The Lathe Of Heaven

“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 morning—right? Some dreams are all right—safe. ”

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 —your reality, your life—which 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. ”

“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 depression—less dreams; less dreams—more depression. Break it. How? No drug we have does much to increase d-sleep. ESB—electronic 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 dream—as 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? ”