Lathe of Heaven, The (8 page)

There was no need to mention that he was doing research along that line, since so far it was quite inconclusive and would merely be misunderstood. "The form of autostimulation by recording that I'm using in this therapy may be described as having no effect on the patient beyond that exerted during the period of the machine's functioning: five to ten minutes." He knew more of any HEW lawyer's specialty than she knew of his; he saw her nodding slightly at that last sentence, it was right down her alley.

But then she said, "What does it do, then?" "Yes, I was coming to that," Haber said, and quickly readjusted his tone, since the irritation was showing through. "What we have in this case is a subject who is afraid to dream: an oneirophobe. My treatment is basically a simple conditioning treatment in the classic tradition of modern psychology. The patient is induced to dream here, under controlled conditions; dream content and emotional affect are manipulated by hypnotic suggestion. The subject is being taught that he can dream safely, pleasantly, et cetera, a positive conditioning which will leave him free of his phobia. The Augmentor is an ideal instrument for this purpose. It ensures that he will dream, by instigating and then reinforcing his own typical d-state activity. It might take a subject up to an hour and a half to go through the various stages of s-sleep and reach the d-state on his own, an impractical length for daytime therapy sessions, and moreover during deep sleep the force of hypnotic suggestions concerning dream content might be partly lost. This is undesirable; while he's in conditioning, it's essential that he have no bad dreams, no nightmares. Therefore the Augmentor provides me with both a timesaving device and a safety factor. The therapy could be achieved without it; but it would probably take months; with it, I except to take a few weeks. It may prove to be as great a timesaver, in appropriate cases, as hypnosis itself has proved to be in psychoanalysis and in conditioning therapy."

Teep, said the lawyer's recorder, and Bong said his own desk communicator in a soft, rich, authoritative voice. Thank God. "Here's our patient now. Now I suggest, Miss Lelache, that you meet him, and we may chat a bit if you like; then perhaps you can fade off to that leather chair in the corner, right? Your presence shouldn't make any real difference to the patient, but if he's constantly reminded of it, it could slow things down badly. He's a person in a fairly severe anxiety state, you see, with a tendency to interpret events as personally threatening, and a set of protective delusions built up--as you'll see.

Oh yes, and the recorder off, that's right, a therapy session's not for the record. Right?

O.K., good. Yes, hello, George, come on in! This is Miss Lelache, the participant from HEW. She's here to see the Augmentor in use." The two were shaking hands in the most ridiculously stiff way. Crash clank! went the lawyer's bracelets. The contrast amused Haber: the harsh fierce woman, the meek characterless man. They had nothing in common at all.

"Now," he said, enjoying running the show, "I suggest that we get on with business, unless there's anything special on your mind, George, that you want to talk about first?"

He was, by his own apparently unassertive movements, sorting them out: the Lelache to the chair in the far corner, Orr to the couch. "O.K., then, good. Let's run off a dream.

Which will incidentally constitute a record for HEW of the fact that the Augmentor doesn't loosen your toenails, or harden your arteries, or blow your mind, or indeed have any side effects whatsoever except perhaps a slight compensatory decrease in dreaming sleep tonight." As he finished the sentence he reached out and placed his right hand on Orr's throat, almost casually.

Orr flinched from the contact as if he had never been hypnotized.

Then he apologized. "Sorry. You come at me so suddenly."

It was necessary to rehypnotize him completely, employing the v-c induction method, which was perfectly legal of course but rather more dramatic than Haber liked to use in front of an observer from HEW; he was furious with Orr, in whom he had sensed growing resistance for the last five or six sessions. Once he had the man under, he put on a tape he had cut himself, of all the boring repetition of deepening trance and posthypnotic suggestion for rehypnotizing: "You are comfortable and relaxed now. You are sinking deeper into trance," and so on and so on. While it played he went back to his desk and sorted through papers with a calm, serious face, ignoring the Lelache. She kept still, knowing the hypnotic routine must not be interrupted; she was looking out the window at the view, the towers of the city.

