"Dream World" (1962)

Teresa was an attractive girl. She had a cute trick of popping the smallest rat out of her mouth so it could see what was coming into her stomach. She was bulbous and beautiful. “Like a sackful of skunk cabbage," Bascomb murmured admiringly in his head, and then flushed green at his forwardness of phrase. Teresa had protuberances upon protuberances and warts on warts, and hair all over her where she wasn't warts and bumps. “Like a latrine mop!" sighed Bascomb with true admiration. The cracked clang of Teresa's voice was music in the early morning. All was right with the earth again. Gone the hideous nightmare world when people had stood barefaced and lonely, without bodily friends or dependents. Gone that ghastly world of the sick blue sky and the near absence of entrancing odor. Bascomb attacked manfully his plate of prime carrion. And outside the pungent green rain fell incessantly.

“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” — W. I. Thomas, The Thomas Theorem, from The Child in America (1928, with Dorothy Swaine Thomas)

“Dream World” is interesting for at least three reasons. First, it’s a fun and memorable. Second, it may be Lafferty’s first complete treatment of the consensus reality theme. Third, it suggests that Lafferty was already pretty well disaffected with the world’s direction before the usual timelines start accounting for it. He wrote “Dream World” in July 1960, when Eisenhower was still president, years before the politics of the late 1960s led to works like Past Master (1968), or the media shifts of the ’60s and ’70s produced Not to Mention Camels (1976).

The story begins with Bascomb Swicegood. Swicegood is a man who prides himself on being a morning type. He feels strangely depressed, so he does what he presumably always does in such moments: he eats it off with a highly specific and gargantuan breakfast ritual at Cahill’s. There are four kinds of juice—grape, pineapple, orange, and apple; four orders of sausage; and a dozen pancakes with a quarter-pound of butter. As he eats, he questions the judgment of others, the first indication that he does not entirely agree with the consensus. The glutinous Swicegood unconsciously tunes in to the musical voice of a young woman named Teresa. She is telling her friend Agnes about a dream where she was “built like a sack. A sackful of skunk cabbage,” and her “mother was a monster . . . a wart-hoggish animal.” In this place, “it rained a dirty green rain that smelled like a four-letter word.”

Swicegood’s depression begins to lift with a jolt of recognition when Teresa mentions an extraordinary detail. He confronts her on the street: “Did you have things like live rats in your stomach to digest for you?” What was once “Teresa, it was only a dream” becomes a global crisis. Spread by a reporter’s article on the “Green-Rain Syndrome” and the “cacophonous ditty Green Rain,” the nightmare spreads into a universal menace. Society begins to fray, and “nervous disorders took a fearful rise.” Then the crisis reaches a tipping point. A voice from within the dream—one of the “repulsive cracked wart-hog voices”—says: “You are not dreaming,” it insists. “This is the real world.” That assertion introduces a doubt, which is finally addressed by a world leader’s broadcast. He explains that the dilemma is not a plague, but it does present a choice. Humanity must decide which reality will survive, because “whichever one wins, the other will have always been a dream, a momentary madness soon forgotten.”

In the final scene, the world has returned to normal with an embarrassed laugh. Bascomb Swicegood is back at Cahill’s. He feels excellent and is chatting with Teresa, who is no longer a stranger. She is, in his new eyes, bulbous and beautiful, with warts and protuberances, and “like a latrine mop.” The cracked clang of her voice is music to his ears. The world of blue skies and individual bodies has become that “hideous nightmare world when people had stood barefaced and lonely.” Bascomb attacks his plate of prime carrion, and Lafferty writes that outside the window, the “pungent green rain fell incessantly.”

As I noted above, one aspect of the story worth considering is that Lafferty already felt the world was making a wrong. This seems useful not dispelling the myth that his disaffection started in second half of the decade and with what followed, Vietnam, Vatican II, all of it. He was already thinking about consensus reality, and he felt disgust over the world people were creating after the war. That complicates the idea that there is a hard break in his later work around youth culture and media. I think it's probably more accurate to say that the cultural shifts of the late 1960s gave him new tools and tropes, but he was already grappling with them during the Eisenhower years.

Also interesting is the question of consensus reality itself. I’ve wondered why Lafferty used that exact term, and my working assumption is that he picked it up from the consensus historians, figures like Daniel Boorstin, the model for Barnaby Sheen. The kind of thing Lafferty is writing about is quite different from how consensus functions in that tradition of historiography, though there are similarities. When Lafferty talks about consensus, he means something closer to social construction. I take him to be a philosophical realist who builds extreme thought experiments in his fiction, and the distinction I see is the classical one between doxa and episteme. Lafferty is concerned that something has gone wrong with the weakening of the Church and the end of Christendom in the West. With that collapse, the authentic episteme of divine revelation has been eclipsed by a doxa that now operates without checks.

People had begun to think about this differently in Lafferty’s lifetime. The intellectual lineage of what we now call “consensus reality” really begins with the Thomas Theorem, first articulated by W. I. and Dorothy Swaine Thomas in 1928: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” This modern axiom is one Lafferty had a complicated relationship with. He certainly acknowledged that it captures something important—something “true,” if we use true as a metaphor. But he was also hostile to it. No amount of consensus was ever going to make him say that natural selection was true.

The Thomas Theorem was really the firstest-with-the-mostest. It introduced the idea that subjective belief could generate objective social facts—a cornerstone of the Chicago School of sociology and the broader Symbolic Interactionist tradition. For several decades, it drove a wide range of research agendas, most of them focused on the micro-sociological level. This work typically examined how individuals negotiate meaning through symbols and interactions. The next major leap came from phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, who, for American academics, popularized the concept of the “life-world,” the taken-for-granted, intersubjective reality that we all assume is “natural.” This is the very space where Lafferty’s "Dream World" begins and ends. Schutz’s primary interest was in how common-sense stocks of knowledge allow us to navigate the world we experience as shared and objective.

When Lafferty wrote "Dream World," the term social constructionism did not yet exist. It entered the academic lexicon in 1966 with the publication of The Social Construction of Reality by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. They synthesized the Thomas Theorem with Schutz’s phenomenology into a comprehensive macro-level theory. Berger and Luckmann aimed to model how social reality is built up, proposing a three-stage dialectical process: externalization, objectivation, and internalization. This model explains how human activity produces durable social institutions that, in turn, shape individuals who perceive that reality as something external and objectively real. After The Social Construction of Reality appeared, many of the ideas Lafferty treats fantastically were increasingly accepted as basic assumptions. It’s probably more useful, then, to read Lafferty’s work against the tradition that grows out of the Thomas Theorem than to frame it within the postmodern or poststructuralist movements that rose alongside it.

"Dream World," avant la lettre, fits closely with how people would later conceptualize social constructionism. Berger and Luckmann are still six years out from the story, but consider how their three-stage process for constructing reality maps onto the narrative. It begins with externalization: the moment Teresa speaks her private, subjective nightmare. That act moves it out of the realm of internal horror and into a shared, external topic, something Bascomb can overhear and confirm. Then comes objectivation. The shared anecdote takes on a life of its own, accelerated by institutions that reify it. Willy Wagoner’s article, as media pathogen, turns the dream into a social fact (the Green-Rain Syndrome) while popular culture contributes artifacts like the “Green Rain” ditty. The private experience becomes a public menace that now exists independently of the dreamers. The circuit completes in the story’s final scene with full internalization. The wart-hog world has been so thoroughly absorbed that it now structures Bascomb’s own consciousness. He loves the wart-hog world. He finds it beautiful. The socially constructed has become self-evident truth.