attempting to make peaceful
arrival," the elbow said all on one note. "Please inform others that this is peaceful
arrival. We do not have any weapons. Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded
fear. Please cease destruction of self and others. We do not have any weapons. We are
nonaggressive unfighting species."
"IâIâI can't control the Air Force," Haber stammered.
"Persons in flying vehicles are being contacted presently," the creature's elbow joint
said. "Is this a military installation?"
Word order showed it to be a question. "No," Haber said, "No, nothing of the kindâ"
"Please then excuse unwarranted intrusion." The huge, armored figure whirred slightly
and seemed to hesitate. "What is device?" it said, pointing with its right elbow joint at
the machinery connected to the head of the sleeping man.
"An electroencephalograph, a machine which records the electrical activity of the brain
â"
"Worthy," said the Alien, and took a short, checked step toward the couch, as if longing
to look. "The individual-person is iahklu'. The recording machine records this perhaps.
Is all your species capable of iahklu'?
"I don'tâdon't know the term, can you describeâ"
The figure whirred a little, raised its left elbow over its head (which, turtle-like, hardly
protruded above the great sloped shoulders of the carapace), and said, "Please excuse.
Incommunicable by communication-machine invented hastily in very-recent-past. Please
excuse. It is necessary that all we proceed in very-near-future rapidly toward other
The Reality of Dreams
- An Alien ship departs Haber's office after a surreal encounter that appears to reverse time as it exits.
- Despite the chaos and potential radiation from explosions, George Orr remains in a state of preternatural calm.
- Haber expresses frustration that Orr's dream did not shift them into a peaceful continuum, viewing the Alien encounter as a failure of hypnotic suggestion.
- Orr asserts that 'an effective dream is a reality,' suggesting that his dreams do not just change the world but constitute it.
- Orr urges Haber to use his influence to contact Washington and explain that the Alien 'invasion' is actually a linguistic misunderstanding.
- The military's aggressive response is identified as the primary threat to human life, as the Aliens are unarmed and indestructible.
Of course it happened. An effective dream is a reality, Dr. Haber.
responsible individual-persons engaged in panic and capable of destroying selves and
others. Thank you very much." And it crawled back into the nose of the ship.
Haber watched the great, round soles of its feet disappear into the dark cavity.
The nose cone jumped up from the floor and twirled itself smartly into place: Haber had
a vivid impression that it was not acting mechanically, but temporally, repeating its
previous actions in reverse, precisely like a film run backward. The Alien ship, jarring
the office and tearing out the rest of the window frame with a hideous noise, withdrew,
and vanished into the lurid murk outside.
The crescendo of explosions, Haber now realized, had ceased; in fact it was fairly quiet.
Everything trembled a little, but that would be the mountain, not the bombs. Sirens
whooped, far and desolate, across the river.
George Orr lay inert on the couch, breathing irregularly, the cuts and swellings on his
face looking ugly on his pallor. Cinders and fumes still drifted in the chill, choking air
through the smashed window. Nothing had been changed. He had undone nothing. Had
he done anything yet? There was a slight eye movement under the closed lids; he was
still dreaming; he could not do otherwise, with the Augmentor overriding the impulses
of his own brain. Why didn't he change continuums, why didn't he get them into a
peaceful world, as Haber had told him to do? The hypnotic suggestion hadn't been clear
or strong enough. They must start all over. Haber switched off the Augmentor, and spoke
Orr's name thrice.
"Don't sit up, the Augmentor hookup's still on you. What did you dream?"
Orr spoke huskily and slowly, not fully awakened. "The ... an Alien was here. In here. In
the office. It came out of the nose of one of their hopping ships. In the window. You and
it were talking together."
"But that's not a dream! That happened! Goddamn, we'll have to do this over again. That
might have been an atomic blast a few minutes ago, we've got to get into another
continuum, we may all be dead of radiation exposure alreadyâ"
"Oh, not this time," Orr said, sitting up and combing off electrodes as if they were dead
lice. "Of course it happened. An effective dream is a reality, Dr. Haber."
Haber stared at him.
"I suppose your Augmentor increased the.immediacy of it for you," Orr said, still with
extraordinary calmness. He appeared to ponder for a little. "Listen, couldn't you call
Washington?"
"What for?"
"Well, a famous scientist right here in the middle of it all might get listened to. They'll
be looking for explanations. Is there somebody in the government you know, that you
might call? Maybe the HEW Minister? You could tell him that the whole thing's a
misunderstanding, the Aliens aren't invading or attacking. They simply didn't realize
until they landed that humans depend on verbal communication. They didn't even know
we thought we were at war with them. ... If you could tell somebody who can get the
President's ear. The sooner Washington can call off the military, the fewer people will be
killed here. It's only civilians getting killed. The Aliens aren't hurting the soldiers, they
aren't even armed, and I have the impression that they're indestructible, in those suits.
But if somebody doesn't stop the Air Force, they'll blow up the whole city. Give it a try,
Dr. Haber. They might listen to you."
The Logic of Insanity
- Haber experiences a surge of confidence as he realizes he can use Orr's reality-altering gift to manipulate global politics.
- A deep resentment grows in Haber toward Orr, whom he views as a passive and unworthy vessel for such immense power.
- Orr clarifies that he does not choose the outcomes of his dreams but merely follows a path he cannot control.
- Haber bypasses Orr to contact the Minister of HEW, believing he can personally lead the country out of the current crisis.
- Orr struggles with the psychological burden of multiple, conflicting timelines and memories jostling in his mind.
Why had this gift been given to a fool, a passive nothing of a man?
Haber felt that Orr was right. There was no reason to it, it was the logic of insanity, but
there it was: his chance. Orr spoke with the incontrovertible conviction of dream, in
which there is no free will: do this, you must do it, it is to be done.
Why had this gift been given to a fool, a passive nothing of a man? Why was Orr so sure
and so right, while the strong, active, positive man was powerless, forced to try to use,
even to obey, the weak tool? This went through his mind, not for the first time, but even
as he thought it he was going over to the desk, to the telephone. He sat down and dialed
direct-distance to the HEW offices in Washington. The call, handled through the Federal
Telephone switchboards in Utah, went straight through.
While he was waiting to be put through to the Minister of Health, Education, and
Welfare, whom he knew fairly well, he said to Orr, "Why didn't you put us over in
another continuum where this mess simply never happened? It would be a lot easier.
And nobody would be dead. Why didn't you simply get rid of the Aliens?"
"I don't choose," Orr said. "Don't you see that yet? I follow."
"You follow my hypnotic suggestions, yes, but never fully, never directly and simplyâ"
"I didn't mean those," Orr said, but Rantow's personal secretary was now on the line.
While Haber was talking Orr slipped away, downstairs, no doubt, to see about the
woman. That was all right. As he talked to the secretary and then to the Minister himself,
Haber began to feel convinced that things were going to be all right now, that the Aliens
were in fact totally unaggressive, and that he would be able to make Rantow believe
this, and, through Rantow, the President and his Generals. Orr was no longer necessary.
Haber saw what must be done, and would lead his country out of the mess.
9
Those who dream of feasting wake to lamendation.
âChuang Tse: II
It was the third week in April. Orr had made a date, last week, to meet Heather Lelache
at Dave's for lunch on Thursday, but as soon as he started out from his office he knew it
wouldn't work.
There were by now so many different memories, so many skeins of life experience,
jostling in his head, that he scarcely tried to remember anything. He took it as it came.
The Architect of Reality
- George Orr finds himself living in a state of childlike immediacy, where the world is both surprising and mundane.
- Haber's manipulation of Orr's dreams has fundamentally altered the social and political structure of the world, elevating Orr to a bureaucratic role he dislikes.
- The essential continuity of Orr's previous livesâsuch as his profession and the global climateâis beginning to fracture under Haber's increasing control.
- Portland has been transformed into the 'Capital of the Planet,' serving as the headquarters for a supranational Federation of Peoples.
- Despite radical shifts in global power and urban architecture, certain elements like the President of the United States remain strangely immutable.
He was living almost like a young child, among actualities only. He was surprised by nothing, and by everything.
He was living almost like a young child, among actualities only. He was surprised by
nothing, and by everything.
His office was on the third floor of the Civil Planning Bureau; his position was more
impressive than any he had had before: he was in charge of the South-East Suburban
Parks section of the City Planning Commission. He did not like the job and never had.
He had always managed to remain some kind of draftsman, up until the dream last
Monday that had, in juggling the Federal and State Governments around to suit some
plan of Haber's, so thoroughly rearranged the whole social system that he had ended up
as a City bureaucrat. He had never held a job, in any of his lives, which was quite up his
alley; what he knew he was best at was design, the realization of proper and fitting shape
and form for things, and this talent had not been in demand in any of his various
existences. But this job, which he had (now) held and disliked for five years, was way
out of line. That worried him.
Until this week there had been an essential continuity, a coherence, among all the
existences resultant from his dreams. He had always been some kind of draftsman, had
always lived on Corbett Avenue. Even in the life that had ended on the concrete steps of
a burnt-out house in a dying city in a ruined world, even in that life, up until there were
no more jobs and no more homes, those continuities had held. And throughout all the
subsequent dreams or lives, many more important things had also remained constant. He
had improved the local climate a little, but not much, and the Greenhouse Effect
remained, a permanent legacy of the middle of the last century. Geography remained
perfectly steady: the continents were where they were. So did national boundaries, and
human nature, and so forth. If Haber had suggested that he dream up a nobler race of
men, he had failed to do so.
But Haber was learning how to run his dreams better. These last two sessions had
changed things quite radically. He still had his flat on Corbett Avenue, the same three
rooms, faintly scented with the manager's marijuana; but he worked as a bureaucrat in a
huge building downtown, and downtown was changed out of all recognition. It was
almost as impressive and skyscraping as it had been when there had been no population
crash, and it was much more durable and handsome. Things were being managed very
differently, now.
Curiously enough, Albert M. Merdle was still President of the United States. He, like the
shapes of continents, appeared to be unchangeable. But the United States was not the
power it had been, nor was any single country.
Portland was now the home of the World Planning Center, the chief agency of the
supranational Federation of Peoples. Portland was, as the souvenir post cards said, the
Capital of the Planet. Its population was two million. The whole downtown area was full
of giant WPC buildings, none more than twelve years old, all carefully planned,
surrounded by green parks and tree-lined malls. Thousands of people, most of them Fed-
peep or WPC employees, fitted those malls; parties of tourists from Ulan Bator and
Santiago de Chile filed past, heads tilted back, listening to their ear-button guides. It was
a lively and imposing spectacleâthe great, handsome buildings, the tended lawns, the
The Graying of Humanity
- George Orr navigates a futuristic Portland where familiar landmarks and streets have been replaced by the Research and Development Coordination Building.
- Orr searches in vain for Heather Lelache, realizing that in this new reality, she may have a different name or might never have been born at all.
- The world has achieved a state of total racial uniformity where every human being is now the same shade of gray.
- Dr. Haber celebrates this biological 'short cut' as the ultimate solution to the history of racial conflict and social outcasting.
- Orr and Haber remain the only two individuals on Earth who possess the memory of a world with diverse skin colors and racial history.
But they all wore the same clothes, trousers, tunic, raincape; and underneath the clothes they were all the same color. They were gray.
well-dressed crowds. It looked, to George Orr, quite futuristic.
He could not find Dave's, of course. He couldn't even find Ankeny Street. He
remembered it so vividly from so many other existences that he refused to accept, until
he got there, the assurances of his present memory, which simply lacked any Ankeny
Street at all. Where it should have been, the Research and Development Coordination
Building shot cloudward from among its lawns and rhododendrons. He did not even
bother to look for the Pendleton Building; Morrison Street was still there, a broad mall
newly planted down the center with orange trees, but there were no neo-Inca style
buildings along it, and never had been.
He could not recall the name of Heather's firm exactly; was it Potman, Esserbeck, and
Rutti, or was it Forman, Esserbeck, Goodhue and Rutti? He found a telephone booth and
looked for the firm. Nothing of the kind was listed, but there was a P. Esserbeck,
attorney. He called there and inquired, but no Miss Lelache worked there. At last he got
up his courage and looked for her name. There was no Lelache in the book.
She might still be, but bear a different name, he thought. Her mother might have
dropped the husband's name after he went off to Africa. Or she might have retained her
own married name after she was widowed. But he had not the least idea what her
husband's name had been. She might never have borne it; many women no longer
changed their names at marriage, holding the custom a relic of feminine serfdom. But
what was the good of such speculations? It might very well be that there was no Heather
Lelache: thatâthis timeâshe had never been born.
After facing this, Orr faced another possibility. If she walked by right now looking for
me, he thought, would I recognize her?
She was brown. A clear, dark, amber brown, like Baltic amber, or a cup of strong Ceylon
tea. But no brown people went by. No black people, no white, no yellow, no red.
They came from every part of the earth to work at the World Planning Center or to look
at it, from Thailand, Argentina, Ghana, China, Ireland, Tasmania, Lebanon, Ethiopia,
Vietnam, Honduras, Lichtenstein. But they all wore the same clothes, trousers, tunic,
raincape; and underneath the clothes they were all the same color. They were gray.
Dr. Haber had been delighted when that happened. It had been last Saturday, their first
session in a week. He had stared at himself in the washroom mirror for five minutes,
chuckling and admiring; he had stared at Orr the same way. "That time you did it the
economical way for once, George! By God, I believe your brain's beginning to cooperate
with me! You know what I suggested you dreamâeh?"
For, these days, Haber did talk freely and fully to Orr about what he was doing and
hoped to do with Orr's dreams. Not that it helped much.
Orr had looked down at his own pale-gray hands, with their short gray nails. "I suppose
that you suggested that there be no more color problems. No question of race."
