The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula Le Guin

Published in 1971, The Lathe of Heaven has complete relevance for our time. Ursula Le Guin's perceptive references to overpopulation, global warming, and the ravages too many humans have wrought on our planet, are as immediate as if she'd written them last week. But those problems are incidental to the story, which is about human limits and hubris.

In Portland, Oregon in the near future, George Orr, an average man in every respect but one, seeks the assistance of a psychologist, Dr. Haber:
"Why do you think your mother didn't notice that reality had changed since last night?"
"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."

So Dr. Haber tests him with hypnosis, recording a short effective dream on his Augmentor, a machine he has built to record brain activity in different states; sure enough, George's dream changes the mural on the wall from Mt. Hood to a racehorse. The doctor undertakes to help George, but gradually seeks more and more to control his dreaming, to direct it. As you might guess, the subconscious, while suggestible, is also unpredictable, and Dr. Haber's "solutions" to world problems have their own terrible consequences, while George is caught between not wanting to be his tool, and believing his visits to Dr. Haber are his only alternative to suicide.

That's enough story to go on. Le Guin's writing has a wonderfully distinct voice:

When he came out of the portals of Willamette East Tower, the March sky was high and clear above the street canyons. The wind had come round to blow from the east, the dry desert wind that from time to time enlivened the wet, hot, sad, gray weather of the Valley of the Willamette.

Le Guin shows us the incremental corruption of power - Dr. Haber has good intentions, but they are his intentions, based on his view of how the world should be. Inevitably his sense of self-importance drowns out his ability to listen, and his faith in the machine he has perfected gives him the illusion of understanding George's mental processes as he dreams. Like humans of every era, Dr. Haber knows enough to be dangerous, but not enough to realize how dangerous his knowledge is.

He wants to be in charge, more than he wants to be part of a whole. In this election season, that seems so familiar. Yet, given that Le Guin wrote this book 45 years ago, I feel more hopeful than I have in months, that this too shall pass, and life will go on. I highly recommend this book!