The Dream Master

Author: Roger Zelazny

Expanded from the Nebula Award winning novella, "He Who Shapes", this is a story about using dreams to both escape and change the world. Charles Render is the inventor of a new psychological technique: he hooks his patients into a giant simulation within which he controls their dreams. In an overpopulated world in which people are increasingly finding themselves unable to cope psychologically with reality, Render's ability to destroy their nightmares proves to be tremendously popular and successful. But then a new blind patient wants to use the simulation in order to see through other people's eyes, and Render finds her slowly starting to control his own dreams. Why it's on the list: Sigmund Freud could be the patron saint of the new wave, throughout the literature dreams are where inner space and outer reality interact. The idea of controlling dreams that Zelazny explores here, is therefore the archetypal new wave project of changing reality.