The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

Written during the 1970’s, The Lathe of Heaven takes place during the near future in Portland. Overpopulation has caused serious overcrowding and lack of resources around the globe for mankind as diseases and violence grow within city communities. Global warming doesn’t help, as the Green House Effect has caused the polar ice to melt and major flooding to occur, including constant rainfall and the dangerous encroachment of oceanic waters onto continental shores. Beside these things, people seem to have grown desensitized due to the harsh conditions from overcrowding, as Le Guin’s characters take on systematic approaches to both solving problems and explaining them. For example, when George first meets Dr. Haber, Haber explains that he is a doctor who specializes in dreams, describing how dreams are important for the brain and how one both enters and exits the dream state, which scientists have named the “d-state.” Everything about dreams is systematic, organized, and even controlled. Haber even uses a machine to both record what a person is dreaming as well to influence what they dream about. One would think that dreams, the inner workings of our subconscious mind, would be spontaneous and private, beyond the control and manipulation of others—that, of all things, the mind was the one thing that could not be controlled, by people or institutions. The characters themselves describe them as being “incoherent, selfish, irrational” even “immoral”(pg. 14), impulsive and beyond understanding. So it strikes me as odd that there is a whole specialized field dedicated to studying, recording, and even controlling such dreams. In this rigid, futuristic world, even a person’s dreams—their subconscious—are systematic and regulated. With so many people in this overcrowded world, there is very little wiggle room for individualism, even in the mind.