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The Lathe of Heaven Rating: 8 on a scale of 10 Review This is a marvelous short novel that was suggested to me by a friend because he knew of my interest in things related to dreams. Ms. Le Guin lives in Portland, OR just a short distance up the road from where I live in Woodburn, OR. She situated this story in Portland and all the names and places are familiar to a "local" like myself. The story is about a man who has what are described as "effective" dreams. An effective dream is a dream where what the dreamer dreams actually comes to pass quite literally and rapidly. For example, if he dreamed the moon was green, then when he woke up the moon would be green, and the whole world of people would have changed to believe the moon had always been green. As you can imagine this would be very problematic. As a result he has been for sometime using medications to block dreams from occurring. He goes to see a psychiatrist at Oregon Health Sciences University who he believes is his last hope to do something about his situation. The scientist has a machine called the Augmentor, which he can use to influence his dreams. At first, he makes some modest suggestions, changing the world slightly. This progresses, and he cannot resist the temptation to alter the dreams of his client in order to effect major changes in the world "for the better". The psychiatrist begins the process of slowly altering the world, but like the effects of chaos theory in Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, when it goes through the clients brain and dreams some odd things happen. When I consider this book, there are several ways to look at it. At it's core this book is about what happens when someone else tries to manipulate someone else's dreams. We all have dreams for life. Now suppose our dreams were all prone to come true. It seems unlikely, but just suppose for a moment. I suspect other people would be quick to to want to cash in on our success and try to tag on or influence how these things go. The world seems filled with people who would like to alter our dreams. The advertising industry is certainly one that comes to mind immediately. They are very interested in altering dreams such that we make their dreams for us become reality. Politicians are certainly interested in altering our dreams such that their dreams become ours and we allow them to create a new better reality for us. Preachers and pastors often want to effect our dreams so that a new and better version of reality will take hold in us. In my work with patients I am frequently trying to give them a new dream that I hope they will adopt as reality. We are all about trying to alter people's dreams to effect a change in reality. This book simply puts it into a more extreme light by asking what if there was a machine that could do this and the dreams actually became real? What would happen? Recently, I was reading The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. In this book toward the end he speaks about the ideas of some indigenous tribal folks in Ecuador. This book is an expose of sorts on how the "corporatocracy" (the nexus of governments, industry and banking) have set out to create empire for the companies of the United States. His role was as an economist in an engineering company, creating vastly overinflated projections of growth which will result in countries being able to borrow large amounts of money from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which will result in the corporations receiving the money to build the infrastructure, but the countries will never be able to pay back, leaving them in vulnerable positions to be manipulated by the US government or corporations. He develops a certain sense of guilt about all of this and ends up quitting his job, eventually finding himself in the Amazon leading eco-tours trying to recover his soul. The indigenous folks tell him that he is what he dreams. It is at this point that he wonders why he dreamed such an awful world. He was behaving just like the psychiatrist in this novel. He was manipulating the dreams of others for his own benefit. The simple moral of this story is to avoid manipulating the dreams of others, especially when those dreams are likely to come into reality in some form, and likely the form will be altered in little ways you never anticipated. The deeper questions relate to all the ways we go about manipulating each others dreams for our own benefit. I loved this book. I highly recommend it. There are many other ways you could consider this book. You will enjoy it, and the conversations you can generate around it would be fun to listen to and participate in. All opinions are those of Curtis Climer, MD Copyright 2010
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