"Precisely. And of course I was envisaging a political and ethical solution. Instead of
which, your primary thinking processes took the usual short cut, which usually turns out
to be a short circuit, but this time they went to the root. Made the change biological and
absolute. There never has been a racial problem! You and I are the only two men on
earth, George, who know that there ever was a racial problem! Can you conceive of
that? Nobody was ever outcaste in Indiaânobody was ever lynched in Alabamaâ
The Price of Gray
- Dr. Haber celebrates the retroactive elimination of war and racial suffering through George Orr's reality-altering dreams.
- The historical record has been wiped clean of figures like Martin Luther King and events like the Gettysburg Address.
- In this new reality, humanity has been homogenized into a single skin color described as the color of a battleship.
- Orr realizes that his wife, Heather, has ceased to exist because her specific racial identity was essential to her being.
- Orr experiences a profound sense of self-loathing, viewing himself as a characterless 'lump of clay' compared to the erased complexity of others.
- Dr. Haber's ego grows as he views himself as a greater benefactor to humanity than religious figures like Jesus or Buddha.
That every soul on earth should have a body the color of a battleship: no!
nobody was massacred in Johannesburg! War's a problem we've outgrown and race is a
problem we never even had! Nobody in the entire history of the human race has suffered
for the color of his skin. You're learning, George! You'll be the greatest benefactor
humanity has ever had in spite of yourself. All the time and energy humans have wasted
on trying to find religious solutions to suffering, then you come along and make Buddha
and Jesus and the rest of them look like the fakirs they were.
They tried to run away from evil, but we, we're uprooting itâgetting rid of it, piece by
piece!"
Haber's paeans of triumph made Orr uneasy, and he didn't listen to them; instead, he had
searched his memory and had found in it no address that had been delivered on a
battlefield in Gettysburg, nor any man known to history named Martin Luther King. But
such matters seemed a small price to pay for the complete retroactive abolition of racial
prejudice, and he had said nothing.
But now, never to have known a woman with brown skin, brown skin and wiry black
hair cut very short so that the elegant line of the skull showed like the curve of a bronze
vaseâno, that was wrong. That was intolerable. That every soul on earth should have a
body the color of a battleship: no!
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 being, her mixed nature, dark and
clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people's world. She
had not been born.
He had, though. He could be born into any world. He had no character. He was a lump
of clay, a block of uncarved wood.
And Dr. Haber: he had been born. Nothing could prevent him. He only got bigger at
The Growth of Power
- Haber has transitioned from subtle manipulation to overt coercion as his social and political status has risen.
- The legal system, now under the guise of Personal Welfare Control, effectively prevents any challenge to Haber's authority.
- Haber's character is described as an onion with infinite layers, suggesting a lack of a core, authentic self.
- The narrative posits that the will to power is defined by perpetual growth rather than final achievement.
- The current reality has shifted so that the Alien arrival was a peaceful diplomatic event rather than a violent conflict.
Layer after layer might peel off the onion and yet nothing be revealed but more onion.
every reincarnation.
During that terrifying day's journey from the cabin to embattled Portland, when they
were bumping over a country road in the wheezing Hertz Steamer, Heather had told him
that she had tried to suggest that he dream an improved Haber, as they had agreed. And
since then Haber had at least been candid with Orr about his manipulations. Though
candid was not the right word; Haber was much too complex a person for candor. Layer
after layer might peel off the onion and yet nothing be revealed but more onion.
That peeling off of one layer was the only real change in him, and it might not be due to
an effective dream, but only to changed circumstances. He was so sure of himself now
that he had no need to try to hide his purposes, or deceive Orr; he could simply coerce
him. Orr had less chance than ever of getting away from him. Voluntary Therapeutic
Treatment was now known as Personal Welfare Control, but it had the same legal teeth
in it, and no lawyer would dream of bringing a patient's complaint against William
Haber. He was an important man, an extremely important man. He was the Director of
HURAD, the vital center of the World Planning Center, the place where the great
decisions were made. He had always wanted power to do good. Now he had it.
In this light, he had remained completely true to the man Orr had first met, jovial and
remote, in the dingy office in Willamette East Tower under the mural photograph of
Mount Hood. He had not changed; he had simply grown.
The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To
be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a
step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more. As
there was no visible limit to the power Haber wielded through Orr's dreams, so there
was no end to his determination to improve the world.
A passing Alien jostled Orr slightly in the crowd on Morrison Mall, and apologized
tonelessly from its raised left elbow. The Aliens had soon learned not to point at people,
finding it dismayed them. Orr looked up, startled; he had almost forgotten about the
Aliens, ever since the crisis on April Fools' Day.
In the present state of affairsâor continuum, as Haber persisted in calling itâhe now
recalled, the Alien landing had been less of a disaster for Oregon, NASA, and the Air
Force. Instead of inventing their translator-computers hastily under a rain of bombs and
napalm, they had brought them with them from the Moon, and had flown about before
they landed, broadcasting their peaceful intention, apologizing for the War in Space,
The Aldebaran Visitors
- The destruction of the Moondome and a Russian station is revealed to be a tragic misunderstanding during first contact.
- Aliens from a methane planet near Aldebaran have peacefully integrated into human society after fourteen months of diplomacy.
- The visitors wear permanent turtle-like suits and communicate through speech emitted from their left elbows.
- Despite vast sensory and biological differences, the aliens have shared advanced space flight technology with Earth.
- The aliens have become industrious citizens, though their ultimate motivation for staying on Earth remains mysterious.
- Public fear has largely subsided, leaving xenophobic rumors to the fringes of paranoid politics.
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.
which had all been a mistake, and asking for instructions. There had been alarm, of
course, but no panic. It had been almost touching to hear the toneless voices, on every
band of the radio and every TV channel, repeating that the destruction of the Moondome
and the Russian orbiting station had been unintended results of their ignorant efforts to
make contact, that they had understood the missiles of the Space Fleet of Earth to be our
own ignorant efforts to make contact, that they were very sorry and, now that they had
finally mastered human channels of communication, such as speech, they wished to try
to make amends. The WPC, established in Portland since the end of the Plague Years,
had coped with them, and had kept the populace and the Generals calm. This had, Orr
now realized when he thought about it, not happened on the first of April a couple of
weeks ago, but last year in Februaryâfourteen months ago. The Aliens had been
permitted to land; satisfactory relations with them had been established; and they had at
last been allowed to leave their carefully guarded landing site near Steens Mountain in
the Oregon desert and mix with men. A few of them now shared the rebuilt Moondome
peacefully with Fed-peep scientists, and a couple of thousand of them were down on
Earth. That was all of them that existed or, at least, all of them that had come; very few
such details were released to the general public. Natives of a methane-atmosphere planet
of the star Aldebaran, they had to wear their outlandish turtle-like suits perpetually on
Earth or the Moon, but they didn't seem to mind. What they actually looked like, inside
the turtle suits, was not clear in Orr's mind. They couldn't come out, and they didn't draw
pictures. 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. There
were vast areas over which no communication was possible: the dolphin problem, only
enormously more difficult. However, their unaggressiveness having been accepted by
the WPC, and the modesty of their numbers and their aims being apparent, they had
been received with a certain eagerness into Terran society. It was pleasant to have
somebody different to look at. They seemed to intend to stay, if allowed; some of them
had already settled down to running small businesses, for they seemed to be good at
salesmanship and organization, as well as space flight, their superior knowledge of
which they had at once shared with Terran scientists. They had not yet made clear what
they hoped for in return, why they had come to Earth. They seemed simply to like it
here. As they went on behaving as industrious, peaceable, and law-abiding citizens of
Earth, rumors of "Alien takeovers" and "nonhuman infiltration" had become the
property of paranoid politicians of dying Nationalist splinter groups and those persons
who had conversations with the real Flying Saucer People.
The only thing left of that terrible first of April, in fact, seemed to be the return of Mount
The Gray New World
- Mount Hood has returned to active-volcano status, burying nearby towns and causing residents to flee to new suburbs.
- Orr experiences a profound sense of 'dream-grief' for a woman who no longer exists in this current reality.
- Public entertainment has shifted toward extreme violence, with 'hand-to-hands' and mass-casualty football matches serving as cathartic releases.
- The state-controlled media is limited, forcing a culture of 'togetherness' centered around watching live carnage in coliseums.
- Social control is enforced through 'Citizen's Arrests,' where individuals are apprehended by peers for health violations like terminal illness.
The skill of the single fighters was fine, but lacked the splendid abreactive release of mass killing.
Hood to active-volcano status. No bomb had hit it, for no bombs had fallen, this time. It
had simply waked up. A long, gray-brown plume of smoke drifted northward from it
now. Zigzag and Rhododendron had gone the way of Pompeii and Herculaneum. A
fumarole had opened up recently near the tiny, old crater in Mount Tabor Park, well
within the city limits. People in the Mount Tabor area were moving out to the thriving
new suburbs of West Eastmont, Chestnut Hills Estates, and Sunny Slopes Subdivision.
They could live with Mount Hood fuming softly on the horizon, but an eruption just up
the street was too much.
Orr bought a tasteless plateful of fish and chips with African peanut sauce at a crowded
counter-restaurant; while he ate it he thought sorrowfully, well, once I stood her up at
Dave's, and now she's stood me up.
He could not face his grief, his bereavement. Dream-grief. The loss of a woman who had
never existed. He tried to taste his food, to watch other people. But the food had no taste
and the people were all gray.
Outside the glass doors of the restaurant the crowds were thickening: people streaming
toward the Portland Palace of Sport, a huge and lavish coliseum down on the river, for
the afternoon show. People didn't sit home and watch TV much any more; Fed-peep
television was on only two hours a day. The modern way of life was togetherness. This
was Thursday; it would be the hand-to-hands, the biggest attraction of the week except
for Saturday night football. More athletes actually got killed in the hand-to-hands, but
they lacked the dramatic, cathartic aspects of football, the sheer carnage when 144 men
were involved at once, the drenching of the arena stands with blood. The skill of the
single fighters was fine, but lacked the splendid abreactive release of mass killing.
No more war, Orr said to himself, giving up on the last soggy splinters of potato. He
went out into the crowd. Ain't gonna . . . war no more. . . . There had been a song. Once.
An old song. Ain't gonna . . . What was the verb? Not fight, it didn't scan. Ain't gonna ...
war no more ....
He walked straight into a Citizen's Arrest. A tall man with a long, wrinkled, gray face
seized a short man with a round, shiny, gray face, grabbing him by the front of his tunic.
The crowd bumped around the pair, some stopping to watch, others pressing on toward
the Palace of Sport. "This is a Citizen's Arrest, passersby please take notice!" the tall
man was saying in a piercing, nervous tenor. "This man, Harvey T. Gonno, is ill with an
incurable malignant abdominal cancer but has concealed his whereabouts from the
authorities and continues to live with his wife. My name is Ernest Ringo Marin, of
2624287 South West Eastwood Drive, Sunny Slopes Subdivision, Greater Portland. Are
there ten witnesses?" One of the witnesses helped hold the feebly struggling criminal,
while Ernest Ringo Marin counted heads. Orr escaped, pushing head-down through the
The Architecture of Utilitarianism
- In this reality, adult citizens are legally required to carry euthanasia weapons to maintain social order and racial purity.
- George Orr remains a psychiatric patient under the PWC, retaining his unloaded weapon as a gesture to preserve his social status during treatment.
- The HURAD Tower, built on the ruins of the old world, serves as a massive monument to the philosophy of 'The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number.'
- Global threats like nuclear weapons have been eliminated, yet the resurgence of cancer suggests that even this engineered utopia is unstable.
- Dr. Haber has ascended from a private practitioner to a powerful director who manages millions from a palatial, high-tech office suite.
- Haber prepares to transition Orr's treatment away from hypnosis, signaling a new phase of experimentation with the 'Augmentor' machine.
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.
crowd, before Marin administered euthanasia with the hypodermic gun worn by all adult
citizens who had earned their Civic Responsibility Certificate. He himself wore one. It
was a legal obligation. His, at the moment, was not loaded; its charge had been removed
when he became a psychiatric patient under PWC; but they had left him the weapon so
that his temporary lapse of status should not be a public humiliation to him. A mental
illness such as he was being treated for, they had explained to him, must not be confused
with a punishable crime such as a serious communicable or hereditary disease. He was
not to feel that he was in any way a danger to the Race or a second-class citizen, and his
weapon would be reloaded as soon as Dr. Haber discharged him as cured.
A tumor, a tumor . . . Hadn't the carcinomic Plague, by killing off all those liable to
cancer, either during the Crash or at infancy, left the survivors free of the scourge? It
had, in another dream. Not in this one. Cancer had evidently broken out again, like
Mount Tabor and Mount Hood.
Study. That's it. Ain't gonna study war no more. . . .
He got onto the funicular at Fourth and Alder; and swooped up over the gray-green city
to the HURAD Tower which crowned the west hills, on the site of the old Pittock
mansion high in Washington Park.
It overlooked everythingâthe city, the rivers, the hazy valleys westward, the great dark
hills of Forest Park stretching north. 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.
Indoors the immense black-marble foyer, modeled after the Pantheon in Rome, bore a
smaller inscription picked out in gold around the drum of the central dome: THE
PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND IS MAN- A. POPE-1688- 1744.
The building was larger in ground area, Orr had been told, than the British Museum, and
five stories taller. It was also earthquake-proof.. It was not bombproof, for there were no
bombs. What nuclear stockpiles remained after the Cislunar War had been taken off and
exploded in a series of interesting experiments out in the Asteroid Belt. This building
could stand up to anything left on Earth, except perhaps Mount Hood. Or a bad dream.
He took the walkbelt to the West Wing, and the broad helical escalator to the top floor.
Dr. Haber still kept his analyst's couch in his office, a kind of ostentatiously humble
reminder of his beginnings as a private practitioner, when he dealt with people by ones
not by millions. But it took a while to get to the couch, for his suite covered about half
an acre and included seven different rooms. Orr announced himself to the
autoreceptionist at the door of the waiting room, then went on past Miss Crouch, who
was feeding her computer, and past the official office, a stately room just lacking a
throne, where the Director received ambassadors, delegations, and Nobel Prize winners,
until at last he came to the smaller office with the wall-to-ceiling window, and the couch.
