fifty years ago Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven entered a world witnessing the once-hopeful dreams of the sixties curdling into the nightmare of neoliberal capitalism. First published in 1971, the novel puts Le Guin’s distinctively artful combination of psychological and sociological themes with dynamic science fiction storytelling on full display, imagining a world in which dreaming could quite literally effect massive social change, for good as well as for ill. In its own moment, this message carried a cutting critique of hippie political idealism: while John Lennon was busy the same year singing, “You may say I’m a dreamer / but I’m not the only one,” the growing reality of fracturing left-wing movements unable to carry out mass social change was becoming more apparent by the day. Reread today in our own moment of accumulating crises, The Lathe of Heaven invites us to reflect on the necessary but slippery role of radical imagination in the arsenal of progressive social movements, rendering dreams both an essential source of hope and a potential site for wishful thinking or frightful authoritarian deformation.