The Dream Master

The Dream Master (1966), originally published as a novella titled He Who Shapes is a science-fiction novel by Roger Zelazny. The novella won a Nebula Award in 1965.

Related Topics:
Novella - Roger Zelazny - Nebula Award

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The story concerns a psychiatrist, Charles Render, using a new technology to help his patients. Instead of interpreting their dreams, after the fashion of Sigmund Freud, he enters and directs them. This involves an array of buttons on a board, over which his hand can travel in a sling propelled by unconscious movements, while he himself experiences the shared dream whose components he selects with the buttons.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Although successful, Render is in a state of withdrawal himself, after the death of his wife in a car crash. Into his ordered existence comes another psychiatrist, a beautiful woman, Eileen Shallott. She wishes to become a dream shaper herself, but has one severe disadvantage - she is blind, and has been since birth. To teach her to operate as a shaper, he must show her the shared dreaming directly. At first he is reluctant to help her, but his obvious attraction to her, coupled with a certain arrogance on his part, causes him to go ahead. This is despite the suicide of a colleague who just happened to have been her last mentor, and the downfall of another who foolishly attempted the process with a chimpanzee.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In the end, her powerful personality, and the visual fantasies of her mind, untrammeled by any reference to reality, are too much for him. Fleeing from her dream persona as The Lady of Shallot he falls into the pit of his own despair, finally facing the memory of the car crash. He struggles to conjure up the image of the button he must press to end the dream, but fades into oblivion. In the final scenes he himself is the subject of the treatment.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~