At last Haber stopped the tape and put the trancap on Orr's head. "Now, while I'm hooking you up let's talk about what kind of dream you're going to dream, George. You feel like talking about that, don't you?"

Slow nod from the patient.

"Last time you were here we were talking about some things that worry you. You said you like your work, but you don't like riding the subway to work. You keep feeling crowded in on, you said--squeezed, pressed together. You feel as if you had no elbow room, as if you weren't free."

He paused, and the patient, who was always taciturn in hypnosis, at last responded merely: "Overpopulation."

"Mhm, that was the word you used. That's your word, your metaphor, for this feeling of unfreedom. Well, now, let's discuss that word. You know that back in the eighteenth century Malthus was pressing the panic button about population growth; and there was another fit of panic about it thirty, forty years ago. And sure enough population has gone up; but all the horrors they predicted just haven't come to pass. It's just not as bad as they said it would be. We all get by just fine here in America, and if our living standard has had to lower in some ways it's even higher in others than it was a generation ago. Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched. So you've found a kind of excuse for keeping reality at a distance." The EEG was running, and as he talked he made the connections to the Augmentor. "Now, George, we'll be talking a little longer and then when I say the key word 'Antwerp' you'll drop off to sleep; when you wake up you'll feel refreshed and alert. You won't recall what I'm saying now, but you will recall your dream. It'll be a vivid dream, vivid and pleasant, an effective dream. You'll dream about this thing that worries you, overpopulation: you'll have a dream where you find out that it isn't really that that worries you. People can't live alone, after all; to be put in solitary is the worst kind of confinement! We need people around us. To help us, to give help to, to compete with, to sharpen our wits against" And so on and so on. The lawyer's presence cramped his style badly; he had to put it all in abstract terms, instead of just telling Orr what to dream. Of course, he wasn't falsifying his method in order to deceive the observer; his method simply wasn't yet invariable. He varied it from session to session, seeking for the sure way to suggest the precise dream he wanted, and always coming up against the resistance that seemed to him sometimes to be the overliteralness of primary-process thinking, and sometimes to be a positive balkiness in Orr's mind. Whatever prevented it, the dream almost never came out the way Haber had intended; and this vague, abstract kind of suggestion might work as well as any. Perhaps it would rouse less unconscious resistance in Orr.

He gestured to the lawyer to come over and watch the EEG screen, at which she had been peering from her corner, and went on: "You're going to have a dream in which you feel uncrowded, unsqueezed. You'll dream about all the elbow room there is in the world, all the freedom you have to move around." And at last he said, "Antwerp!"--and pointed to the EEG traces so that the Lelache would see the almost instantaneous change. "Watch the slowing down all across the graph," he murmured. "There's a high-voltage peak, see, there's another. . . . Sleep spindles. He's already going into the second stage of orthodox sleep, s-sleep, whichever term you've run into, the kind of sleep without vivid dreams that occurs in between the d-states all night. But I'm not letting him go on down into deep fourth-stage, since he's here to dream. I'm turning on the Augmentor. Keep your eye on those traces. Do you see?"

"Looks like he was waking up again," she murmured doubtfully.

"Right! But it's not waking. Look at him." Orr lay supine, his head fallen back a little so that his short, fair beard jutted up; he was sound asleep, but there was a tension about his mouth; he sighed deeply.

"See his eyes move, under the lids? That's how they first caught this whole phenomenon of dreaming sleep, back in the 1930's; they called it rapid-eye-movement sleep, REM, for years. Ifs a hell of a lot more than that, though. It's a third state of being. His whole autonomic system is as fully mobilized as it might be in an exciting moment of waking life; but his muscle tone is nil, the large muscles are relaxed more deeply than in s-sleep.

Cortical, subcortical, hippocampal, and midbrain areas all as active as in waking, whereas they're inactive in s-sleep. His respiration and blood pressure are up to waking levels or higher. Here, feel the pulse." He put her fingers against Orr's lax wrist. "Eighty or eighty-five, he's going. He's having a humdinger, whatever it is. . . ."

