Rainy Day, Dream Away
RAINY DAY, DREAM AWAY
Sometime in 1980 I caught a trippy sci-fi movie on television. It blew my mind with its psychedelic special effects and consciousness-altering ideas. In the movie, a man’s dreams rewrote reality. This impressed itself deeply on my memory. For a long time, I wanted to see the movie again, but I could never remember the title.
Eventually the mystery was solved. I often perused the science fiction sections of bookstores and so I happened upon The Lathe of Heaven. I started to read it – for something about dreams was guaranteed to get my attention – and soon enough I recognized it as the movie that blew my mind that evening in 1980. There it was. My trippy dream movie in its original form.
This is one of those books where I get something different from it each time I read it. From my first and most superficial reading I got exactly what I wanted: a mind-bending sci-fi story about alternate realities. Reading it years later, after my graduate studies in philosophy, I got a Taoist parable about the dangers of Utilitarianism. Still later, assigning it to my literature courses, I got a richly symbolic work of literary brilliance. Now I get all that and more. Now I am also sensitive to the metaphysics of the story.
Haber wants to be God, but isn’t. George doesn’t want to be God, but is. Of course, George is not actually God, but he might as well be. His dreams become reality. When the world ends, he dreams it back into existence. He might as well be Vishnu, the cosmic dreamer, the sleeping God who dreams the universe into existence.
I know that this is a Taoist story, that George is the uncarved block, the man who goes with the flow, yielding, desireless, soft as water. But I also see echoes of Hinduism in this story.
According to the Mandukya Upanishad, there are four states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and transcendence.
In waking life, consciousness is directed without. In dreaming life, consciousness is directed within. In deep sleep, consciousness is silent and the self is at peace. These are the ordinary states of consciousness. But there is a fourth state of consciousness: transcendence. It is pure, eternal, undifferentiated. This is the true state of the self.
Is this the state of consciousness George experiences as he lays on the floor of his darkened living room?
“He lay still, not asleep; somewhere else than sleep, father on, farther out, a place where there are no dreams. It was not the first time he had been there.”
George intuitively recognizes the oneness of all things. “Self is universe” says one of the extraterrestrial creations of his dreaming mind. “Thou art that,” says the Chandogya Upanishad. Atman is Brahman. Self is God, consciousness, all that is.
Unlike George, Haber thinks of God as a benevolent ruler who controls and directs the world. This is precisely why he wants to be God. And it is precisely why he is so alienated from the world and from himself. When Haber dreams, chaos ensues. The world becomes unmade because he cannot bear the knowledge that it is all a dream.
And what if it is? What if life is a dream? What if everything in the universe, everything past, present, and future, everything from the Big Bang to the Apocalypse, is all just a dream in the mind of God?
When Vishnu’s dream ends, the universe ends. Everything ceases to exist until he dreams again. Do George’s dreams likewise sustain the universe? Does he sleep on the cosmic sea, a lotus arising from his navel, Heather Lelache, like Lakshmi, massaging his feet as he dreams a new reality into existence? And if he does, if this is what reality is, does it matter?
To a rational mind, a utilitarian mind, in short, a mind like Haber’s mind, this is an existential nightmare. But to a mind that can embrace paradox, a mind that seeks harmony rather than control, it does not matter at all.