There the antique redwood panels of one entire wall were slid back, exposing a
magnificent array of research machinery: Haber was halfway into the exposed entrails of
the Augmentor. "Hullo, George!" he boomed from within, not looking around. "Just
hooking a new ergismatch into Baby's hormocouple. Half a mo. I think we'll have a
session without hypnosis today. Sit down, I'll be a while at this, I've been doing a bit of
tinkering again. .. . Listen. You remember that battery of tests they gave you, when you
first showed up down at the Med School? Personality inventories, IQ, Rorschach, and so
on and so on. Then I gave you the TAT and some simulated encounter situations, about
your third session here. Remember? Ever wonder how you did on 'em?"
The Man in the Middle
- Dr. Haber reveals that Orr's psychological tests show him to be an extreme anomaly of total balance.
- Orr scores almost exactly at the median on every scale, including dominance, independence, and creativity.
- While Haber views this as a form of self-cancellation, his colleague Walters interprets it as a state of holistic self-harmony.
- Haber plans to shift their sessions to a waking state to map Orr's unique brain rhythms using the Augmentor.
- The doctor's ultimate goal is to isolate the 'tracer-shell effect' in Orr's hippocampus to understand how his dreams function.
- Orr remains skeptical and fearful, reiterating that his only goal is to stop his dreams from changing reality.
Well, you're a queer fish, George, and the queerest thing about you is that there's nothing queer about you!
Haber's face, gray, framed by curly black hair and beard, appeared suddenly above the
pulled-out chassis of the Augmentor. His eyes, as he gazed at Orr, reflected the light of
the wall-sized window.
"I guess so," Orr said; actually he had never given it a thought.
"I believe it's time for you to know that, within the frame of reference of those
standardized but extremely subtle and useful tests, you are so sane as to be an anomaly.
Of course, I'm using the lay word 'sane,' which has no precise objective meaning; in
quantifiable terms, you're median. Your extraversion/introversion score, for instance,
was 49.1. That is, you're more introverted than extraverted by .9 of a degree. That's not
unusual; what is, is the emergence of the same damn pattern everywhere, right across the
board. If you put them all onto the same graph you sit smack in the middle at 50.
Dominance, for example; I think you were 48.8 on that. Neither dominant nor
submissive. Independence/dependenceâsame thing.
Creative/destructive, on the Ramirez scaleâsame thing. Both, neither. Either, or. Where
there's an opposed pair, a polarity, you're in the middle; where there's a scale, you're at
the balance point. You cancel out so thoroughly that, in a sense, nothing is left. Now,
Walters down at the Med School reads the results a bit differently; he says your lack of
social achievement is a result of your holistic adjustment, whatever that is, and that what
I see as self-cancellation is a peculiar state of poise, of self-harmony. By which you can
see that, let's face it, old Walters is a pious fraud, he's never outgrown the mysticism of
the seventies; but he means well. So there you have it, anyway: you're the man in the
middle of the graph. There we are, now to hook up the glumdalclitch with the brobding-
nag, and we're all set. . . . Hell!" He had knocked his head on a panel getting up. He left
the Augmentor open. "Well, you're a queer fish, George, and the queerest thing about
you is that there's nothing queer about you!" He laughed his huge, gusty laugh. "So,
today we try a new tack. No hypnosis. No sleep. No d-state and no dreams. Today I want
to hook you up with the Augmentor in a waking state."
Orr's heart sank, though he did not know why. "What for?" he said.
"Principally to get a record of your normal waking brain rhythms when augmented. I got
a full analysis your first session, but that was before the Augmentor could do anything
but fall in with the rhythm you were currently emitting. Now I'll be able to use it to
stimulate and trace certain individual characteristics of your brain activity more clearly,
particularly that tracer-shell effect you have in the hippocampus. Then I can compare
them with your d-state patterns, and with the patterns of other brains, normal and
abnormal. I'm looking for what makes you tick, George, so that I can find what makes
your dreams work."
"What for?" Orr repeated.
"What for? Well, isn't that what you're here for?" "I came here to be cured. To learn how
not to dream effectively."
"If you'd been a simple one-two-three cure, would you have been sent up here to the
Institute, to HURADâto me?"
The Ethics of Change
- Dr. Haber challenges Orr's fear of 'changing things,' arguing that life is an inherently dynamic process of evolution and entropy-defying energy.
- Orr expresses a fundamental philosophical disagreement, positing that stillness and 'letting things be' are as essential to existence as change.
- Haber views his experiments with Orr's power as a 'great experiment' to control a new life-force for the benefit of mankind.
- Orr warns that attempting to stand outside the world and manipulate it is a violation of life's natural order.
- The dialogue culminates in a moral hypothetical about saving a life, highlighting the divide between Haber's utilitarian activism and Orr's cautious uncertainty regarding good and evil.
We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand outside things and run them, that way.
Orr put his head in his hands, and said nothing.
"I can't show you how to stop, George, until I can find out what it is you're doing."
"But if you do find out, will you tell me how to stop?"
Haber rocked back largely on his heels. "Why are you so afraid of yourself, George?"
"I'm not," Orr said. His hands were sweaty. "I'm afraid ofâ" But he was too afraid, in
fact, to say the pronoun.
"Of changing things, as you call it. O.K. I know. We've been through that many times.
Why, George? You've got to ask yourself that question. What's wrong with changing
things? Now, I wonder if this self-canceling, centerpoised personality of yours leads you
to look at things defensively. I want you to try to detach yourself from yourself and try
to see your own viewpoint from the outside, objectively. You are afraid of losing your
balance. But change need not unbalance you; life's not a static object, after all. It's a
process. There's no holding still. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you
refuse it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can't step into the
same river twice. Lifeâevolutionâthe whole universe of space/time, matter/ energyâ
existence itselfâis essentially change."
"That is one aspect of it," Orr said. "The other is stillness."
"When things don't change any longer, that's the end result of entropy, the heat-death of
the universe. The more things go on moving, interrelating, conflicting, changing, the less
balance there isâand the more life. I'm pro-life, George. Life itself is a huge gamble
against the odds, against all odds! You can't try to live safely, there's no such thing as
safety. Stick your neck out of your shell, then, and live fully! It's not how you get there,
but where you get to that counts. What you're afraid to accept, here, is that we're
engaged in a really great experiment, you and I. We're on the brink of discovering and
controlling, for the good of all mankind., a whole new force, an entire new field of
antientropic energy, of the life-force, of the will to act, to do, to change!"
"All that is true. But there isâ"
"What, George?" He was fatherly and patient, now; and Orr forced himself to go on,
knowing it was no good.
"We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand outside things and run
them, that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to
follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it.
You have to let it be."
Haber walked up and down the room, pausing before the huge window that framed a
view northward of the serene and nonerupting cone of Mount St. Helen. He nodded
several times. "I understand," he said with his back turned. "I understand completely.
But let me put it this way, George, and perhaps you'll understand what it is I'm after.
You're alone in the jungle, in the Mato Grosso, and you find a native woman lying on the
path, dying of snakebite. You have serum in your kit, plenty of it, enough to cure
thousands of snakebites. Do you withhold it because 'this is the way it is'âdo you 'let
her be'?"
"It would depend," Orr said.
"Depend on what?"
"Well... I don't know. If reincarnation is a fact, you might be keeping her from a better
life and condemning her to live out a wretched one. Perhaps you cure her and she goes
home and murders six people in the village. I know you'd give her the serum, because
you have it, and feel sorry for her. But you don't know whether what you're doing is
good or evil or both...."
Crossing in the Mist
- Haber defends the brutal eugenics and 'controlled violence' of the current reality as a necessary sacrifice for a healthy, tough-minded society.
- Orr remains deeply unsettled by the world Haber has created, specifically the public arrests for euthanasia and the lack of compassion for the 'incurable.'
- While connected to the Augmentor, Orr experiences a surreal encounter with a nine-foot-tall, turtle-like alien on a crowded mall.
- The alien warns Orr that his ability to alter reality is causing 'disturbances' and 'mist' in the perception of other beings.
- The alien offers Orr a cryptic phrase, 'Er' perrehnne,' as a means to summon auxiliary help before he follows further 'wrong directions.'
- Haber is startled by the immediate and unexpected shift in reality or Orr's state, demanding to know what Orr has done.
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.
"O.K.! Granted! I know what snakebite serum does, but I don't know what I'm doingâ
O.K., I'll buy it on those terms, gladly. And say what's the difference? I freely admit that
I don't know, about 85 per cent of the time, what the hell I'm doing with this screwball
brain of yours, and you don't either, but we're doing itâso, can we get on with it?" His
virile, genial vigor was overwhelming; he laughed, and Orr found a weak smile on his
lips.
While the electrodes were being applied, however, he ' made one last effort to
communicate with Haber. "I saw a Citizen's Arrest for euthanasia on the way here," he
said.
"What for?"
"Eugenics. Cancer."
Haber nodded, alert. "No wonder you're depressed. You haven't yet fully accepted the
use of controlled violence for the good of the community; you may never be able to.
This is a tough-minded world we've got going here, George. A realistic one. But as I
said, life can't be safe. This society is tough-minded, and getting tougher yearly: the
future will justify it. We need health. We simply have no room for the incurables, the
gene-damaged who degrade the species; we have no time for wasted, useless suffering."
He spoke with an enthusiasm that rang hollower than usual; Orr wondered how well, in
fact, Haber liked this world he had indubitably made. "Now just sit like that, I. don't
want you going to sleep from force of habit. O.K., great. You may get bored. I want you
just to sit for a while. Keep your eyes open, think about anything you like. I'll be
fiddling with Baby's guts, here. Now, here we go: bingo." He pressed the white ON
button in the wall panel to the right of the Augmentor, by the head of the couch.
A passing Alien jostled Orr slightly in the crowd on the mall; it raised its left elbow to
apologize, and Orr muttered, "Sorry." It stopped, half blocking his way: and he too
halted, startled and impressed by its nine-foot, greenish, armored impassivity. 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.
From the still-lifted left elbow the voice issued flatly: "Jor Jor," it said.
After a moment Orr recognized his own name in this Barsoomian bisyllable, and said
with some embarrassment, "Yes, I'm Orr."
"Please forgive warranted interruption. You are human capable of iahklu' as previously
noted. This troubles self."
"I don'tâI thinkâ"
"We also have been variously disturbed. Concepts cross in mist. Perception is difficult.
Volcanoes emit fire. Help is offered: refusably. Snakebite serum is not prescribed for all.
Before following directions leading in wrong directions, auxiliary forces may be
summoned, in immediate-following fashion: Er' perrehnne!"
"Er' perrehnne," Orr repeated automatically, his whole mind intent on trying to
understand what the Alien was telling him.
"If desired. Speech is silver, silence is gold. Self is universe. Please forgive interruption,
crossing in mist." The Alien, though neckless and waistless, gave an impression of
bowing, and passed on, huge and greenish above the gray-faced crowd. Orr stood staring
after him until Haber said, "George!"
"What?" He looked stupidly around at the room, the desk, the window.
"What the hell did you do?"
The Return of Equanimity
- Dr. Haber observes an unprecedented 150mv spike in Orr's brain activity while testing the Augmentor.
- Orr experiences a profound sense of threat and reluctance when asked to reconstruct his thoughts about the Aliens.
- Haber dismisses the unusual readings as an exaggerated emotional response to a memory of euthanasia.
- As the Augmentor restarts, Orr unexpectedly recovers a lost sense of well-being and universal belonging.
- Orr realizes he has been 'off course' for four years due to drugs, dreams, and Haber's constant interference.
- Haber remains oblivious to Orr's internal peace, focusing entirely on the technical data provided by his machines.
Orr set his teeth and faced Chaos and Old Night.
"Nothing," Orr said. He was still sitting on the couch, his hair full of electrodes. Haber
had pushed the OFF button of the Augmentor and had come around in front of the
couch, staring first at Orr and then at the EEG screen.
He opened the machine and checked the permanent record inside it, recorded by pens on
paper tape. "Thought I'd misread the screen," he said, and gave a peculiar laugh, a very
clipped version of his usual full-throated roar. "Queer stuff going on in your cortex there,
and I wasn't even feeding your cortex at all with the Augmentor, I'd just begun a slight
stimulus to the pons, nothing specific. . . . What's this. . . . Christ, that must be 150 mv
there." He turned suddenly to Orr. "What were you thinking? Reconstruct it."
An extreme reluctance possessed Orr, amounting to a sense of threat, of danger.
"I thoughtâI was thinking about the Aliens."
"The Aldebaranians? Well?"
"I just thought of one I saw on the street, coming here."
"And that reminded you, consciously or unconsciously, of the euthanasia you saw
performed. Right? O.K. That might explain the funny business here down in the emotive
centers, the Augmentor picked it up and exaggerated it.
You must have felt thatâsomething special, unusual going on in your mind?"
"No," Orr said, truthfully. It had not felt unusual.
"O.K. Now look, in case my reactions worried you there, you should know that I've had
this Augmentor hooked up to my own brain several hundred times, and on lab subjects,
some forty-five different subjects in fact. It's not going to hurt you any more than it did
them. But that reading was a very unusual one for an adult subject, and I simply wanted
to check with you to see if you felt it subjectively."
Haber was reassuring himself, not Orr, but it didn't matter. Orr was past reassurance.
"O.K. Here we go again." Haber restarted the EEG, and approached the ON button of
the Augmentor. Orr set his teeth and faced Chaos and Old Night.
