Terran eight-hour work day. Their dreaming is not restricted to times when they are asleep, with adept dreamers being able to dream while wide awake as well. The visions they see while dreaming direct and shape their waking behavior, which Selver describes as "balanc[ing] your sanity ... on the double support, the fine balance, of reason and dream; once you have learned that, you cannot unlearn it any more than you can unlearn to think." The leaders among the Athsheans are the best dreamers, and they consider individuals able to interpret dreams to be gods. The Athshean word for "god" is the same as the word for "translator", representing this role that "gods have" in their society. Spivack writes that Selver becomes such a god during the events of The Word for World is Forest, but his interpretation of dreams is a negative one, because it tells the Athsheans how to kill. The Athsheans perceive the Terrans as an insane people, partly because of the disconnect amongst the Terrans between conscious, rational thinking and subconscious drives. The Terrans frequent use of hallucinogens is seen as the closest they are able to get to understanding their own subconscious. The psychological equilibrium which their dreaming gives the Athsheans is portrayed as the reason why they are able to live in balance with their ecosystem. Reviewer Ian Watson states that the Athshean forest itself is a metaphor for consciousness in the novel. The Terrans, distanced from their own tangled subconscious, are afraid of the forest, and seek to tear it down. The Athsheans, in contrast, are integrated with it at a subconscious level. The entire forest is also seen as a collective Athshean consciousness. Although the forest in The Word for World is Forest is not actually sentient, Le Guin explores the idea of a sentient forest further in the short story "Vaster than Empires and More Slow", which shares many thematic parallels with the former. Colonialism and anti-war themes Le Guin was strongly opposed to and troubled by the Vietnam War, a reaction which played a large part in the tone of the novel. The tone of the novel is often harsh and hard-hitting, playing off the anger in the United States at American military actions in Vietnam. The tension between violence and non-violence is a part of the dialectic theme in the novel, of a constant tension between opposites. Through most