The Lathe Of Heaven

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 peace—that’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 said—no, 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 are—Here! 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, “—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 say—” 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 space—” 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 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—this 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. ”

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’sdreams 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.