A year ago people were talking about how low the dams were in this country due to the lack of rain. This year, it’s a completely different picture. It has been a very rainy year, and the residents of Tokyo are feeling like they are in Seattle. So now we are all Sleepless in Tokyo. Which reminds me of the ancient PBS miniseries “The Lathe of Heaven” based on the 1971 novel by Ursula K. LeGuin.The film starts out in an always-rainy Portland, Oregon of the not too distant future (actually, 2008 is probably about the time represented in the late 70s flick). The protagonist, George Orr, has the peculiar talent of “effective dreaming”— that is, his dreams affect reality. The twist, however, is that nobody knows that reality is being changed right from under everyone's feet whenever George dreams a new dream that changes everything—nobody except the dreamer, George himself. The humor in the film comes when the people around George blithely comment on the new reality as if nothing has changed. For example, one rainy day George goes into his psychiatrist’s office and dreams that Portland is, and has been for years, a sun-drenched metropolis. When he wakes up, that’s exactly how everyone has experienced it. The psychiatrist’s secretary walks into the room wearing a cool sundress when only moments before she was donning a heavily padded raincoat. It is a conspiracy made up by the dreamer in his own brain which nobody else knows about. The idea has been used in numerous Star Trek episodes, to the extent that the characters find themselves wound up in layer upon layer of changed realities. Changing Reality Through Dreaming. The Internet itself provides a good analogy of this idea. So the LeGuin novel was certainly prophetic. We can easily find ourselves lost in cyberspace after a few hyperlink clicks. The only difference is that everyone is now an “effective dreamer,” dreaming up this constantly changing cyber landscape, dreaming from one drought-plagued year to a rainy one in a bustling futuristic metropolis. As Willy Wonka said, "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”