But they were not there. Nor was he downtown talking to a nine-foot turtle. He remained
sitting on the comfortable couch looking at the misty, blue-gray cone of St. Helen out
the window. And, quiet as a thief in the night, a sense of well-being came into him, a
certainty that things were all right, and that he was in the middle of things. Self is
universe. He would not be allowed to be isolated, to be stranded. He was back where he
belonged. He felt an equanimity, a perfect certainty as to where he was and where
everything else was. This feeling did not come to him as blissful or mystical, but simply
as normal. It was the way he generally had felt, except in times of crisis, of agony; it was
the mood of his childhood and all the best and profoundest hours of the boyhood and
maturity; it was his natural mode of being. These last years he had lost it, gradually but
almost entirely, scarcely realizing that he had lost it. Four years ago this month, four
years ago in April, something had happened that had made him lose that balance
altogether for a while; and recently the drugs he had taken, the dreams he had dreamed,
the constant jumping from one life-memory to another, the worsening of the texture of
life the more Haber unproved it, all this had sent him clear off course. Now, all at once,
he was back where he belonged.
He knew that this was nothing he had accomplished by himself.
He said aloud, "Did the Augmentor do that?"
"Do what?" said Haber, leaning around the machinery again to watch the EEG screen.
"Oh... I don't know."
"It isn't doing anything, in your sense," Haber replied with a touch of irritation. Haber
was likable at moments like this, playing no role and pretending no response, wholly
absorbed in what he was trying to learn from the quick and subtle reactions of his
machines. "It's merely amplifying what your own brain's doing at the moment,
The Granite Door
- Orr attempts to assert his autonomy by refusing to allow Haber to use his effective dreams any longer.
- Haber reveals he is close to perfecting a method to replicate and induce 'e-state' rhythms in other subjects.
- The doctor views his research as the most important scientific endeavor in history, justifying any means to complete it.
- Haber threatens Orr with legal coercion and chemical restraint, framing Orr's refusal as a sign of psychosis.
- Despite the threats, Orr maintains a newfound serenity and mildness that surprises and momentarily recoils the doctor.
He seemed to recoil, as a man might who thought to push aside a gauze curtain and found it to be a granite door.
selectively reinforcing the activity, and your brain's doing absolutely nothing interesting.
. . . There." He made a rapid note of something, returned to the Augmentor, then leaned
back to observe the jiggling lines on the little screen. He separated three that had seemed
one, by turning dials, then reunified them. Orr did not interrupt him again. Once Haber
said sharply, "Shut your eyes. Roll the eyeballs upward. Right. Keep them shut, try to
visualize somethingâa red cube. Right...."
When at last he turned the machines off and began to detach the electrodes, the serenity
Orr had felt did not lapse, like the induced mood of a drug or alcohol. It remained.
Without premeditation and without timidity Orr said, "Dr. Haber, I can't let you use my
effective dreams any more."
"Eh?" Haber said, his mind still on Orr's brain, not on Orr.
"I can't let you use my dreams any more."
"'Use' them?"
"Use them."
"Call it what you like," Haber said. He had straightened up and towered over Orr, who
was still sitting down. He was gray, large, broad, curly bearded, deep-chested, frowning.
Your God is a jealous God. "I'm sorry, George, but you're not in a position to say that."
Orr's gods were nameless and unenvious, asking neither worship nor obedience.
"Yet I do say it," he replied mildly.
Haber looked down at him, really looked at him for a moment, and saw him. He seemed
to recoil, as a man might who thought to push aside a gauze curtain and found it to be a
granite door. He crossed the room. He sat down behind his desk. Orr now stood up and
stretched a little.
Haber stroked his black beard with a big, gray hand.
"I am on the vergeâno, I'm in the midstâof a breakthrough," he said, his deep voice
not booming or jovial but dark, powerful. "Using your brain patterns in a feedback-
elimination-replication-augmentation routine, I am programming the Augmentor to
reproduce the EEG rhythms that obtain during effective dreaming. I call these e-state
rhythms. When I have them sufficiently generalized, I will be able to superimpose them
on the d-state rhythms of another brain, and after a period of synchronization they will, I
believe, induce effective dreaming in that brain. Do you understand what that means? I'll
be able to induce the e-state in a properly selected and trained brain, as easily as a
psychologist using ESB induces rage in a cat, or tranquillity in a psychotic humanâ
more easily, for I can stimulate without implanting contacts or chemicals. I am within a
few days, perhaps a few hours, of accomplishing this goal. Once I do, you're off the
hook. You will be unnecessary. I don't like working with an unwilling subject, and
progress will be much faster with a suitably equipped and oriented subject. But until I'm
ready, I need you. This research must be finished. It is probably the most important piece
of scientific research that has ever been done. I need you to the extent thatâif your
sense of obligation to me as a friend, and to the pursuit of knowledge, and to the welfare
of all humanity, isn't sufficient to keep you hereâthen I'm willing to compel you to
serve a higher cause. If necessary, I'll obtain an order of Obligatory Therâ of Personal
Welfare Constraint. If necessary, I'll use drugs, as if you were a violent psychotic. Your
refusal to help in a matter of this importance is, of course, psychotic. Needless to say,
however, I would infinitely rather have your free, voluntary help, without legal or
psychic coercion. It would make all the difference to me."
"It really wouldn't make any difference to you," Orr said, without belligerence.
"Why are you fighting meânow? Why now, George? When you've contributed so
The Price of Progress
- Haber defends his manipulation of Orr's dreams by listing global achievements like the elimination of war, cancer, and overpopulation.
- Orr argues that these 'improvements' have resulted in a joyless, uniform society where individual choice and democratic government have vanished.
- Haber blames Orrâs subconscious for the 'shoddy' implementation of his utopian ideals, calling Orr's mind devious and negative.
- The conflict highlights a fundamental divide between Haber's utilitarian 'progress' and Orr's concern for the organic quality of human life.
- Haber reveals his total lack of empathy by dismissing the death of Heather Lelache as a positive development for Orr's productivity.
You have no social conscience, no altruism. You're a moral jellyfish.
much, and we're so near the goal?" Your God is a reproachful God. But guilt was not the
way to get at George Orr; if he had been a man much given to guilt feelings he would
not have lived to thirty.
"Because the longer you go on the worse it gets. And now, instead of preventing me
from having effective dreams, you're going to start having them yourself. I don't like
making the rest of the world live in my dreams, but I certainly don't want to live in
yours."
"What do you mean by that: 'the worse it gets'? Look here, George." Man to man.
Reason will prevail. If only we sit down and talk things over. . . . "In the few weeks that
we've worked together, this is what we've done. Eliminated overpopulation; restored the
quality of urban life and the ecological balance of the planet. Eliminated cancer as a
major killer." He began to bend his strong, gray fingers down, enumerating. "Eliminated
the color problem, racial hatred. Eliminated war. Eliminated the risk of species
deterioration and the fostering of deleterious gene stocks. Eliminatedâno, say in
process of eliminatingâpoverty, economic inequality, the class war, all over the world.
What else? Mental illness, maladjustment to reality: that'll take a while, but we've made
the first steps already. Under HURAD direction, the reduction of human misery,
physical and psychic, and the constant increase of valid individual self-expression, is an
ongoing thing, a constant progress. Progress, George! We've made more progress in six
weeks than humanity made in six hundred thousand years!"
Orr felt that all these arguments should be answered. He began, "But where's democratic
government got to? People can't choose anything at all any more for themselves. Why is
everything so shoddy, why is everybody so joyless? You can't even tell people apartâ
and the younger they are the more that's so. This business of World State bringing up all
the children in those Centersâ"
But Haber interrupted, really angry. "The Child Centers were your invention, not mine! I
simply outlined the desiderata to you among the suggestions for a dream, as I always do;
I tried to suggest how to implement some of them, but those suggestions never seem to
take hold, or they get twisted out of all recognition by your damned primary-process
thinking. You don't have to tell me that you resist and resent everything I'm trying to
accomplish for humanity, you knowâthat's been obvious from the start. Every step
forward that I force you to take, you cancel, you cripple with the deviousness or
stupidity of the means your dream takes to realize it. You try, each time, to take a step
backward. Your own drives are totally negative. If you weren't under strong hypnotic
compulsion when you dream, you'd have reduced the world to ashes, weeks ago! Look
what you almost did, that one night when you ran off with that woman lawyerâ"
"She's dead," Orr said.
"Good. She was a destructive influence on you. Irresponsible. You have no social
conscience, no altruism. You're a moral jellyfish. I have to instill social responsibility in
you hypnotically, every time. And every time it's thwarted, spoiled. That's what
happened with the Child Centers. I suggested that the nuclear family being the prime
shaper of neurotic personality structures, there were certain ways in which it might, in an
ideal society, be modified. Your dream simply grabbed at the crudest interpretation of
these, mixed it up with cheap Utopian concepts, or cynical anti-utopian concepts
The Will to Progress
- Orr attempts to convince Haber that his power is a dangerous gift that should only be used as a last resort when no alternatives exist.
- Haber dismisses Orr's concerns as personal fears, viewing the ability to dream effectively as a scientific milestone comparable to the invention of printing.
- Haber reveals his plan to make the 'effective dream' state replicable through technology, removing the need for Orr as a single, 'sterile' source.
- The doctor intends to use the Augmentor on himself to achieve complete autohypnotic control over reality, guided by his own conscious planning.
- Haber promises to 'cure' Orr by dreaming away his ability to dream effectively once the technology is perfected.
- The section concludes with Haber's ecstatic, almost terrifying vision of a world where men become like gods through his total control.
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.
perhaps, and produced the Centers. Which, all the same, are better than what they
replaced! There is very little schizophrenia in this worldâdid you know that? It's a rare
disease!" Haber's dark eyes shone, his lips grinned.
"Things are better than theyâthan they were once," Orr said, abandoning hope of
discussion. "But as you go on they get worse. I'm not trying to thwart you, it's that you're
trying to do something that can't be done. I have this, this gift, I know that; and I know
my obligation to it. To use it only when I must. When there is no other alternative. There
are alternatives now. I've got to stop."
"We can't stopâwe've just begun! We're just beginning to get any control at all over this
power of yours. I'm within sight of doing so, and I will do so. No personal fears can
stand in the way of the good that can be done for all men with this new capacity of the
human brain!"
Haber was speechmaking. Orr looked at him, but the opaque eyes, gazing straight at
him, did not return his look, did not see him. The speech went on.
"What I'm doing is making this new capacity replicable. There's an analogy with the
invention of printing, with the application of any new technological or scientific
concept. If the experiment or technique cannot be repeated successfully by others, it is of
no use. Similarly, the e-state, so long as it was locked into the brain of a single man, was
no more use to humanity than a key locked inside a room, or a single, sterile genius
mutation. But I'll have the means of getting the key out of that room. And that 'key' will
be as great a milestone in human evolution as the development of the reasoning brain
itself! Any brain capable of using it, deserving of using it, will be able to. When a
suitable, trained, prepared subject enters the e-state under the Augmentor stimulus, he
will be under complete autohypnotic control. Nothing will be left to chance, to random
impulse, to irrational narcissistic whim. There will be none of this tension between your
will to nihilism and my will to progress, your Nirvana wishes and my conscious, careful
planning for the good of all. When I have made sure of my techniques, then you'll be
free to go. Absolutely free. And since you've claimed all along that all you want is to be
free of responsibility, incapable of dreaming effectively, then I'll promise that my very
first effective dream will include your 'cure'âyou'll never have an effective dream
again."
Orr had risen; he stood still, looking at Haber; his face was calm but intensely alert and
centered. "You will control your own dreams," he said, "by yourselfâno one helping, or
supervising youâ?"
"I've controlled yours for weeks now. In my own case, and of course I'll be the first
subject of my own experiment, that's an absolute ethical obligation, in my own case the
control will be complete."
"I tried autohypnosis, before I ever used the dream-suppressing drugsâ"
"Yes, you mentioned that before; you failed, of course. The question of a resistant
subject achieving successful autosuggestion is an interesting one, but this was no test of
it whatever; you're not a professional psychologist, you're not a trained hypnotist, and
you were already emotionally disturbed about the whole issue; you got nowhere, of
course. But I am a professional, and I know precisely what I'm doing. I can autosuggest
an entire dream and dream it in every detail precisely as thought out by my waking
mind. I've done so, every night this past week, getting in training. When the Augmentor
synchronizes the generalized e-state pattern with my own d-state, such dreams will be
effectivized. And thenâand thenâ" 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. "Then this world will be
like heaven, and men will be like gods!"
The Hollow Reality
- Haber expresses a megalomaniacal confidence in his scientific and moral control over Orr's effective dreaming abilities.
- Orr experiences a profound sense of dissociation, viewing his professional life and memories as unreal and hollow.
- The protagonist recognizes that denying current reality risks a loss of free will and invites psychological instability.
- Orr decides to stop resisting his dreams and drugs, choosing to face whatever 'monsters' his subconscious produces.
- The setting reveals a world rebuilt after 'Plague Years,' dominated by global rationing and massive corporate monopolies.
- The presence of a 'JUNQUE' shop filled with cultural litter highlights the remnants of a discarded, more tangible past.
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.
"We are, we are already," Orr said, but the other paid no heed.
"There is nothing to fear. The dangerous timeâhad we known itâwas when you alone
possessed the capacity for e-dreaming, and didn't know what to do with it. If you hadn't
come to me, if you hadn't been sent into trained, scientific hands, who knows what
might have happened. But you were here, and I was here: as they say, genius consists in
being in the right time in the right place!" He boomed a laugh. "So now there's nothing
to fear, and it's all out of your hands. I know, scientifically and morally, what I'm doing
and how to do it. I know where I'm going."
"Volcanoes emit fire," Orr murmured.
"What?"
"May I go now?"
"Tomorrow at five."
"I'll come," Orr said, and left.
10
Il descend, reveille, l'autre cote du reve.
âHugo, Contemplations
It was only three o'clock, and he should have gone back to his office in the Parks
Department and finished up the plans for southeast suburban play areas; but he didn't.