"You mean he's dreaming?" She looked awed.

"Right."

"Are all these reactions normal?"

"Absolutely. We all go through this performance every night, four or five times, for at least ten minutes at a time. This is a quite normal d-state EEG on the screen. The only anomaly or peculiarity about it that you might be able to catch is an occasional high peaking right through the traces, a kind of brainstorm effect I've never seen in a d-state EEG before. Its pattern seems to resemble an effect that's been observed in electroencephalograms of men hard at work of a certain sort: creative or artistic work, painting, writing verse, even reading Shakespeare. What this brain is doing at those moments, I don't yet know. But the Augmentor gives me the opportunity to observe them systematically, and so eventually to analyze them out."

"There's no chance that the machine is causing this effect?"

"No." As a matter of fact, he had tried stimulating Orr's brain with a playback of one of these peak traces, but the dream resulting from that experiment had been incoherent, a mishmash of the previous dream, during which the Augmentor had recorded the peak, and the present one. No need to mention inconclusive experiments. "Now that he's well into this dream, in fact, I'll cut the Augmentor out. Watch, see if you can tell when I cut off the input." She couldn't "He may produce a brainstorm for us anyhow; keep an eye on those traces. You may catch it first in the theta rhythm, there, from the hippocampus.

It occurs in other brains, undoubtedly. Nothing's new. If I can find out what other brains, in what state, I may be able to specify much more exactly what this subject's trouble is; there may be a psychological or neurophysiological type to which he belongs. You see the research possibilities of the Augmentor? No effect on the patient except that of temporarily putting his brain into whichever of its own normal states the physician wants to observe. Look there!" She missed the peak, of course; EEG-reading on a moving screen took practice. "Blew his fuse. Still in the dream now. . . . He'll tell us about it presently." He could not go on talking. His mouth had gone dry. He felt it: the shift, the arrival, the change.

The woman felt it too. She looked frightened. Holding the heavy brass necklace up close to her throat like a talisman, she was staring in dismay, shock, terror, out the window at the view.

He had not expected that. He had thought that only he could be aware of the change.

But she had heard him tell Orr what to dream; she had stood beside the dreamer; she was there at the center, like him. And like him had turned to look out the window at the vanishing towers fade like a dream, leave not a wrack behind, the insubstantial miles of suburb dissolving like smoke on the wind, the city of Portland, which had had a population of a million people before the Plague Years but had only about a hundred thousand these days of the Recovery, a mess and jumble like all American cities, but unified by its hills and its misty, seven-bridged river, the old forty-story First National Bank building dominating the downtown skyline, and far beyond, above it all, the serene and pale mountains. . . .

She saw it happen. And he realized that he had never once thought that the HEW

observer might see it happen. It hadn't been a possibility, he hadn't given it a thought.

And this implied that he himself had not believed in the change, in what Orr's dreams did. Though he had felt it, seen it, with bewilderment, fear, and exultation, a dozen times now; though he had watched the horse become a mountain (if you can watch the overlap of one reality with another), though he had been testing, and using, the effective power of Orr's dreams for nearly a month now, yet he had not believed in what was happening.

This whole day, from his arrival at work on, he had not given one thought to the fact that, a week ago, he had not been the Director of the Oregon Oneirological Institute, because there had been no Institue. Ever since last Friday, there had been an Institute for the last eighteen months. And he had been its founder and director. And this being the way it was--for him, for everyone on the staff, and his colleagues at the Medical School, and the Government that funded it--he had accepted it totally, just as they did, as the only reality. He had suppressed his memory of the fact that, until last Friday, this had not been the way it was.

That had been Orr's most successful dream by far. It had begun in the old office across the river, under that damned mural photograph of Mount Hood, and had ended in this office . . . and he had been there, had seen the walls change around him, had known the world was being remade, and had forgotten it. He had forgotten it so completely that he had never even wondered if a stranger, a third person, might have the same experience.