Entry 1-The Lathe of Heaven

           Orr stood up, but didn’t head for the door. “Did you ever happen to think, Dr. Haber,” he said, quietly enough but stuttering a little, “that there, there might be other people who dream the way I do? That reality’s being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the time—only we don’t know it? Only the dreamer knows it, and those who know his dream. If that’s true, I guess we’re lucky not knowing it. This is confusing enough.”                                                                                  pg 71

            Reading this passage it became clear to me that, while George Orr personally struggles with issues that are unique to his anomalous situation, his perspective reflects, in many ways, the same efforts that all of humanity undergoes at one point or another to try and explain the abstract concepts that make up our reality. Marked next to the above passage in my book is a quick scrawl of a few words, barely intelligible, which express what I was thinking with the initial impact of this speech. “Rethinks the nature of reality,” I had commented. I have no doubt, looking back, that the understood subject I had in mind was Orr, but these words actually reflect the thoughts that ran through my head at the time. I was rethinking, along with Orr, the nature of our collective reality. What does it mean to live in a world where the very essence of your life is defined by this abstract thing we call “time”?  This is often enough to think about without the variables to the accepted scheme that are presented in this story. And yet, by looking at the world through the perspective of Orr’s ethereal blue-gray eyes, we have the opportunity to think about our human condition in a different light. Does it really matter how my reality is created? Do the means define then end, or is reality defined purely by what I believe to be true? All of these essentially human suspicions arise in my consciousness as I ponder Orr’s situation, but this time they are presented with a new twist—the perspective of someone who is intrinsically connected to the process of creating reality. Would any of these questions have answers if I knew that there was a man or woman with George Orr’s ability in existence? Probably not. But, as my mind floods with new possibilities that will likely never amount to any resolution, I cannot help settling on Orr’s final words, “I guess we’re lucky not knowing…this is confusing enough.”