He gave it one thought and dismissed it. Although his memory assured him that he had
held that position for five years now, he disbelieved his memory; the job had no reality
to him. It was not work he had to do. It was not his job.
He was aware that in thus relegating to irreality a major portion of the only reality, the
only existence, that he in fact did have, he was running exactly the same risk the insane
mind runs: the loss of the sense of free will. 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. But the void was there. This life lacked realness; it was hollow; the dream,
creating where there was no necessity to create, had worn thin and sleazy. If this was
being, perhaps the void was better. He would accept the monsters and the necessities
beyond reason. He would go home, and take no drugs, but sleep, and dream what
dreams might come.
He got off the funicular downtown, but instead of taking the trolley he set out walking
toward his own district; he had always liked to walk.
Along past Lovejoy Park a piece of the old freeway was still standing, a huge ramp,
probably dating from the last frenetic convulsions of highway-mania in the seventies; it
must have led up to the Marquam Bridge, once, but now ended abruptly in mid-air thirty
feet above Front Avenue. It had not been destroyed when the city was cleaned up and
rebuilt after the Plague Years, perhaps because it was so large, so useless, and so ugly as
to be, to the American eye, invisible. There it stood, and a few bushes had taken root up
on the roadway, while underneath it a huddle of buildings had grown up, like swallows'
nests in a cliff. In this rather dowdy and noncommittal bit of the city there were still
small shops, independent markets, unappetizing little restaurants, and so on, struggling
along despite the stringencies of total Consumer Product Equity-Rationing and the
overwhelming competition of the great WPC Marts and Outlets, through which 90 per
cent of world trade was now channeled.
One of these shops under the ramp was a secondhand store; the sign above the windows
said ANTIQUES and a poorly lettered, peeling sign painted on the glass said JUNQUE.
There was some squat handmade pottery in one window, an old rocker with a motheaten
paisley shawl draped over it in the other, and, scattered around these main displays, all
kinds of cultural litter: a horseshoe, a hand-wound clock, something enigmatic from a
dairy, a framed photograph of President Eisenhower, a slightly chipped glass globe
containing three Ecuadorian coins, a plastic toilet-seat cover decorated with baby crabs
Crossings in Mist
- George Orr enters a dark, cavernous antique shop filled with the discarded flotsam of 20th-century American culture.
- The shop is run by an Alien proprietor, Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe, who moves with a slow, reptilian grace within a green carapace.
- Orr attempts to understand the concept of 'iahklu', but the Alien explains that the term is incommunicable in languages meant for individual-to-individual communication.
- The Alien offers a philosophical perspective on Orr's lost love, Heather Lelache, describing their separation as 'crossings in mist.'
- Seeking advice on how to control reality, Orr is met with cryptic proverbs and a symbolic gift from the Alien: a Beatles record.
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.
and seaweed, a well-thumbed rosary, and a stack of old hi-fi 45 rpm records, marked
"Gd Cond," but obviously scratched. Just the sort of place, Orr thought, where Heather's
mother might have worked for a while. Moved by the impulse, he went in.
It was cool and rather dark inside. A leg of the ramp formed one wall, a high blank dark
expanse of concrete, like the wall of an undersea cave. 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.
It raised its crooked left elbow and said, "Good day. Do you wish an object?"
"Thanks, I was just looking."
"Please continue this activity," the proprietor said. It withdrew a little way into the
shadows and stood quite motionless. Orr looked at the light play on some ratty old
peacock feathers, observed a 1950 home-movie projector, a blue and white saki set, a
heap of Mad magazines, priced quite high. He hefted a solid steel hammer and admired
its balance; it was a well-made tool, a good thing. "Is this your own choice?" he asked
the proprietor, wondering what the Aliens themselves might prize from all this flotsam
of the affluent years of America.
"What comes is acceptable," the Alien replied.
A congenial point of view. "I wonder if you'd tell me something. In your language, what
is the meaning of the word iahklu'?"
The proprietor came slowly forward again, edging the broad, shell-like armor carefully
among fragile objects.
"Incommunicable. Language used for communication with individual-persons will not
contain other forms of relationship. Jor Jor." The right hand, a great, greenish, flipperlike
extremity, came forward in a slow and perhaps tentative fashion. "Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe."
Orr shook hands with it. It stood immobile, apparently regarding him, though no eyes
were visible inside the dark-tinted, vapor-filled headpiece. If it was a headpiece. Was
there in fact any substantial form within that green carapace, that mighty armor? He
didn't know. He felt, however, completely at ease with Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe.
"I don't suppose," he said, on impulse again, "that you ever knew anyone named
Lelache?"
"Lelache. No. Do you seek Lelache."
"I have lost Lelache."
"Crossings in mist," the Alien observed.
"That's about it," Orr said. He picked up from the crowded table before him a white bust
of Franz Schubert about two inches high, probably a piano-teacher's prize to a pupil. On
the base the pupil had written, "What, Me Worry?" Schubert's face was mild and
impassive, a tiny bespectacled Buddha. "How much is this?" Orr asked.
"Five New Cents," replied Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe.
Orr produced a Fed-peep nickel.
"'Is there any way to control iahklu', to make it go the way it... ought to go?"
The Alien took the nickel and sidled majestically over to a chrome-plated cash register
which Orr had assumed was for sale as an antique. It rang up the sale on the register and
stood still a while.
"One swallow does not make a summer," it said. "Many hands make light work." It
stopped again, apparently not satisfied with this effort at bridging the communication
gap. It stood still for half a minute, then went to the front window and with precise, stiff,
careful movements picked out one of the antique disk-records displayed there, and
brought it to Orr. It was a Beatles record: "With a Little Help from My Friends."
"Gift," it said. "Is it acceptable?"
"Yes," Orr said, and took the record. "Thank youâ thanks very much. It's very kind of
you. I am grateful."
"Pleasure," said the Alien. Though the mechanically produced voice was toneless and
Interconnection and the False God
- Orr reflects on his profound connection to the Aliens, realizing they exist because he dreamed them into being.
- He concludes that he is fundamentally interconnected with the world he has shaped, rather than separate from it.
- Orr identifies Haber as a negative force who lacks a true connection to reality, viewing the world only as a means to an end.
- He critiques Haber's messianic drive, arguing that good motives are insufficient if one lacks the ability to 'let be' or 'let go.'
- Seeking peace and guidance, Orr retreats to a basement to share tea with his landlord before listening to a gift from the Aliens.
- The act of playing a Beatles record becomes a meditative plea for the help and love he needs to endure his situation.
He can't accept, he can't let be, he can't let go. He is insane.
the armor impassive, Orr was sure that Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe was in fact pleased; he
himself was moved.
"I can play this on my landlord's machine, he has an old disk-phonograph," he said.
"Thank you very much." They shook hands again, and he left.
After all, he thought as he walked on toward Corbett Avenue, it's not surprising that the
Aliens are on my side. In a sense, I invented them. I have no idea in what sense, of
course. But they definitely weren't around until I dreamed they were, until I let them be.
So that there isâthere always wasâa connection between us.
Of course (his thoughts proceeded, also at a walking pace), it that's true, then the whole
world as it now is should be on my side; because I dreamed a lot of it up, too. Well, after
all, it is on my side. That is, I'm a part of it. Not separate from it. I walk on the ground
and the ground's walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely
interconnected with the world.
Only Haber's different, and more different with each dream. He's against me: my
connection with him is negative. And that aspect of the world which he's responsible for,
which he ordered me to dream, that's what I feel alienated from, powerless against. . . .
It's not that he's evil. He's right, one ought to try to help other people. But that analogy
with snakebite serum was false. He was talking about one person meeting another
person in pain. That's different. Perhaps what I did, what I did in April four years ago...
was justified. ... (But his thoughts shied away, as always, from the burned place.) You
have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be
God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing
you're right and your motives are good isn't enough. You have to... be in touch. He isn't
in touch. No one else, no thing even, has an existence of its own for him; he sees the
world only as a means to his end. It doesn't make any difference if his end is good;
means are all we've got.... He can't accept, he can't let be, he can't let go. He is insane....
He could take us all with him, out of touch, if he did manage to dream as I do. What am
I to do?
He reached the old house on Corbett as he reached that question.
He stopped off in the basement to borrow the old-fashioned phonograph from Mannie
Ahrens, the manager. This involved sharing a pot of tea. Mannie always brewed it for
Orr, since Orr had never smoked and couldn't inhale without coughing. They discussed
world affairs a little. Mannie hated the Sports Shows; he stayed home and watched the
WPC educational shows for pre-Child Center children every afternoon. "The alligator
puppet, Dooby Doo, he's a real cool cat," he said. There were long gaps in the
conversation, reflections of the large holes in the fabric of Mannie's mind, worn thin by
the application of innumerable chemicals over the years. But there was peace and
privacy in his grubby basement, and weak cannabis tea had a mildly relaxing effect on
Orr. At last he lugged the phonograph upstairs, and plugged it into a wall-socket in his
bare living room. He put the record on, and then held the needle-arm suspended over the
turning disk. What did he want?
He didn't know. Help, he supposed. Well, what came would be acceptable, as Tiua'k
Ennbe Ennbe had said.
He set the needle carefully on the outer groove, and lay down beside the phonograph on
the dusty floor.
Do you need anybody? I need somebody to love.
The machine was automatic; when it had played the record it grumbled softly a moment,
clicked its innards, and returned the needle to the first groove.
I get by, with a little help,
A Disoriented Awakening
- Heather and George wake up in a daze after falling asleep on the floor to a repeating record.
- The atmosphere is colored by the lingering effects of marijuana and a sense of temporal disorientation.
- Heather navigates the mundane realities of a rationed society, preparing a meager meal of pig liver and cabbage.
- The relationship between the two is characterized by George's easygoing nature and Heather's pragmatic care.
- The scene shifts abruptly from a drug-induced stupor to the domestic duties of a harsh, rationed world.
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.
With a little help from my friends.
During the eleventh replay Orr fell sound asleep.
Awakening in the high, bare, twilit room, Heather was disconcerted. Where on earth?
She had been asleep. Gone to sleep sitting on the floor with her legs stretched out and
her back against the piano. Marijuana always made her sleepy, and stupid, too, but you
couldn't hurt Mannie's feelings and refuse it, the poor old pothead. 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. She cut the volume down
slowly, then stopped the machine. George never stirred; his lips were slightly parted, his
eyes firmly closed. How funny that they had both gone to sleep listening to the music.
She got up off her knees and went out to the kitchen to see what was for dinner.
Oh for Christsake, pig liver. It was nourishing and the best value you could get for three
meat-ration stamps by weight. She had picked it up at the Mart yesterday. Well, cut real
thin, and fried with salt pork and onions...yecchh. Oh well, she was hungry enough to
eat pig liver, and George wasn't a picky man. If it was decent food he ate and enjoyed it
and if it was lousy pig liver he ate it. Praise God from whom all blessings flow,
including good-natured men.
As she set the kitchen table and put two potatoes and half a cabbage on to cook, she
paused from time to time: she did feel odd. Disoriented. From the damn pot, and going
to sleep on the floor at all hours, no doubt.
George came in, disheveled and dusty-shirted. He stared at her. She said, "Well. Good
morning!"
Love Like Bread
- George and Heather share a moment of profound emotional connection, briefly recalling a past reality where they lived in a cabin by a creek.
- Heather expresses deep concern for George's well-being, urging him to break ties with Haber despite the legal risks of a Constraint injunction.
- George maintains a sense of resilience, claiming he cannot be destroyed as long as he has support, though his laughter borders on a sob.
- The narrative reflects on the nature of love, describing it not as a static object but as something that must be actively 'made' and renewed like bread.
- Heather experiences a shift in her own personality, feeling uncharacteristically bold and violent in her protective instincts toward George.
- The couple navigates a world of government-controlled media and rationed 'stamps' while trying to maintain a sense of normalcy and romance.
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.
He stood looking at her and smiling, a broad radiant smile of pure joy. She had never
received so great a compliment in her life; she was abashed by that joy, which she had
caused. "My dear wife," he said, taking her hands. He looked at them, palms and backs,
and put them up against his face. "You should be brown," he said, and to her dismay she
saw tears in his eyes. For a moment, just that moment, she had a notion of what was
going on; she recalled being brown, and remembered the silence in the cabin at night,
and the sound of the creek, and many other things, all in a flash. But George was a more
urgent consideration. She was holding him, as he held her. "You're worn out," she said,
"you're upset, you fell asleep on the floor. It's that bastard Haber. Don't go back to him.
Just don't. I don't care what he does, we'll take it to court, we'll appeal it, even if he slaps
a Constraint injunction on you and sticks you in Linnton we'll get you a different shrink
and get you out again. You can't go on with him, he's destroying you."
"Nobody can destroy me," he said, and laughed a little, deep in his chest, almost a sob,
"not so long as I have a little help from my friends. I'll go back, it's not going to last
much longer. It's not me I'm worried about, any more. But don't worry...." They hung on
to each other, in touch at all available surfaces, absolutely unified, while the liver and
onions sizzled in the pan. "I fell asleep too," she said into his neck, "I got so groggy
typing up old Rutti's dumb letters. But that's a good record you bought. I loved the
Beatles when I was a kid but the Government stations never play them any more."
"It was a present," George said, but the liver popped in the pan, and she had to disengage
herself and see to it. At dinner George watched her; she watched him a good bit, too.
They had been married seven months. They said nothing of any importance. They
washed up the dishes and went to bed. In bed, they made love. Love doesn't just sit
there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. When it
was made, they lay in each other's arms, holding love, asleep. In her sleep Heather heard
the roaring of a creek full of the voices of unborn children singing.
In his sleep George saw the depths of the open sea.
Heather was the secretary of an aged and otiose legal partnership, Ponder and Rutti.
