| “ | Progress, George. Progress. We have made more progress in six weeks than humanity has made in the past six thousand years. | „ |
| ~ Dr. William Haber |
Dr. William Haber is the psychiatrist assigned to treat the protagonist George Orr in the 1971 science fantasy novel The Lathe of Heaven and it's 1980 movie adaptation, who discovers the ability of Orr's dreams to alter reality and seeks to use it to change the world for the better.
Haber begins as an ambitious but underrecognized sleep researcher, but this changes when he hypnotizes Orr into dreaming of realities that improve Haber’s status until he becomes the most powerful person on the planet. Though Haber initially dismisses Orr’s effective dreams, he changes his mind after one of Orr’s dreams alters a mural on his wall during one of their sessions. Though Haber cares about the common good, his desire for power and control corrupts his altruism. As such, under the guise of administering treatment, Haber hypnotizes Orr, feeding him suggestions to make his effective dreams morph reality into Haber’s vision of a perfect world. Meanwhile, Haber records Orr’s brainwaves with the Augmentor so that he might one day induce conscious effective dreaming in himself and gain complete control of reality. Haber successfully uses Orr’s dreams to eliminate overpopulation, racism, and global war; however, these utopic accomplishments are always achieved at an unforeseen, dystopic cost. In response to Haber’s suggestion to dream away overpopulation, for example, Orr creates a plague that kills six billion people, and he produces an alien invasion to end global conflict. Such setbacks never bother Haber, who uses the promise of a collectively better world to justify any suffering his hypnosuggestions create.
Toward the end of the novel, once Haber unlocks the key to effective dreaming, he “cures” Orr by hypnotizing him to dream that his dreams no longer change reality. Haber then ignores Orr’s advice to consult with the Aliens before inducing an effective dream in himself, and his effective dream becomes a nightmare that causes reality to collapse. Though Orr disconnects Haber from the Augmentor in time to restore reality to relative coherence, Haber’s new knowledge of unreality leaves him institutionalized in a broken, catatonic state.