"Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in he moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.
But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into the air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to heap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking....
What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?" [Chapter I, "The Lathe of Heaven" by Ursula K. Le Guin]
As an instrumental opening, Le Guin makes a metaphoric reference to the jellyfish. Though it is written as a prose, I see it as a poetic verse where the vulnerability jellyfish is linked to the vulnerable essence of a human being. Peoples' reliability on the perpetual qualities of everyday life in the real world could directly relate to the "instability" that Le Guin points out in the statement above. Often times, life is seen as a perpetual wave or an "endless circle." For example in Gabriel Garcia Marquéz's "Hundred Years of Solitude," history repeats itself over and over again and characters become reflections of one another. And therefore, people, in order to shatter the monotony of their lives, venture off into the dream-like world of their imaginations. In the statement above, it says that "the light shines through (the jellyfish), and the dark enters it"; though the world of consciousness and that of unconsciousness are separated, the wall or the boundary between the two is sheer enough to be shattered, perhaps by the human's ability to dream, which, Le Guin says, bridges the "gulf" which is located "between the waking or hypnotized-trance condition and the dreaming state." Therefore, human beings are vulnerable as to differentiating between reality and non-reality because, like the jellyfish which is "tugged from anywhere to anywhere," human beings are also tugged back and forth between reality and dreams.
Though such introduction of the novel, I believe, set a great opening for the novel in which the main protagonist experiences his dreams altering reality, what really interested me was a statement Haber made to Orr during one of their later conversations.
"'I'm not in the judgment business, Mr. Orr. I'm after facts. And the events of the mind, believe me, to me are facts. When you see another man's dream as he dreams it recorded in black and white on the electroencephalograph, as I've done ten thousand times, you don't speak of dreams as 'unreal.' They exist; they are events; they leave a ark behind them.'" [Chapter II]
In an article titled, "Between Reality and Illusion" by Kentaro Ichinara (taken from the Guggenheim site: http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/interact/participate/youtube-play/the-take/moving-images/3735-between-reality-and-illusion), the writer makes a statement at the end which reads, "Through projected images, illusion permeates into and is mingled with reality, blurring any potential borders between them. This is the world we live in." It really made me question what is real and what is not. Ichinara also said in his article that, "Illusion is also a phenomenon involving our perception of reality, whether it is a 'true' representation of that reality or not" which related to when Haber said "your uncinscious mind is trying to tell your conscious mind something about reality--your reality, your life--which you aren't ready, rationally, to accept" [Chapter II]. Perhaps, we do have the ability to create a "new present" [Chapter III] which is shaped by the idea that memories could be altered. Personally, I do agree with the idea that memories could be altered... have you ever heard the case of a girl who accused her own father of raping and killing her best friend because she remembered something incorrectly? After all, the past, present, and the future are all made up of images which are stored in our brain as memories and if we do dream of different images, I believe that that dream will have the potential power to alter our memories, making the dream a part of our reality. Who knows, like the photographic image of Mount Hood on the wall of Haber's office, our reality also has the potential to be altered through the unconscious.
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