When she got off work at four-thirty the next day. Friday, she didn't take the monorail
and trolley home, but rode the funicular up to Washington Park. She had told George she
might come meet him at HURAD, since his therapy session wasn't till five, and after it
they might go back downtown together and eat at one of the WPC restaurants on the
International Mall. "It'll be all right," he told her, understanding her motive and meaning
that he would be all right. She replied, "I know. But it would be fun to eat out, and I
saved some stamps. We haven't tried the Casa Boliviana yet."
She got to the HURAD tower early, and waited on the vast marble steps. He came on the
next car. She saw him get off, with others whom she did not see. A short, neatly made
man, very self-contained, with an amiable expression. He moved well, though he
stooped a little like most desk workers. When he saw her his eyes, which were clear and
light, seemed to grow lighter, and he smiled: again that heartbreaking smile of
unmitigated joy. She loved him violently. If Haber hurt him again she would go in there
and tear Haber into little bits. Violent feelings were foreign to her, usually, but not where
George was concerned. And anyhow, today for some reason she felt different from usual.
She felt bolder, harder. She had said "shit" aloud, twice, at work, making old Mr. Rutti
flinch. She had hardly ever said "shit" before aloud, and she hadn't intended to do so
either time, and yet she had done it, as if it were a habit too old to break....
"Hello, George," she said.
The Final Session at HURAD
- George and Heather arrive at the massive HURAD headquarters, which George describes as the true seat of global power.
- Despite his previous distress, George appears to have regained his equanimity, a shift Heather attributes to a shared moment of music and sleep.
- Dr. Haber welcomes them with an intense, exultant energy, revealing that this will be George's final session.
- George expresses skepticism about Haberâs motives, comparing the doctor's drive for power to that of Alexander the Great.
- Heather is intimidated by Haberâs larger-than-life presence and his habit of using George's name as if to remind himself of George's humanity.
- The session begins with Haber preparing a final 'controlled dream' to supposedly solve George's unique psychological problem.
In fact it was, the endless warm drizzle of springâthe ice of Antarctica, falling softly on the heads of the children of those responsible for melting it.
"Hello," he said, taking her hands. "You are beautiful, beautiful."
How could anybody think this man was sick? All right, so he had funny dreams. That
was better than being plain mean and hateful, like about one quarter of the people she
had ever met.
"It's five already," she said. "I'll wait down here. If it rains, I'll be in the lobby. It's like
Napoleon's Tomb in there, all that black marble and stuff. It's nice out here, though. You
can hear the lions roaring down in the Zoo."
"Come on up with me," he said. "It's raining already." In fact it was, the endless warm
drizzle of springâthe ice of Antarctica, falling softly on the heads of the children of
those responsible for melting it. "He's got a nice waiting room. You'll probably be
sharing it with a mess of Fed-peep bigwigs and three or four Chiefs of State. All dancing
attendance on the Director of HURAD. And I have to go crawling through and get
shown in ahead of them, every damn time. Dr. Haber's tame psycho. His exhibition. His
token patient...." He was steering her through the big lobby under the Pantheon dome,
onto moving walkways, up an incredible, apparently endless, spiral escalator. "HURAD
really runs the world, as is," he said. "I can't help wondering why Haber needs any other
form of power. He's got enough, God knows. Why can't he stop here? I suppose it's like
Alexander the Great, needing new worlds to conquer. I never did understand that. How
was work today?"
He was tense, that's why he was talking so much; but he didn't seem depressed or
distressed, as he had for weeks. Something had restored his natural equanimity. She had
never really believed that he could lose it for long, lose his way, get out of touch; yet he
had been wretched, increasingly so. Now he was not, and the change was so sudden and
complete that she wondered what, in fact, had worked it All she could date it from was
their sitting down in the still-unfurnished living room to listen to that nutty and subtle
Beatles song last evening, and both falling asleep. From then on, he had been himself
again.
Nobody was in Haber's big, sleek waiting room. George said his name to a desklike
thing by the door, an auto-receptionist, he explained to Heather. She was making a
nervous funny about did they have autoeroticists, too, when a door opened, and Haber
stood in the doorway.
She had met him only once, and briefly, when he first took George as a patient. She had
forgotten what a big man he was, how big a beard he had, how drastically impressive he
looked. "Come on in, George!" he thundered. She was awed. She cowered. He noticed
her. "Mrs. Orrâglad to see you! Glad you came! You come on in, too."
"Oh no. I justâ"
"Oh yes. D'you realize that this is probably George's last session here? Did he tell you?
Tonight we wind it up. You certainly ought to be present. Come on. I've let my staff out
early. Expect you saw the stampede on the Down escalator. Felt like having the place to
myself tonight That's it, sit down there." He went on; there was no need to say anything
meaningful in reply. She was fascinated by Haber's demeanor, the kind of exultation he
exuded; she hadn't remembered what a masterful, genial person he was, larger than life-
size. It was unbelievable, really, that such a man, a world leader and a great scientist,
should have spent all these weeks of personal therapy on George, who wasn't anybody.
But, of course, George's case was very important, researchwise.
"One last session," he was saying, while adjusting something in a computerish-looking
thing in the wall at the head of the couch. "One last controlled dream, and then, I think,
we've got the problem licked. You game, George?"
He used her husband's name often. She remembered George's saying a couple of weeks
ago, "He keeps calling me by my name; I think it's to remind himself that there's
someone else present."
The Final Suggestion
- George Orr submits to a final hypnotic session under Dr. Haber to supposedly cure his 'effective' dreaming.
- Heather watches with growing unease as Haber attaches electrodes, comparing the process to a machine draining thoughts into the scribbles of the mad.
- Haber delivers a powerful hypnotic command designed to strip George of his reality-altering abilities by making him dream he is normal.
- The doctor characterizes the procedure as the culmination of weeks of conditioning aimed at breaking George's dependency on drugs.
- Heather perceives Haber as a 'bear-shaman-god,' feeling a sense of vulnerability and fear as she witnesses the experiment.
- The scene highlights the power dynamic between the massive, confident Haber and the slight, passive George.
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.
"Sure, I'm game," George said, and sat down on the couch, lifting his face a little; he
glanced once at Heather and smiled. Haber at once started attaching the little things on
wires to his head, parting the thick hair to do so. Heather remembered that process from
her own brain-printing, part of the battery of tests and records made on every Fed-peep
citizen. It made her uneasy to see it done to her husband. 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. George's face now
wore a look of extreme concentration. What was he thinking?
Haber put his hand on George's throat suddenly as if about to throttle him, and reaching
out with the other hand, started a tape which spoke the hypnotist's spiel in his own voice:
"You are entering the hypnotic state...." Within a few seconds he stopped it and tested
for hypnosis. George was under.
"O.K.," Huber said, and paused, evidently pondering. Huge, like a grizzly bear reared up
on its hind legs, he stood there between her and the slight, passive figure on the couch.
"Now listen carefully, George, and remember what I say. You are deeply hypnotized and
will follow explicitly all instructions I give you. You're going to go to sleep when I tell
you to, and you'll dream. You'll have an effective dream. You'll dream that you are
completely normalâthat you are like everybody else. You'll dream that you once had, or
thought you had, a capacity for effective dreaming, but that this is no longer true. Your
dreams from henceforth will be just like everybody else's, meaningful to you alone,
having no effect on outward reality. You'll dream all this; whatever symbolism you use
to express the dream, its effective content will be that you can no longer dream
effectively. It will be a pleasant dream, and you'll wake up when I say your name three
times, feeling alert and well. After this dream you will never dream effectively again.
Now, lie back. Get comfortable. You're going to sleep. You're asleep. Antwerp!"
As he said this last word, George's lips moved and he said something in the faint, remote
voice of the sleep-talker. Heather could not hear what he said, but she thought at once of
last night; she had been nearly asleep, curled up next to him, when he had said
something aloud: air per annum, it sounded like. "What?" she had said, and he had said
nothing, he was asleep. As he was now.
Her heart contracted within her as she watched him lying there, his hands quiet at his
sides, vulnerable.
Haber had risen, and now pressed a white button on the side of the machine at the head
of the couch; some of the electrode wires went to it, and some to the EEG machine,
which she recognized. The thing in the wall must be the Augmentor, the thing all the
research was about.
Haber came over to her, where she sat sunk deep in a huge leather armchair. Real
leather, she had forgotten what real leather felt like. It was like the vinyleathers, but
more interesting to the fingers. She was frightened. She did not understand what was
going on. She looked up askance at the big man standing before her, the bear-shaman-
god.
"This is the culmination, Mrs. Orr," he was saying in a lowered voice, "of a long series
of suggested dreams. We've been building toward this sessionâthis dreamâfor weeks
now. I'm glad you came, I didn't think to ask you, but your presence is an added boon in
making him feel completely secure and trustful. He knows I can't pull any tricks with
you around! Right? Actually I'm pretty confident of success. It'll do the trick. The
dependency on sleeping drugs will be quite broken, once the obsessive fear of dreaming
is erased. It's purely a matter of conditioning. ... I've got to keep an eye on that EEG,
he'll be dreaming now." Quick and massive, he moved across the room. She sat still,
watching George's calm face, from which the expression of concentration, all
The Puppet and the Augmentor
- Dr. Haber treats George Orr as a unique research subject for his Human Utility: Research and Development (HURAD) project.
- Haber displays an obsessive, self-congratulatory attitude toward his work, viewing George's case as a breakthrough in 'human utility.'
- Under the influence of the Augmentor, George is instructed to dream a specific reality into existence: a mural of Mount Hood on the office wall.
- The experiment reveals a shift in power dynamics as George unexpectedly overrides the machine's stimulation and wakes up on his own.
- Heather observes the scene with a sense of dread, noting George's death-like stillness and Haber's growing detachment from human empathy.
The calm face did not change, but the head nodded once. Like the head of a puppet on a string.
expression, was gone. So he might look in death.
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 softlyânot 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?"
The Dreaming of Substance
- George describes a dream of normalcy and average stature, signaling to Haber that George's volatile power has been stabilized or transferred.
- Haber celebrates the successful shift of the 'big load' from George to himself, exhibiting a state of extreme, almost manic excitement.
- George warns Haber to consult with the Aldebaranian aliens before proceeding with the new dream-manipulation techniques.
- The aliens are described by Haber as potentially irrational mimics, while George views them as ancient beings who exist within the 'dream time.'
- George explains a philosophy where dreaming is the 'play of form' and warns that conscious minds must learn the limits of this power to avoid destroying the world.
- Haber dismisses George's profound warnings as 'prescientific synthesis' and mysticism, asserting the superiority of his own rational approach.
Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes.
"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 dreamâany 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 itâI 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 dreamingâat 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 carefullyâas 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."
A Warning and a Shift
- George attempts to warn Haber about the dangers of the Augmentor, suggesting a specific phrase to invoke external help.
- Haber dismisses George's genuine concern as a potential research lead, patronizing him as a 'natural' for the psychiatric field.
- Heather experiences intense visceral hatred for Haber, perceiving him as a false and dangerous fraud.
- George believes he is finally free from the mandatory sessions and drugs, though he remains cautious about his clearance.
- A moment of cognitive dissonance occurs when Heather forgets that Chinatown was demolished years ago, signaling a shift in reality.
- The couple navigates a decaying urban landscape where nature is slowly reclaiming the ruins of once-grand shopping centers.
No water ran in the bizarre, romantic fountains of twisted metal.
"I don't know if that's true," George said without the least resentment, though he was
very earnest. "But just out of scientific curiosity, then, at least try this: before testing the
Augmentor on yourself, before you turn it on, when you're starting your autosuggestion,
say this: Er' perrehnne. Aloud or in your mind. Once. Clearly. Try it."
"Why?"
"Because it works."
"'Works how?"
"You get a little help from your friends," George said. He stood up. Heather stared at
him in terror. What he had been saying sounded crazyâHaber's cure had driven him
insane, she had known it would. But Haber was not respondingâwas he?âas he would
to incoherent or psychotic talk.
"Iahklu' is too much for one person to handle alone," George was saying, "it gets out of
hand. They know what's involved in controlling it. Or, not exactly controlling it, that's
not the right word; but keeping it where it belongs, going the right way. ... I don't
understand it. Maybe you will. Ask their help. Say Er' perrehnne before you . . . before
you press the ON button."
"You may have something there," Haber said. "Might be worth investigating. I'll get
onto it, George. I'll have one of the Aldebaranians from the Culture Center up and see if
I can get some information on this. . . . All Greek to you, eh, Mrs. Orr? This husband of
yours should have gone into the shrink game, the research end of it; he's wasted as a
draftsman." Why did he say that? George was a parks-and-playgrounds designer. "He's
got the flair, he's a natural. Never thought of hooking the Aldebaranians in on this, but he
might just have a real idea there. But maybe you're just as glad he's not a shrink, eh?
Awful to have your spouse analyzing your unconscious desires across the dinner table,
eh?" He boomed and thundered, showing them out. Heather was bewildered, nearly in
tears.
"I hate him," she said fiercely, on the descending spiral of the escalator. "He's a horrible
man. False. A big fake!" George took her arm. He said nothing. "Are you through?
Really through? You won't need drugs any more, and you're all through these awful
sessions?"
"I think so. He'll file my papers, and in six weeks I should get a notice of clearance. If I
behave myself." He smiled, a little tiredly. "This was tough on you, honey, but it wasn't
on me. Not this time. I'm hungry, though. Where'll we go for dinner? The Casa
Boliviana?"
"Chinatown," she said, and then caught herself. "Ha-ha," she added. The old Chinese
district had been cleared away along with the rest of downtown, at least ten years ago.
