The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Discussion questions
1. What role do the chapter header quotes play throughout the novel? Which was your favorite? Why? Which quote, if any, do you think encapsulates the main theme of the novel?
2. Do you think that George has found a way to stop his dreams at the end? Does the importance lie in his ability to control the dreams or to exterminate them?
3. What would you do if you could change the world by dreaming? What would be your first dream? Would it be a power you would want to keep?
4. As much as his world changes around him, Orr is still able to remain true to his core being. How important do you think this stability is to the outcome? Was his therapy helpful in this aspect?
5. The main tension throughout the novel is between Orr and his therapist Dr. Haber. How do this tension and its inherent power struggle get resolved? In the end who is stronger?
6. Heather Lelache is the main female character. How does her character change, both in her view of Orr as well as her view of the world in which she lives? Why is she the only character who is, effectively, reborn?
7. How does Dr. Haber plan to use Orr's power? Why is he destroyed by his own plans in the end? What is his never-ending dream/nightmare?
8. Despite the changes that wreak havoc upon Orr's world, there are a few elements that remain constant. What are they and why do you think they are important?
9. Why do you think the aliens are the only ones who can save Orr? What do the aliens represent in his mind? Did they exist at all, unknown to humans, before George dreamed of them?
10. According to Haber, George is average in every way according to a battery of tests. Do you think he is? In what ways might he differ from the average person?
11. What is the significance of Mount Hood? It first appears when George changes the picture of Mount Hood on Haber’s office wall to a horse and then back again through his dreams. Later, Haber’s nightmare causes the dormant volcano to erupt.
12. Is Haber a good man, as George says several times? (Actually, it is usually phrased that he is not evil.) George says, “I can’t judge him” (p. 45). Should society judge his actions and motives?
13. Haber is annoyed when Heather Lelache comes to observe one of his dream therapy sessions with George and adjusts his dream suggestions (making them vaguer). Does this suggest that he feels guilty about what he’s doing? What other reason could there be for his feeling of resentment towards Heather?
14. Once he has been in treatment for some time and has had several effective dreams with large impacts, George observes, “Haber had a moral line on him.” Do you think this is true, since George is participating in the experiment under legal compulsion?
15. George says the chance of power has corrupted Haber. Do you think this is true? Would any basically decent person have succumbed to the temptation to change the world if presented with a similar opportunity?
16. How does Le Guin draw Heather Lelache’s character? While George and Haber are consistent in their character, her personality and behavior varies more in the different worlds/time lines. How do your feelings towards her change throughout the novel?
17. When Heather finds George at his cabin and tells him she believes his dreams are affecting reality, she says it is not his fault and he shouldn’t feel guilty. Do you agree with her? Why or why not?
18. The “ideal” world that Haber creates through George’s dreams has many nightmarish aspects. For example, those who are ill or carry genes for fatal diseases are euthanized. What does it say about a society that allows this to happen and encourages and even obliges the average citizen to take part in such killings? Is everyone a killer if given societal permission? How does this scenario compare with The Unit, in which society’s undesirables are put out of sight before they are killed?
19. Haber says that when his own dreams can be effectivized “…this world will be like heaven, and men will be like gods!” George replies, “We are, we are already.” (p. 150). What does he mean? Do you agree with him?
20. At another point, reflecting on Haber’s question to him (whether saving a snakebite victim was interfering in the way things should be), George thinks, “You have to help another person. But it’s not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you’re doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you’re right and your motives are good isn’t enough. You have to…be in touch. He isn’t in touch. No one else, no thing even, has an existence of its own for him; he sees the world only as a means to his end” (pg.155-56). What do you think of George’s world view? Are there areas in which humans should not interfere or seek to change the world?
21. Why and how is George able to bring Heather to life again when she has disappeared? What is the secret to controlling dream effectiveness that the alien tries to share with George?
22. Reflecting on a quote from a T.S. Eliot poem, the narrator says, “A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.” What does this mean? Do you agree or disagree, and why?
23. The Lathe of Heaven was first published in 1971. What do you think of the future world Le Guin has created? Which of her visions are of concern to us today? Does this still seem like a plausible future for us today?
About the author
Ursula K. Le Guin has written over 50 books, including novels, poetry, children's books, and short stories collections, mainly fantasy and science fiction. She is one of science fiction's most popular and respected writers, having received five Hugo awards and six Nebula awards, among many other prizes. In 2002, Le Guin received the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in a body of short fiction. First published in the 1960s, her works explore Taoist, anarchist, ethnographic, feminist, psychological and sociological themes. They often feature fantastic universes and fictional societies and explore dualities and concepts of two opposing forces, like chaos versus order or harmony versus rebellion. Her most famous novels include the Earthsea Trilogy; The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), part of the Hainish Cycle; and The Lathe of Heaven (1971).
The Lathe of Heaven chapter header quotes
Confucius and you are both dreams, and I who say you are dreams am a dream myself. This is a paradox. Tomorrow a wise man may explain it; that tomorrow will not be for ten thousand generations.
— Chuang Tse: II
The portal of God is non-existence. — Chuang Tse: XXIII
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.
— Chuang Tse: XXIII
Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (expect 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
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When the Great Way is lost, we get benevolence and righteousness. — Lao Tse: XVIII
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
Daydream, which is to thought as the nebula is to the star, borders on sleep, and is concerned with it as its frontier. An atmosphere inhabited by living transparencies: there’s a beginning of the unknown. But beyond it the Possible opens out, immense. Other beings, other facts, are there. No supernaturalism, only the occult continuation of infinite nature….Sleep is in contact with the Possible, which we also call the improbably. The world of the night is a world. Night, as night, is a universe….The dark things of the unknown world become neighbors of man, whether by true communication or by a visionary enlargement of the distances of the abyss…and the sleeper, not quite seeing, not quite unconscious, glimpses the strange animalities, weird vegetations, terrible or radiant pallors, ghosts, masks, figures, hydras, confusions, moonless moonlights, obscure unmakings of miracle, growths and vanishing within a murky depth, shapes floating in shadow, the whole mystery which we call Dreaming, and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality. The dream is the aquarium of Night.
— Victor Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la Mer
Heaven and Earth are not humane. — Lao Tse: V
Those who dream of feasting wake to lamentation. — Chuang Tse: II
Il descend, réveillé, l’autre côte du rêve. (He descends, awake, to the other side of the dream.)
— Victor Hugo, Les Contempations
Starlight asked Non-Entity, “Master, do you exist? Or do you not exist?” He got no answer to his question, however…. — Chuang Tse: XXII