A passage from Ursula Le Guin’s 1971 “The Lathe of Heaven,” in which the “effective dreamer” George Orr is overcome with relief, while riding a packed subway car in a tunnel beneath the Willamette River: “So great a joy filled Orr that, among the forty-two persons who had been jamming into the car as he thought these things, the seven or eight pressed closest to him felt a slight but definite glow of benevolence or relief. The woman who had failed to get his strap handle away from him felt a blessed surcease of the sharp pain in her corn; the man squashed against him on the left thought suddenly of sunlight; the old man sitting crouched directly in front of him forgot, for a little, that he was hungry.”