One of the central conflicts of The Lathe of Heaven is George Orr’s internal struggle to know what is real and what is imagined. At first, it appears that the novel’s baseline reality (from which all Orr’s dreamed alternate realities diverge) is the world where Orr is apprehended for drug abuse and sent to Haber for Volunteer Therapeutic Treatment (VTT). However, it’s later revealed that this reality is itself a dream that Orr willed into existence as he lay dying during the fallout of a global Nuclear War in 1998. This, to Orr’s mind, renders false each subsequent reality he dreams into existence. One of the novel’s central questions thus becomes: if reality exists in a state of constant flux that is beyond any one person’s ability to discern, how does anyone know for certain what’s real? Orr’s desire to stop dreaming effectively isn’t simply a passive man’s discomfort with playing God, then, but a reflection of his larger discomfort with uncertainty. Orr initially seems to believe that if he can stop dreaming effectively, he will be able to exist in a more solid, stable, and knowable world. Instead, Orr eventually finds peace in the version of the world he knows least, a peace which comes only after embracing the Alien invaders’ philosophy, which stresses not knowing the world with certainty, but simply coexisting with it. Through its metaphorical use of dreams, The Lathe of Heaven critiques efforts to transcend reality’s unknowable character, arguing that human beings must embrace uncertainty instead.
Orr initially fears his effective dreams because he can’t control them. He thinks being “cured” of his ability will make him feel better. Because Orr’s dreams exist only in his unconscious, he can’t consciously experience them. This is his main complaint with his curious ability: that it’s beyond his ability to control and comprehend. When explaining his concerns to Haber in their initial session, he cites an instance from his youth in which he dreamed his abusive Aunt Ethel died in a car crash as evidence of the “incoherent, selfish, irrational, [and] immoral” quality of his unconscious. Orr’s dreams (aided by Haber’s hypnosuggestions) create additional “immoral” circumstances over the course of the novel, including a massive plague and an alien invasion. Orr repeatedly attempts to suppress his dreams—abusing drugs, avoiding sleep, and avoiding his sessions with Haber—but these methods are all short-lived. Orr’s failure to control his dreams—and the suffering he incurs in trying and failing to control them—suggests that repressing one’s anxieties about uncertainty is an inadequate method of coping with a fear of the unknown.
Haber adopts an opposite stance, striving to eliminate uncertainty through logic and reason. Haber describes Orr’s condition positively, referring to it as a “wellspring of health, imagination, creativity,” which, once adequately understood, can be used to benefit mankind. Haber thinks the most effective way to conquer the unknown is to leave no mystery unsolved: “to bring up what’s unconscious into the light of rational consciousness [and] examine it objectively.” To Haber, Orr’s effective dreams (and by extension, the unknown) are only existential threats so long as they remain unexamined and uncontrolled. Haber tries to understand Orr’s dreams with the intention of inducing effective, conscious (and therefore controllable) dreams in himself to create a new reality where everything is controlled, and nothing is left to chance. But Haber’s efforts backfire when his first attempt to induce a consciously effective dream turns into an uncontrollable nightmare that nearly destroys the planet. The horrors Haber witnesses during his nightmare leave him permanently insane and confined to an institution. When Orr visits him, he observes a blank-eyed Haber “looking at the world as misunderstood by the mind: the bad dream.” Orr’s remarks affirm what Haber failed to recognize: that it’s impossible to rationalize away the mind’s capacity to misunderstand the world, and the world’s capacity to confound the mind. Haber’s tragic end shows that there’s a limit to what humanity can rationalize.
In place of Orr’s and Haber’s equally insufficient methods to cope with uncertainty, the novel offers a third method, espoused by the Aldebaranian Aliens, which is simply to embrace uncertainty. Toward the end of the novel, Orr has an effective dream where an Alien teaches him two Alien words: iahklu’, which refers to effective dreaming, and Er’ perrehnne. The Alien tells Orr that if he utters this latter word “before following directions leading in wrong directions,” it will guide him through troubling effective dreams. The Alien’s advice works. After exchanging “Er’ perrehnne’s” with the Alien in his dream, Orr feels calm and reassured. When he awakens in Haber’s office, a confused Haber notes that the EEG screen registers unusually powerful activity in Orr’s cortex. Orr later tries to explain Er’ perrehnne to Haber, though the concept remains mostly inarticulable. To Orr, the concept behind Er’ perrehnne is that navigating the unknown depths of dreams requires one to “learn the skills, the art, the limits. A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully.” Orr’s understanding of Er’ perrehnne dictates that “a conscious mind,” or a knowing mind, must reimagine its relationship to the unknown: it “must be part of the whole unconsciously,” accepting the validity of the things it can’t change or know rather than fearing or trying to conquer them. After accepting Er’ perrehnne, Orr’s dreams no longer plague him. When Orr finds shelter with an Alien named E’nememen Asfah the evening after Haber’s effective dream nearly destroys the world, Orr and Asfah exchange Er’perrehnne’s before Orr falls asleep, and Orr’s dreams wash over him “like waves of the deep sea.” Embracing the unknown metaphorically transforms Orr into the jellyfish featured in the novel’s opening scene—strengthened rather than threatened by the vast, mysterious waters that surround him.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Dreams and the Limitations of Knowledge ThemeTracker
Dreams and the Limitations of Knowledge Quotes in The Lathe of Heaven
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 moon-driven 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 outer space 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 sea-drift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?
“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.”
“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, irrational—immoral, you said a minute ago. They come from the unsocialized part of us, don’t they, at least partly?”
“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.”
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 into his own hands.
“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 earth—to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?”
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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.
“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 mind—his ideas of what ought to be.”
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 one—isn’t it?”
“I don’t choose,” Orr said. “Don’t you see that yet? I follow.”
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.
“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. Life—evolution—the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy—existence itself—is essentially change.”
“That is one aspect of it,” Orr said. “The other is stillness.”
“Volcanoes emit fire.”
“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 carefully—as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously. Do you see? Does it mean anything to you?”
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.
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 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.
“Take evening,” the Alien said. “There is time. There are returns. To go is to return.”
“Thank you very much,” Orr said, and shook hand 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.