For some reason she had completely forgotten that for a moment. "I mean Ruby Loo's,"
she said, confused. George held her arm a little closer. "Fine," he said. It was easy to get
to; the funicular line stopped across the river in the old Lloyd Center, once the biggest
shopping center in the world, back before the Crash. Nowadays the vast multilevel
parking lots were gone along with the dinosaurs, and many of the shops and stores along
the two-level mall were empty, boarded up. The ice rink had not been filled in twenty
years. No water ran in the bizarre, romantic fountains of twisted metal. Small
ornamental trees had grown up towering; their roots cracked the walkways for yards
around their cylindrical planters. Voices and footsteps rang overclearly, a little hollowly,
The Melting of Reality
- Heather experiences a sudden psychological shift from serenity to profound despair while walking through derelict arcades.
- A hot, unnatural wind and a sense of meaninglessness signal a breakdown in the fabric of the environment.
- George realizes that Haber has begun dreaming, prompting a desperate and fearful return to the research center.
- The physical world begins to dissolve, evidenced by the Willamette River running dry and revealing a bed of filth and decay.
- The massive government buildings of Portland, the 'Capital of the World,' are literally melting like gelatin in the sun.
- The characters find themselves trapped on a speeding funicular as the structural integrity of their reality collapses around them.
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 GovernmentâResearch and Development, Communications, Industry, Economic Planning, Environmental Controlâwere melting.
before and behind one, walking those long, half-lit, half-derelict arcades.
Ruby Loo's was on the upper level. The branches of a horse chestnut almost hid the
glass facade. Overhead, the sky was an intense delicate green, that color seen briefly on
spring evenings when there is a clearing after rain. Heather looked up into that jade
heaven, remote, improbable, serene; her heart lifted, she felt anxiety begin to slip off her
like a shed skin. But it did not last. There was a curious reversal, a shifting. Something
seemed to catch at her, to hold her. She almost stopped walking, and looked down from
the sky of jade into the empty, heavy-shadowed walks before her. This was a strange
place. "It's spooky up here," she said.
George shrugged; but his face looked tense and rather grim.
A wind had come up, too warm for the Aprils of the old days, a wet, hot wind moving
the great green-fingered branches of the chestnut, stirring litter far down the long,
deserted turnings. The red neon sign behind the moving branches seemed to dim and
waver with the wind, to change shape; it didn't say Ruby Loo's, it didn't say anything
any more; Nothing said anything. Nothing had meaning. The wind blew hollow in the
hollow courts. Heather turned away from George and went off toward the nearest wall;
she was in tears. In pain her instinct was to hide, to get in a corner of a wall and hide.
"What is it, honey. .. . It's all right. Hang on, it'll be all right."
I am going insane, she thought; it wasn't George, it wasn't George all along, it was me.
"It'll be all right," he whispered once more, but she heard in his voice that he did not
believe it. She felt in his hands that he did not believe it.
"What's wrong," she cried despairing. "What's wrong?"
"I don't know," he said, almost inattentively. He had lifted his head and turned a little
from her, though he still held her to him to stop her crying fit. He seemed to be
watching, to be listening. She felt the heart beat hard and steady in his chest.
"Heather, listen. I'm going to have to go back."
"Go back where? What is it that's wrong?" Her voice was thin and high.
"To Haber. I have to go. Now. Wait for meâin the restaurant. Wait for me, Heather.
Don't follow me." He was off. She had to follow. He went, not looking back, fast, down
the long stairs, under the arcades, past the dry fountains, out to the funicular station. A
car was waiting, there at the end of the line; he hopped in. She scrambled on, her breath
hurting in her chest, just as the car began to pull out. "What the hell, George!"
"I'm sorry." He was panting, too. "I have to get there. I didn't want to take you into it."
"Into what?" She detested him. They sat on facing seats, puffing at each other. "What is
this crazy performance? What are you going back there for?"
"Haber isâ" George's voice went dry for a moment. "He is dreaming," he said. A deep
mindless terror crawled inside Heather; she ignored it.
"Dreaming what? So what?"
"Look out the window."
She had looked only at him, while they ran and since they had got onto the car. The
funicular was crossing the river now, high above the water. But there was no water. The
river had run dry. The bed of it lay cracked and oozing in the lights of the bridges, foul,
full of grease and bones and lost tools and dying fish. The great ships lay careened and
ruined by the towering, slimy docks.
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
GovernmentâResearch and Development, Communications, Industry, Economic
Planning, Environmental Controlâwere melting. They were getting soggy and shaky,
like jello left out in the sun. The corners had already run down the sides, leaving great
creamy smears.
The funicular was going very fast and not stopping at stations: something must be wrong
with the cable, Heather thought without personal involvement. They swung rapidly over
The Eye of the Nightmare
- As Mount Hood erupts in a 'terrible and gorgeous' display, George and Heather witness the city dissolving into a formless abyss.
- Heather experiences a terrifying 'presence of absence,' a void that consumes all things and leaves her falling through a desolate, dry abyss.
- George uses the sheer power of his will to navigate a hallucinatory landscape of mist, corpses, and shifting letters to reach the HURAD Tower.
- Upon reaching the top floor, George faces a literal nothingness that threatens to pull him apart and erase his existence.
- Drawing strength from memories of his wife and the alien Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe, George enters the heart of the nightmare to reach the Augmentor.
- By manually deactivating the machine, George ends the ontological collapse and restores a damaged but stable reality.
The car swung wild in the abyss, between the unforming city and the formless sky.
the dissolving city, low enough to hear the rumbling and the cries.
As the car ran up higher, Mount Hood came into view, behind George's head as he sat
facing her. He saw the lurid light reflected on her face or in her eyes, perhaps, for he
turned at once to look, to see the vast inverted cone of fire.
The car swung wild in the abyss, between the unforming city and the formless sky.
"Nothing seems to go quite right today," said a woman farther back in the car, in a loud,
quivering voice.
The light of the eruption was terrible and gorgeous. Its huge, material, geological vigor
was reassuring, compared to the hollow area that now lay ahead of the car, at the upper
end of the line.
The presentiment which had seized Heather as she looked down from the jade sky was
now a presence. It was there. It was an area, or perhaps a time-period, of a sort of
emptiness. It was the presence of absence: an unquantifiable entity without qualities,
into which all things fell and from which nothing came forth. It was horrible, and it was
nothing. It was the wrong way.
Into this, as the funicular car stopped at its terminus, George went. He looked back at
her as he went, crying out, "Wait for me, Heather! Don't follow me, don't come!"
But though she tried to obey him, it came to her. It was growing out from the center
rapidly. She found that all things were gone and that she was lost in the panic dark,
crying out her husband's name with no voice, desolate, until she sank down in a ball
curled about the center of her own being, and fell forever through the dry abyss.
By the power of will, which is indeed great when exercised in the right way at the right
time, George Orr found beneath his feet the hard marble of the steps up to the HURAD
Tower. He walked forward, while his eyes informed him that he walked on mist, on
mud, on decayed corpses, on innumerable tiny toads. It was very cold, yet there was a
smell of hot metal and burning hair or flesh. He crossed the lobby; gold letters from the
aphorism around the dome leapt about him momentarily, MAN MANKIND M N A A A.
The A's tried to trip his feet. He stepped onto a moving walkway though it was not
visible to him; he stepped onto the helical escalator and rode it up into nothing,
supporting it continually by the firmness of his will. He did not even shut his eyes.
Up on the top story, the floor was ice. It was about a finger's width thick, and quite clear.
Through it could be seen the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. Orr stepped out onto it
and all the stars rang loud and false, like cracked bells. The foul smell was much worse,
making him gag. He went forward, holding out his hand. The panel of the door of
Haber's outer office was there to meet it; he could not see it but he touched it. A wolf
howled. The lava moved toward the city.
He went on and came to the last door. He pushed it open. On the other side of it there
was nothing.
"Help me," he said aloud, for the void drew him, pulled at him. He had not the strength
all by himself to get through nothingness and out the other side.
There was a sort of dull rousing in his mind; he thought of Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe, and of
the bust of Schubert, and of Heather's voice saying furiously, "What the hell, George!"
This seemed to be all he had to cross nothingness on. He went forward. He knew as he
went that he would lose all he had.
He entered the eye of the nightmare.
It was a cold, vaguely moving, rotating darkness made of fear, that pulled him aside,
pulled him apart. He knew where the Augmentor stood. He put out his mortal hand
along the way things go. He touched it; felt for the lower button, and pushed it once.
He crouched down then, covering his eyes and cowering, for the fear had taken his
mind. When he raised his head and looked, the world re-existed. It was not in good
condition, but it was there.
They weren't in the HURAD Tower, but in some dingier, commoner office which he had
The Void of Chaos
- Orr disconnects Haber from the Augmentor, finding the doctor's mind has been reduced to an empty, slack void.
- The continuity between Orr's dream-worlds has shattered, leaving him in a chaotic reality where memories no longer align with the physical world.
- Orr realizes that the general population will face terror and death as they experience radical, irrational shifts in existence without understanding the cause.
- The woman Orr loved is lost to the dissolution of the previous timeline, leaving him in a state of profound grief and exhaustion.
- Portland has become a jumbled landscape of grandiose ruins and madness, yet people continue to perform mundane or desperate acts of survival.
- The eruption of Mount Hood has been retroactively erased from this timeline, leaving the mountain in a dormant, dreaming state.
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.
never seen before. Haber lay sprawled on the couch, massive, his beard jutting up. Red-
brown beard again, whitish skin, no longer gray. The eyes were half open and saw
nothing.
Orr pulled away the electrodes whose wires ran like threadworms between Haber's skull
and the Augmentor. He looked at the machine, its cabinets all standing open; it should be
destroyed, he thought. But he had no idea how to do it, nor any will to try. Destruction
was not his line; and a machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It
has no intentions whatsoever but our own.
"Dr. Haber," he said, shaking the big, heavy shoulders a little. "Haber! Wake up!"
After a while the big body moved, and presently sat up. It was all slack and loose. The
massive, handsome head hung between the shoulders. The mouth was loose. 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.
Orr became afraid of him physically, and backed away from him.
I've got to get help, he thought, I can't handle this alone. . . . He left the office, went out
through an unfamiliar waiting room, ran down the stairs. He had never been in this
building and had no idea what it was, or where. When he came out into the street, he
knew that it was a Portland street, but that was all. It was nowhere near Washington
Park, or the west hills. It was no street he had ever walked on.
The emptiness of Haber's being, the effective nightmare, radiating outward from the
dreaming brain, had undone connections. The continuity which had always held between
the worlds or timelines of Orr's dreaming had now been broken. Chaos had entered in.
He had few and incoherent memories of this existence he was now in; almost all he
knew came from the other memories, the other dreamtimes.
Other people, less aware than he, might be better equipped for this shift of existence: but
they would be more frightened by it, having no explanation. They would be finding the
world radically, senselessly, suddenly changed, with no possible rational cause of
change. There would be much death and terror following Dr. Haber's dream.
And loss. And loss.
He knew he had lost her; had known it since he stepped out, with her help, into the panic
void surrounding the dreamer. She was lost along with the world of the gray people and
the huge, fake building into which he had run, leaving her alone in the ruin and
dissolution of the nightmare. She was gone.
He did not try to get help for Haber. There was no help for Haber. Nor for himself. He
had done all he would ever do. He walked on along the distracted streets. He saw from
streetsigns that he was in the northeast part of Portland, an area he had never known
much of. The houses were low, and at corners there was sometimes a view of the
mountain. He saw that the eruption had ceased; had never, in fact, begun. Mount Hood
rose dun-violet into the darkening April sky, dormant. The mountain slept.
Dreaming, dreaming.
Orr walked without goal, following one street and then another; he was exhausted, so
that he sometimes wanted to lie down there on the pavement and rest for a while, yet he
kept going. He was approaching a business section now, coming closer to the river. The
city, half wrecked and half transformed, a jumble and mess of grandiose plans and
incomplete memories, swarmed like Bedlam; fires and insanities ran from house to
house. And yet people went about their business as always: there were two men looting a
jewelry shop, and past them came a woman who held her bawling, red-faced baby in her
arms and walked purposefully home.
Wherever home was.
11
Starlight asked Non-Entity, 'Master, do you exist? or do you not exist?' He got no answer
to his question, however. . . .
âChuang Tse: XXH
The Weight of One Button
- Orr is guided through a chaotic city by an Alien named E'nememen Asfah to a modest apartment above a bicycle shop.
- The world seeks divine explanations for the temporal disruption that occurred earlier that evening.
- Orr reflects on the immense psychological cost of his single decisive action: pressing an 'OFF' button.
- The Alien offers a unique form of hospitality, existing in the room with a dream-like presence rather than a physical one.
- Orr experiences a profound sense of vulnerability and accepts the Alien's protective compassion as he succumbs to exhaustion.
It took the entire will power, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned OFF button.
Some time that night, as Orr was trying to find his way through the suburbs of chaos to
Corbett Avenue, an Aldebaranian Alien stopped him and persuaded him to come with it
He came along, docile. He asked it after a while if it was Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe, but he did
not ask with much conviction, and did not seem to mind when the Alien explained,
rather laboriously, that he was called Jor Jor and it was called E'nememen Asfah.
It took him to its apartment near the river, over a bicycle repair shop and next door to the
Hope Eternal Gospel Mission, which was pretty full up, tonight. All over the world the
various gods were being requested, more or less politely, for an explanation of what had
occurred between 6:25 and 7:08 P.M. Pacific Standard Time. Sweetly discordant, "Rock
of Ages" rang underfoot as they climbed dark stairs to a second-story flat. The Alien
there suggested that he lie down on the bed, as he looked tired. "Sleep that knits up the
ravell'd sleave of care," it said.
"To sleep, perchance to dream; aye, there's the rub," Orr replied. There was, he thought,
something to the curious manner in which the Aliens communicated; but he was much
too tired to decide what. "Where will you sleep?" he inquired, sitting down heavily on
the bed.
"No where," the Alien replied, its toneless voice dividing the word into two equally
significant wholes.
Orr stooped to unlace his shoes. He didn't want to get the Alien's bedspread dirty with
his shoes, that would be scarcely a fair return for kindness. Stooping made him dizzy. "I
am tired," he said. "I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever
done. I pressed a button. It took the entire will power, the accumulated strength of my
entire existence, to press one damned OFF button."
