In The Lathe of Heaven, any attempt to exert power over others eventually has corrupting results. When Haber tries to manipulate Orr’s effective dreams to uplift humanity, his initially altruistic intentions are stymied by his selfish thirst for power. While each reality that Haber indirectly creates comes with a multitude of unanticipated conflicts and challenges for the people of the world, his own position of power and status in those worlds predictably increases. In an ultimate act of power-hungry selfishness, Haber finds a way to effect reality without Orr’s involvement, and in so doing he nearly brings about the end of the world, leaving him psychologically broken. Orr’s salvation in the novel, on the other hand, is exemplified by his ultimate relinquishing of control over others. In his final reunion with Heather, for example, his former wife is no longer the gray, submissive version of herself that Haber’s hypercontrolled, raceless world forced her to become. In a final act of selflessness, Orr uses his power to restore Heather to her formerly bold, powerful self. While their future together is uncertain, they now have the power to shape each other’s lives in a mutually selfless relationship uncorrupted by selfishness. Through Haber’s and Orr’s contrasting fates, The Lathe of Heaven critiques selfish, ego-driven exertions of power, instead advocating for a reserved, ethical application of power that allows for a harmonious co-existence rooted in mutual empowerment.
Haber’s powerful status enables him to make the world a better place, but selfishness corrupts that power and ultimately destroys him. Haber initially uses his medical privileges as Orr’s psychiatrist to achieve noble ends, manipulating Orr’s dreams to fix many of the world’s problems. For example, he eliminates famine, nearly eradicates cancer, and improves Earth’s ecological health. However, Haber becomes corrupted when he uses his power to fulfill egotistical rather than altruistic goals. The humanitarian accomplishments Haber brings about through Orr’s dreams are always accompanied by changes that improve Haber’s position. Though Haber begins as a middling psychiatrist, he eventually becomes the director of the Human Utility: Research and Development (HURAD) department of the World Planning Center, which makes him the most powerful person in the world. When Haber “effectivize[s]” the world to exist within his own dream, he’s too self-absorbed to heed Orr’s advice about consulting with the Aliens beforehand. Once reality is “effectivized,” Haber tells Orr, “this world will be like heaven, and men will be like gods!” Though Haber claims his new world will make people “like gods,” his design renders Haber most God-like of all, positioning him as the sole creator and controller of this new, heavenly world. Ultimately, Haber loses control of his dream, sends the world into chaos, and goes insane, which leads to his institutionalization. Thus, Haber’s selfish pursuit of power is his downfall.
Orr succeeds where Haber fails because he adopts a more ethical, selfless relationship to power. Unlike Haber, Orr has no desire to play God. Orr’s relationship to his effective dreams emphasizes the potential harm his dreams might inflict on others rather than the potential benefit they might bring himself. Orr recognizes his “obligation” to use his power to coexist with rather than to dominate others. Near the end of the novel, for example, Orr jumps inside a black hole that Haber’s uncontrolled dream creates and, “by the power of will, which is indeed great when exercised in the right way at the right time,” Orr teleports himself to the HURAD Tower. Once he’s outside Haber’s office, Orr gathers strength through thoughts of Tiua’k Ennbe Ennbe (an Alien shopkeeper he befriends), and Heather, which allows him “to cross nothingness,” rip Haber from the Augmentor, and restore relative order to the world. Unlike Haber, whose egotistical relationship to power motivates him to reject the help of others and leads him down a path of complete destruction, Orr’s selfless relationship to power allows him to access his abilities responsibly, remain receptive to others’ help, and save the day.
After disconnecting Haber from the Augmentor, Orr restores a reality that gives Heather the power to act of her own accord, which further affirms Orr’s commitment to a selfless relationship to power. The Heather that Orr first dreams into existence as his wife is a gray, submissive shadow of her former self. She’s the only version of Heather that can exist in this reality, which Haber has engineered (through Orr’s effective dreams) to rob people of individuality, agency, and racial difference. Because being biracial was so central to Heather’s identity, she ceases to exist in this world until Orr dreams this lacking version of herself into existence. After Orr defeats Haber, he restores race, individuality, and personal freedom to the world, which allows Heather to become the person she was before Haber began his quest for world domination—and before she knew Orr. This final iteration of Heather has only a vague memory of Orr—she doesn’t remember they were ever married or in love—yet this fact doesn’t crush Orr; on the contrary, he looks at Heather, whom he describes as a “fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger,” and optimistically welcomes the challenge of winning back her love. Though Heather and Orr’s future together is uncertain, the shared, equal power they hold in developing that future has its own beauty. Unlike Haber, whose egotistical need for control corrupted his power, Orr recognizes that the highest power of all is the collective empowerment that exists within a harmonious co-existence among mutually empowered people.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Power and Selfishness ThemeTracker
Power and Selfishness 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?”
Goddamn but he wished he could afford an office with a window with a view!
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.
“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.”
“I know he means well. It’s just that I want to be cured, not used.”
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.
“To a better world!” Dr. Haber said, raising his glass to his creation, and finished his whisky in a lingering, savoring swallow.
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.
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
“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?”
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.
