This, my second exposure to le Guin, reads exactly like an episode of The Twilight Zone. A man, Orr, is confronted by law enforcement after trying to buy certain drugs illegally; he explains to them that he needed it, for sleep, and they remand him to a shrink who discovers the man is trying not to dream. Why? Because some of his dreams are “effective”: what he dreams comes true, and does so retroactively so that he is the only one who remembers the old reality. The shrink, Haber, thinks he’s nuts, of course, but then he experiences reality changing in real time: he instructs Orr to dream of a horse, and the horse manifests — an image of the dream-horse replacing a painting of a mountain in Haber’s office. Haber, seized with the potential of this, begins trying to use Orr’s dreams to the good — but whatever power Orr has is laden with the same mischief of the genie in the lamp. You want to ease overpopulation? Very well, a plague reduced humanity to one billion people. You want racism to go away? Very well, everyone is now the same color: dull, drab, grey! You want humans to stop fighting one another? Enter an alien invasion to unite us against an outsider. Reality in the book gets increasingly distorted and unhinged, and Haber somehow grows in power with every single turn of the lathe, no matter how violent and chaotic things get. Orr is overwhelmed and terrified, but Haber keeps insisting he come back for ‘sessions’, and is frustrated by Orr’s doubts. Can’t you see we’re building a better world? Nevermind the Reavers. The book ends, but — not with the tidy ending one might expect. I found this wholly absorbing at first, though once I was in the bottom third I was bewildered by what was going on. Very interesting stuff, and there were numerous passages I had to copy down.

Quotations

“All the same, Mr. Orr, you were doing something dangerous.” He paused for effect. “You were depriving yourself of dreams.”

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 stars were coming out, white as daisies. A big one was blooming just to the right of the road, low over the dark country, tremulously white. When he looked up at it again it had already become larger and brighter. It’s enhuging, he thought. It seemed to grow reddish as it brightened. It enreddenhuged. “

It was no longer pleasant to exchange glances with the moon. It symbolized neither the Unattainable, as it had for thousands of years, nor the Attained, as it had for a few decades, but the Lost. A stolen coin, the muzzle of one’s gun turned against one, a round hole in the fabric of the sky. The Aliens held the moon.

I’ve had so many childhoods now,” he said. “Which one should I tell you about? In one both my parents died in the first year of the Plague. In one there wasn’t any Plague. I don’t know … None of them were very interesting. I mean, nothing to tell. All I ever did was survive.”

“Shut your eyes!” Haber commanded, put his hand on Orr’s throat, and turned up the gain. “RELAXING,” said his own huge voice. “YOU FEEL COMFORTABLE AND RELAXED. YOU WILL ENTER THE—” The building leaped like a spring lamb and settled down askew.

But now, never to have known a woman with brown skin, brown skin and wiry black hair cut very short so that the elegant line of the skull showed like the curve of a bronze vase—no, that was wrong. That was intolerable. That every soul on earth should have a body the color of a battleship: no! That’s why she’s not here, he thought. She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people’s world. She had not been born.