"You have lived well," the Alien said.
It was standing in a corner, apparently intending to stand there indefinitely.
It was not standing there, Orr thought: not in the same way that he would stand, or sit, or
lie, or be. It was standing there in the way that he, in a dream, might be standing. It was
there in the sense that in a dream one is somewhere.
He lay back. He clearly sensed the pity and protective compassion of the Alien standing
across the dark room. It saw him, not with eyes, as short-lived, fleshly, armorless, a
strange creature, infinitely vulnerable, adrift in the gulfs of the possible: something that
needed help. He didn't mind. He did need help. Weariness took him over, picked him up
The Weight of Unreality
- Orr finds peace in his dreams, which no longer alter the fabric of reality but exist as harmless waves in the sea of being.
- Society begins to stabilize after the catastrophic events of 'The Break,' returning to a semblance of mundane normalcy.
- Dr. Haber is confined to a federal asylum, catatonic and isolated because his presence induces primal terror in other patients.
- Haber is trapped in a state of permanent mental collapse, staring into the void of a world he broke through his own misunderstanding.
- The narrative posits that while humans can endure the weight of reality, the burden of unreality is what leads to total madness.
- Orr experiences profound pity and fear for Haber, realizing there is no way to bridge the gap to the man's lost mind.
A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
like a current of the sea into which he was sinking slowly. "Er' perrehnne," he muttered,
surrendering to sleep.
"Er' perrehnne," replied E'nememen Asfah, soundlessly.
Orr slept. He dreamed. There was no rub. His dreams, like waves of the deep sea far
from any shore, came and went, rose and fell, profound and harmless, breaking nowhere,
changing nothing. They danced the dance among all the other waves in the sea of being.
Through his sleep the great, green sea turtles dived, swimming with heavy inexhaustible
grace through the depths, in their element.
In early June the trees were in full leaf and the roses blooming. All over the city the
large, old-fashioned ones, tough as weeds, called the Portland Rose, flowered pink on
thorny stems. Things had settled down pretty well. The economy was recovering. People
were mowing their lawns.
Orr was at the Federal Asylum for the Insane at Linnton, a little north of Portland. The
buildings, put up early in the nineties, stood on & great bluff overlooking the water
meadows of the Willamette and the Gothic elegance of the St. Johns Bridge. They had
been horribly overcrowded there in late April and May, with the plague of mental
breakdowns that had followed on the inexplicable events of the evening that was now
referred to as "The Break"; but that had eased off, and asylum routine was back to its
understaffed, overcrowded, terrible norm.
A tall, soft-spoken orderly took Orr upstairs to the single-bed rooms in the north wing.
The door leading into this wing and the doors of all the rooms in it were heavy, with a
little spyhole grating five feet up, and all of them were locked.
"It's not that he's troublesome," the orderly said as he unlocked the corridor door. "Never
been violent. But he had this bad effect on the others. We tried him in two wards. No go.
The others were scared of him, never saw anything like it. They all affect each other and
get panics and wild nights and so on, but not like this. They were scared of him. Be
clawing at the doors, nights, to get away from him. And all he ever did was just lay
there. Well, you see everything here, sooner or later. He don't care where he is, I guess.
Here you are." He unlocked the door and preceded Orr into the room. "Visitor, Dr.
Haber," he said.
Haber was thin. The blue and white pajamas hung lank on him. His hair and beard were
cut shorter, but were well cared for and neat. He sat on the bed and stared at the void.
"Dr. Haber," Orr said, but his voice failed; he felt excruciating pity, and fear. He knew
what Haber was looking at. He had seen it himself. He was looking at the world after
April 1998. He was looking at the world as misunderstood by the mind: the bad dream.
There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much
reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for
eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
Haber was lost. He had lost touch.
Orr tried to speak again, but found no words. He backed out, and the orderly, right with
him, closed and locked the door.
"I can't," Orr said. "There's no way."
"No way," the orderly said.
Going down the corridor, he added in his soft voice, "Dr. Walters tells me he was a very
promising scientist."
Orr returned to downtown Portland by boat. Transportation was still rather confused;
pieces, remnants, and commencements of about six different public-transportation
A World Rebuilding
- Portland's infrastructure remains a patchwork of unfinished transit projects and improvised ferry services following the global shift.
- George Orr works for an Alien E'nememen Asfah at a kitchenware design firm called the Kitchen Sink.
- The post-Break economy is characterized by a state of laissez faire where small firms and Alien-run businesses thrive amidst government confusion.
- Society is attempting to return to normalcy, with politicians predicting economic stability and citizens refurnishing their lives.
- Orr encounters a woman named Heather who resembles his wife, but she only vaguely remembers him from a different timeline.
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.
systems cluttered up the city. Reed College had a subway station, but no subway; the
funicular to Washington Park ended at the entrance to a tunnel which went halfway
under the Willamette and then stopped. Meanwhile, an enterprising fellow had refitted a
couple of boats that used to run tours up and down the Willamette and Columbia, and
was using them as ferries on regular runs between Linnton, Vancouver, Portland, and
Oregon City. It made a pleasant trip.
Orr had taken a long lunch hour for the visit to the asylum. His employer, the Alien
E'nememen Asfah, was indifferent to hours worked and interested only in work done.
When one did it was one's own concern. Orr did a good deal of his in his head, lying in
bed half-awake for an hour before he got up in the morning.
It was three o'clock when he got back to the Kitchen Sink and sat down in front of his
drafting table in the workshop. Asfah was in the showroom waiting on customers. He
had a staff of three designers, and contracts with various manufacturers who made
kitchen equipment of all sorts, bowls, cookware, implements, tools, everything short of
heavy appliances. 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, and small private firms that had been able to
keep going or get started during this period were in a good position. In Oregon a number
of these firms, all handling material goods of one kind or another, were run by
Aldebaranians; they were good managers and extraordinary salesmen, though they had
to hire human beings for all handwork. The Government liked them because they
willingly accepted governmental constraints and controls, for the world economy was
gradually pulling itself back together. People were even talking about the Gross National
Product again, and President Merdle had predicted a return to normalcy by Christmas.
Asfah sold retail as well as wholesale, and the Kitchen Sink was popular for its sturdy
wares and fair prices. Since The Break, housewives, refurnishing the unexpected
kitchens they had found themselves cooking in that evening in April, had come in
increasing numbers. Orr was looking over some wood samples for cutting boards when
he heard one saying, "I'd like one of those egg whisks," and because the voice reminded
him of his wife's voice he got up and looked into the showroom. Asfah was showing
something to a middle-sized brown woman of thirty or so, with short, black, wiry hair on
a well-shaped head.
"Heather," he said, coming forward.
She turned. She looked at him for what seemed a long time. "Orr," she said. "George
Orr. Right? When did I know you?"
"Inâ" He hesitated. "Aren't you a lawyer?"
The Expert with Tangibles
- George Orr and Heather Lelache reunite in a kitchenware shop after the world has been fundamentally reshaped.
- Orr now works as a designer of functional tools, finding solace in creating beautiful, tangible objects like teakettles and whisks.
- Heather recalls fragments of the previous reality, including Orr's effective dreams and his struggle with Voluntary Therapy.
- The current world is described as a 'mess' of mixed races and lingering gray-skinned people, a result of the various 'Breaks' in reality.
- Orr recognizes Heather as a fiercer, more difficult version of his lost wife, yet he accepts the challenge of winning her over again.
- The encounter concludes with Orr inviting Heather for coffee, signaling a new beginning in this latest version of existence.
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.
E'nememen Asfah stood immense in greenish armor, holding an egg whisk.
"Nope. Legal secretary. I work for Rutti and Goodhue, in the Pendleton Building."
"That must be it. I was in there once. Do you, do you like that? I designed it." He took
another egg whisk from the bin and displayed it to her. "Good balance, see. And it works
fast. They usually make the wires too taut, or too heavy, except in France."
"It's good-looking," she said. "I have an old electric mixer but I wanted at least to hang
that on the wall. You work here? You didn't use to. I remember now. You were in some
office on Stark Street, and you were seeing a doctor on Voluntary Therapy."
He had no idea what, or how much, she recalled, nor how to fit it in with his own
multiple memories.
His wife, of course, had been gray-skinned. There were still gray people now, it was
said, particularly in the Middle West and Germany, but most of the rest had gone back to
white, brown, black, red, yellow, and mixtures. His wife had been a gray person, a far
gentler person than this one, he thought. This Heather carried a big black handbag with a
brass snap, and probably a half pint of brandy inside; she came on hard. His wife had
been unaggressive and, though courageous, timid in manner. This was not his wife, but a
fiercer woman, vivid and difficult.
"That's right," he said. "Before The Break. We had . . . Actually, Miss Lelache, we had a
date for lunch. At Dave's, on Ankeny. We never made it."
"I'm not Miss Lelache, that's my maiden name. I'm Mrs. Andrews."
She eyed him with curiosity. He stood and endured reality.
"My husband was killed in the war in the Near East," she added.
"Yes," Orr said.
"Do you design all these things?"
"Most of the tools and stuff. And the cookware. Look, do you like this?" He hauled out a
copper-bottom teakettle, massive and yet elegant, as proportioned by necessity as a
sailing ship.
"Who wouldn't?" she said, putting out her hands. He gave it to her. She hefted and
admired it. "I like things," she said.
He nodded.
"You're a real artist. It's beautiful."
"Mr. Orr is expert with tangibles," the proprietor put in, toneless, speaking from the left
elbow.
"Listen, I remember," Heather said suddenly. "Of course, it was before The Break, that's
why it's all mixed up in my mind. You dreamed, I mean, you thought you dreamed
things that came true. Didn't you? And the doctor was making you do more and more of
it, and you didn't want him to, and you were looking for a way to get out of Voluntary
Therapy with him without getting clobbered with Obligatory. See, I do remember it. Did
you ever get assigned to another shrink?"
"No. Outgrew 'em," Orr said, and laughed. She also laughed.
"What did you do about the dreams?"
"Oh . . . went on dreaming."
"I thought you could change the world. Is this the best you could do for usâthis mess?"
"It'll have to do," he said.
He would have preferred less of a mess himself, but it wasn't up to him. And at least it
had her in it. He had sought her as best he could, had not found her, and had turned to
his work for solace; it had not given much, but it was the work he was fit to do, and he
was a patient man. 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.
He knew her, he knew his stranger, how to keep her talking and how to make her laugh.
He said finally, "Would you like a cup of coffee? There's a cafe next door. It's time for
my break."
"The hell it is," she said; it was quarter to five. She glanced over at the Alien. "Sure I'd
like some coffee, butâ"
The Return to Reality
- George Orr prepares to leave his workplace, signaling a transition from his professional duties to personal life.
- The Alien employer uses a cryptic, philosophical farewell, suggesting a cyclical nature of time and existence.
- A physical connection is shared between human and Alien through a handshake, highlighting a peaceful coexistence.
- Orr departs with Heather into a rainy summer afternoon, moving toward an uncertain but shared future.
- The Alien observes their departure from behind glass, maintaining a sense of detached, aquatic observation.
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.
"I'll be back in ten minutes. E'nememen Asfah," Orr said to his employer as he went for
his raincoat.
"Take evening," the Alien said. "There is time. There are returns. To go is to return."
"Thank you very much," Orr said, and shook hands with his boss. The big green flipper
was cool on his human hand. He went out with Heather into the warm, rainy afternoon
of summer. 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.
-END-
The Vulnerable Dreamer
- A metaphorical jellyfish represents lifeâs ultimate vulnerability, perfectly attuned to the ocean but destroyed by the âterrible outerspaceâ of dry land.
What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?
The Bureaucracy of Survival
- The medic describes a systemic crisis where children in state housing suffer from kwashiorkor because of protein shortages and bureaucratic red tape.
- The setting is a dystopian future Portland where basic resources are scarce and the National Guard is used to break transit strikes.
I go give 'em Vitamin C shots and try to pretend that starvation is just scurvy....
The Dream Specialist
- Haber identifies Orr as a âdreamerâ who has been using barbiturates to suppress his dreams, a common reason for referral to his specialty.
- The doctor observes Orr as repressed, unaggressive, and easily frightened, with no psychological defenses.
The real trick was to learn how not to hear them. The only solid partitions left were inside the head.
The Necessity of Dreams
- Dr. Haber explains that dreaming is a biological necessity as vital as food, water, and air.
- Systematic dream deprivation causes irritability, paranoia, and potentially fatal brain lesions.
No drug we have will keep you from dreaming, unless it kills you.
The Power of Effective Dreams
- George Orr reveals that his dreams do not merely predict the future but actively change reality.
- Orr recounts a formative memory from age seventeen involving his Aunt Ethel and a crowded living situation.
"Not prophetic dreams. I can't foresee anything. I simply change things."
The Retroactive Reality of Dreams
- Orr explains that his dreams change reality retroactively, leaving him as the only person who remembers the previous version of existence.
- Orr expresses a profound fear of his power, arguing that he has no right to meddle with the world through his irrational, selfish unconscious mind.
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.
The Shifting Mural
- George Orr confronts Dr. Haber about a mural in the office that seemingly transformed from a mountain landscape into a horse after Orrâs dream.
- Orr reveals his burden of âdouble memory,â remembering both the original reality and the new one created by his effective dreaming.
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
The Dreams of Reality
- The client, George Orr, reveals that he believes his dreams can alter reality, a claim he knows sounds insane.
- Orr explains that Dr. Haber is using a machine to force him into an intensified dream state through hypnotic suggestion.
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.
The Mechanics of Effective Dreaming
- George Orr explains that his dreams retroactively alter reality, changing history from its origins so the dreamâs content appears natural.
- Orr describes the âpink dogâ paradox, where a dream must rewrite the laws of nature or causality to accommodate an impossible request.
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.