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“It was an easy guess for me, Mr. Orr. They generally send me the dreamers.” He grinned at the little man. “I’m a dream specialist. Literally. An oneirologist. Sleep and dreaming are my field. O.K., now I can proceed to the next educated guess, which is that you used the phenobarb to suppress dreaming but found that with habituation the drug has less and less dream-suppressive effect, until it has none at all. Similarly with the Dexedrine. So you alternated them. Right?”
“You know that you need sleep. Just as you need food, water, and air. But did you realize that sleep’s not enough, that your body insists just as strongly upon having its allotment of dreaming sleep?
“I don’t have nightmares more than most people, I think,” Orr was saying, looking down at his hands. “Nothing special. I’m … afraid of dreaming.” “Of dreaming bad dreams.” “Any dreams.”
“Here’s where you stop believing me.”
“A man who deals with dreams both awake and sleeping isn’t too concerned with belief and disbelief,
He looked at Orr to see if the statement had been taken amiss, and met, for one instant, the man’s eyes. Extraordinarily beautiful eyes, Haber thought, and was surprised by the word, for beauty was not a category he used much either. The irises were blue or gray, very clear, as if transparent. For a moment Haber forgot himself and stared back at those clear, elusive eyes; but only for a moment, so that the strangeness of the experience scarcely registered on his conscious mind.
“No, I don’t mean that.” And stuttering a little, “What I mean is, I dreamed something, and it came true.”
“Not prophetic dreams. I can’t foresee anything. I simply change things.”
“Well, she didn’t dream it. I mean, the dream really did change reality. It made a different reality, retroactively, which she’d been part of all along. Being in it, she had no memory of any other. I did, I remembered both, because I was … there … at the moment of the change. This is the only way I can explain it, I know it doesn’t make sense. But I have got to have some explanation, or else face the fact that I am insane.”
“Why scared?” “Because I don’t want to change things!” Orr said, as if stating the superobvious. “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 auto-hypnosis 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 didn’t want to kill poor Ethel. I just wanted her out of my way. Well, in a dream, that’s likely to be drastic. Dreams take short cuts. I killed her. In a car crash a thousand
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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.”
“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 intensely, as we like.
It was a scene he never tired of, the All-Night Movie, the show on Channel One.
Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.
Undernourishment, overcrowding, and pervading foulness of the environment were the norm. There was more scurvy, typhus, and hepatitis in the Old Cities, more gang violence, crime, and murder in the New Cities. The rats ran one and the Mafia ran the other.
“How do you feel about another go in the Palace of Dreams?”
The power of dreaming alone is quite undreamt of!”
When Haber spoke of using, employing his mental powers, he had thought for a moment that the doctor must mean his power of changing reality by dreaming; but surely if he’d meant that he would have said it clearly? Knowing that Orr desperately needed confirmation, he would not causelessly withhold it if he could give it.
No good. No way out. Orr was where he had been for months – alone: knowing he was insane and knowing he was not insane, simultaneously and intensely. It was enough to drive him insane.
He felt the heaviness upon him, the weight bearing down endlessly. He thought, I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.
Nonconscious thinking, whether in infancy or in dream, apparently is not available to conscious recall.
Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being. – H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia
Gradually, with a lot of backing and filling, he explained that he was undergoing a therapy which consisted essentially of hypnotically induced sleep and dreaming. He felt that the psychiatrist, by ordering him to dream certain dreams, might be infringing upon his rights of privacy as defined in the New Federal Constitution of 1984.
“You mean he’s a Mad Scientist with an Infernal Machine?”
“To change reality by dreaming that it’s different,”
“I have no right to change things. Nor he to make me do it.”
“Dual time-tracks, alternate universes,”
He was a psychiatrist, after all. He had gone into sleep research and oneirology in the first place to find therapeutic applications. He was not interested in detached knowledge, science for science’ sake: there was no use learning anything if it was of no use.
For there is nothing important except people. 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.
Deeply disturbed and with artificial reality-orientations, but improving under current therapy.”
Cats. We sleep researchers like cats, you know; they sleep a lot!
His head was too full, holding the two sets of memories, two full systems of information: one of the real (no longer) world with a human population of nearly seven billion and increasing geometrically, and one of the real (now) world with a population of less than one billion and still not stabilized. My God, he thought, what has Orr done? Six billion people. Where are they?
a man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes’ witness, if those with him saw nothing.
“You have a queer profession,” she said abruptly. “Dreams; watching people’s brains work; telling them what to dream … I suppose you do a lot of your research at night?”
But of course a mystery is merely a problem we haven’t solved yet!
“No. I never buried anybody. Nobody died of the Plague. There wasn’t any Plague. It’s all in my imagination. I dreamed it.”
“Did you ever happen to think, Dr. Haber,” he said, quietly enough but stuttering a little, “that there, there might be other people who dream the way I do? That reality’s being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the time – only we don’t know it? Only the dreamer knows it, and those who know his dream. If that’s true, I guess we’re lucky not knowing it. This is confusing enough.”
“To a better world!” Dr. Haber said, raising his glass to his creation, and finished his whisky in a lingering, savoring swallow.
It may remain for us to learn … that our task is only beginning, and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable and unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking; – that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past; – that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire; – and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives. – Lafcadio Hearn, Out of the East
The scientific aspect of it all was in fact the only hopeful one, to his mind; it seemed to him that perhaps science might wring some good out of his peculiar and terrible gift, put it to some good ends, compensating a little for the enormous harm it had done. The murder of six billion nonexistent people.
An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and flowered all in one moment with its roots in his loins and its flowers in his mind.
Nothing will keep a man from dreaming, he had said, but death.
Curious, in this life they hadn’t had a trial marriage, he and Donna. There was no such thing, legally speaking, in the post-Plague years. There was full marriage only. In Utah, since the birth rate was still lower than the death rate, they were even trying to reinstitute polygamous marriage, for religious and patriotic reasons.
He thought: In that life, yesterday, I dreamed an effective dream, which obliterated six billion lives and changed the entire history of humankind for the past quarter century. But in this life, which I then created, I did not dream an effective dream. I was in Haber’s office, all right, and I dreamed; but it didn’t change anything. It’s been this way all along, and I merely had a bad dream about the Plague Years. There’s nothing wrong with me; I don’t need therapy.
“George, you must realize that you ask questions which from your point of view may seem reasonable, but which from my point of view are literally unanswerable. We don’t see reality the same way.”
“But in fact, isn’t that man’s very purpose on earth – to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?”
Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part.
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
For all he knew, Haber was incapable of sincerity because he was lying to himself.
Aliens from outer space attacking Earth! Look: if you ask me to dream again, what will you get? Maybe a totally insane world, the product of an insane mind. Monsters, ghosts, witches, dragons, transformations – all the stuff we carry around in us, all the horrors of childhood, the night fears, the nightmares.
