The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula Le Guin

Ursula K. LeGuin was doing her thing in the 1970's, the years of the hippies and the exploration of Eastern philosophies. The daughter of an anthropologist father and a mother studying psychology, Ursula was coming of age in a family rife with speculative study, cultural observation, academics, feminism, and Jungian philosophy.
I'm jealous.

I have to admit right here and now that I had to go online to figure out what, exactly, I'd just been reading...  
Turns out it's about Taoism and Utilitarianism.
No, seriously.  ☯



The Lathe of Heaven opens up with a dream sequence, a dream of a jellyfish floating in a vast sea. I'm sharing that dream sequence here because the writing grabbed me immediately and I know you will love it:

Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.
(Bold text is mine.)

I'm starting with this quote from the very first page of The Lathe of Heaven because jellyfish seems to be a theme of the book because the main character, George Orr, is frequently compared to a jellyfish. A man moving through life, letting ebbs and flows carry him along, never quite making a plan or a choice. Yet, somehow, he becomes the hero; the strength of the whole ocean is behind him, afterall. 
Stay tuned.

∾

Ursula Le Guin

At the opening of the book, our main character, George Orr, is waking up from a strange dream (stick around, dreams play heavy in this book) and he is immediately confronted with medical first responders, and confusion. It turns out that George is being busted for overdosing on medication, medication designed to keep him awake at all costs. We soon learn that, in this strange dystopian age, George's medications are being monitored by the state and he is known to be using his medications incorrectly.

Because of this culturally gross abuse of medications, George is directed to see a therapist in order to avoid stronger punishment. While meeting with his new therapist, Dr. William Haber, a sleep and dream specialist, we learn that George's misuse of the pep pills is almost understandable. It turns out that George is taking the medications to avoid sleeping, not because he is afraid of nightmares or sleepwalking, but because sometimes when George dreams, his dreams come true. His dreams change reality.

At first glance, this sounds pretty awesome, doesn't it? 
Who doesn't want to have their dreams become reality?
For example, just last night, and this is true, I was dreaming of Benedict Cumberbatch. Just as I asked him to come back to my hotel room and he said yes, my cell phone alarm went off. 

Long story short, I need a new phone...
😉

The problem, though, even with this sweet problem, George keeps finding himself making terrible things happen through his dreaming, even when he has the best of intentions. Thus, he tries to stay awake indefinitely.
Sadly, upon entering into the care of Dr. Haber, George does not realize that he, George, has come under the thumb of a power-hungry man who attempts to bring George's dream powers into his own control.

Image by  Eleanor Wood

Dr. Haber seeks, first, to control George's dreams by planting suggestions into the dreams. For example, each time George goes to sleep in the doctor's office, he wakes up to grander and grander office spaces occupied by Dr. Haber because Dr. Haber is using the dreaming as a way to improve his own life, in addition to trying to make improvements in the wide world. 

Unfortunately George's dreaming, in spite of Dr. Haber's direction and control, leads to greater and greater problems in the wide world, beginning with the town in which this book is set, Portland Oregon, which begins experiencing terrible volcanic activity from the formerly-dormant Mount Hood. The problems from the dreaming become more and more awful, including huge losses of the population, alien invasion, even the end of the world.
Did they even THINK of a dream catcher?

In his disgust with George being jellyfish-like, Dr. Haber works out some high-falutin' scientific device and plans to move the Trumped-Up dreaming from George's head to his own head, megalomaniac style. I'm going to leave the cute technologies to the reader to find out. Suffice it to say that this book was written in 1971 and computers were in their, what comes before infancy, zygote-hood. Dr. Haber's device is a bit hilarious, but deviously so. Lucky for us, George figures out the plan and saves us all from a fate worse than death...he rescues us from the end of All That Is.


Weirdly, even though George is quite depressed and sad, although he is quite wishy-washy, and although he is really quite dull, it is his propensity for mediocrity and the Middle Way that saves us all. He is quite exceptional for his mediocrity. In fact, one of my favorite parts of the book is when George is getting results back from the personality test administered by Doctor Haber. Here's a part of the test results, a short excerpt that actually made me laugh:

I believe it's time for you to know that, within the frame of reference of those standardized but extremely subtle and useful tests, you are so sane as to be an anomaly. Of course, I'm using the lay word 'sane,' which has no precise objective meaning; in quantifiable terms, you're median. Your extroversion/introversion score, for instance, was 49.1. That is, you're more introverted than extroverted by .9 of a degree. That's not unusual; what is, is the emergence of the same damn pattern everywhere, right across the board. If you put them all onto the same graph you sit smack in the middle at 50. 

Furthermore, the doctor, in his case notes describes George as Unaggressive, placid, milquetoast, repressed, conventional.  
How Dr. Haber despises George's boring weakness, his jellyfishness.


Now what was that about Taoism and Utilitarianism?
 
Consider when Le Guin was writing. 1971. She was living during a time when, culturally, the US was deep into the hippies (think counterculture and the sexual revolution), the Vietnam War (think of the war on TV each night and those fighting the war), Civil Rights (think MLK and his I Have a Dream speech), Women's Lib (think Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique), Space Exploration (think Apollos 1 and 11), Race Relations (think segregation and the protests to segregation), threats of nuclear war (think the Cuban Missile Crisis), protests in the streets (think Che Guevara, among others), and the Beatles.

As a result of these and many other influences, Eastern mysticism became hip and cool and trendy about this time. I remember it. So Le Guin explores her own Taoism journey right here in the pages of this book.
 

So what is Taoism?

According to about fifty websites, Taoism or Daoism, is a philosophy centered on the belief that life is normally happy, but should be lived with balance and virtue. Taoism is also known as The Middle Way or The Path.

Cool. So what is Utilitarianism? 

Utilitarianism is a theory in philosophy about right and wrong actions. It says that the morally best action is the one that makes the most overall happiness or "utility" (usefulness). The greatest good for the greatest number of people.

And how do these two concepts interact in this book?

Easy, surprisingly.
George is a walking, talking Taoism symbol, almost like Yoda (not). And, it turns out, the doctor represents utilitarianism, though a slightly messed up version of it. Although the doctor and George experiment with dreams about creating a happier, better world for us all, Utilitarianism, none of these dreams actually come to fruition without serious complications. It isn't until George insists on walking the Tao way, the center, the simple way, do we see some semblance of joy and peace. 

Is this simplified?

YES.
I'm no philosophy major.

But I'll keep trying:


☯
The yin-yang symbol fits here. In every good is an equal bit of bad...just like the stuff resulting from the good-intentions of the dream.
SEE, I'm getting it!

The greatest good for the greatest number of people—we can all get on board with that one, can't we? Utilitarianism seeks to maximize happiness and minimize suffering. While the principles of utilitarianism might seem pretty reasonable, in The Lathe of Heaven we see how things can go horribly, horribly wrong, even with the best of intentions. And even more horribly wrong in the hands of the ego-maniacal Dr. Haber.

Anytime these man seek to alter the reality of things, they unbalance things, move things from the center, and create chaos. It is only in the middle where we are safe, happy, productive.


Le Guin, in this tiny little novel, also explores subjects of race, love, power, good vs. evil, ...even freedom is explored right here in this tiny little book. And far better than this choppy blog post.
I'd say go and read it!

I'm giving this book a total of seven stars for the number of times I had to go online and remind myself about the various bits of philosophy that hid in the text. SO worth it.

Do you think you'll go and read it?