The Art of Dreaming (13 page)

Don Juan
then gave me a new version of what had happened to me as I gazed at the
mesquite tree. He said that I began by perceiving the energy of the tree. On
the subjective level, however, I believed I was
dreaming
because I
employed
dreaming
techniques to perceive energy. He asserted that to use
dreaming
techniques in the world of everyday life was one of the old
sorcerers' most effective devices. It made perceiving energy directly
dreamlike, instead of totally chaotic, until a moment when something rearranged
perception and the sorcerer found himself facing a new world - the very thing
that had happened to me.

I told him
about the thought I'd had, which I had barely dared to think: that the scenery
I was viewing was not a dream, nor was it our daily world.

"It
wasn't," he said. "I've been saying this to you over and over, and
you think that I am merely repeating myself. I know how difficult it is for the
mind to allow mindless possibilities to become real. But new worlds exist! They
are wrapped one around the other, like the skins of an onion. The world we
exist in is but one of those skins."

"Do
you mean, don Juan, that the goal of your teaching is to prepare me to go into
those worlds?"

"No. I
don't mean that. We go into those worlds only as an exercise. Those journeys
are the antecedents of the sorcerers of today. We do the same
dreaming
that the old sorcerers used to do, but at one moment we deviate into new
ground. The old sorcerers preferred the shifts of the assemblage point, so they
were always on more or less known, predictable ground. We prefer the movements
of the assemblage point. The old sorcerers were after the human unknown. We are
after the nonhuman unknown."

"I haven't
gotten to that yet, have I?"

"No.
You are only beginning. And at the beginning everyone has to go through the old
sorcerers' steps. After all, they were the ones who invented
dreaming
."

"At
what point will I then begin to learn the new sorcerers' brand of
dreaming
?"

"You
have enormous ground yet to cover. Years from now perhaps. Besides, in your
case, I have to be extraordinarily careful. In character, you are definitely
linked to the old sorcerers. I've said this to you before, but you always manage
to avoid my probes. Sometimes I even think that some alien energy is advising
you, but then I discard the idea. You are not devious."

"What
are you talking about, don Juan?"

"You've
done, unwittingly, two things that worry the hell out of me. You traveled with
your energy body to a place outside this world the first time you dreamt. And
you walked there! And then you traveled with your energy body to another place
outside this world, but parting from the awareness of the daily world."

"Why
would that worry you, don Juan?"

"
dreaming
is too easy for you. And that is a damnation if we don't watch it. It leads to
the human unknown. As I said to you, modern-day sorcerers strive to get to the
nonhuman unknown."

"What
can the nonhuman unknown be?"

"Freedom
from being human. Inconceivable worlds that are outside the band of man but
that we still can perceive. This is where modern sorcerers take the side road.
Their predilection is what's outside the human domain. And what are outside
that domain are all-inclusive worlds, not merely the realm of birds or the
realm of animals or the realm of man, even if it be the unknown man. What I am
talking about are worlds, like the one where we live; total worlds with endless
realms."

"Where
are those worlds, don Juan? In different positions of the assemblage
point?"

"Right.
In different positions of the assemblage point, but positions sorcerers arrive
at with a movement of the assemblage point, not a shift. Entering into those
worlds is the type of
dreaming
only sorcerers of today do. The old
sorcerers stayed away from it, because it requires a great deal of detachment
and no self-importance whatsoever. A price they couldn't afford to pay.

"For
the sorcerers who practice
dreaming
today,
dreaming
is freedom to
perceive worlds beyond the imagination."

"But,
what's the point of perceiving all that?"

"You
already asked me, today, the same question. You speak like a true merchant.
What's the risk? you ask. What's the percentage gain to my investment? Is it
going to better me?"

"There
is no way to answer that. The merchant mind does commerce. But freedom cannot
be an investment. Freedom is an adventure with no end, in which we risk our
lives and much more for a few moments of something beyond words, beyond
thoughts or feelings."

"I
didn't ask that question in that spirit, don Juan. What I want to know is what
can be the driving force to do all this for a lazy bum like myself?"

"To
seek freedom is the only driving force I know. Freedom to fly off into that
infinity out there. Freedom to dissolve; to lift off; to be like the flame of a
candle, which, in spite of being up against the light of a billion stars,
remains intact, because it never pretended to be more than what it is: a mere
candle."

Faithful to
my agreement to wait for don Juan to initiate any comment on
dreaming
,
only in cases of necessity did I ask him for advice. Ordinarily, though, he not
only seemed reluctant to touch the subject but was somehow displeased with me
about it. In my estimation, a confirmation of his disapproval was the fact that
whenever we talked about my
dreaming
activities, he always minimized the
import of anything I had accomplished.

For me, at
that time, the animate existence of inorganic beings had become the most
crucial aspect of my
dreaming
practices. After encountering them in my
dreams, and especially after my bout with them in the desert around don Juan's
house, I should have been more willing to take their existence as a serious
affair. But all these events had quite the opposite effect on me. I became
adamant and doggedly denied the possibility that they existed.

Then I had
a change of heart and decided to conduct an objective inquiry about them. The
method of this inquiry required that I first compile a record of everything
that transpired in my
dreaming
sessions, then use that record as a
matrix to find out if my
dreaming
proved or disproved anything about the
inorganic beings. I actually wrote down hundreds of pages of meticulous but
meaningless details, when it should have been clear to me that the evidence of
their existence had been gathered almost as soon as I had started my inquiry.

It took but
a few sessions for me to discover that what I thought to be don Juan's casual
recommendation - to suspend judgment and let the inorganic beings come to me -
was, in fact, the very procedure used by the sorcerers of antiquity to attract
them. By leaving me to find it out for myself, don Juan was simply following
his sorcery training. He had remarked time and time again that it is very
difficult to make the self give up its strongholds except through practice. One
of the self's strongest lines of defense is indeed our rationality, and this is
not only the most durable line of defense when it comes to sorcery actions and
explanations but also the most threatened. Don Juan believed that the existence
of inorganic beings is a foremost assailant of our rationality.

In my
dreaming
practices, I had an established course, which I followed every single day
without deviation. I aimed first at observing every conceivable item of my
dreams, then at changing dreams. I can say in sincerity that I observed
universes of detail in dreams upon dreams. As a matter of course, at one given
moment my
dreaming
attention began to wane, and my
dreaming
sessions ended either in my falling asleep and having regular dreams, in which
I had no
dreaming
attention whatsoever, or in my waking up and not being
able to sleep at all.

From time
to time, however, as don Juan had described it, a current of foreign energy, a
scout, as he called it, was injected into my dreams. Being forewarned helped me
to adjust my
dreaming
attention and be on the alert. The first time I
noticed foreign energy, I was
dreaming
about shopping in a department
store. I was going from counter to counter looking for antiques. I finally
found one. The incongruence of looking for antiques in a department store was
so obvious that it made me chuckle, but since I had found one, I forgot about
that incongruence. The antique was the handle of a walking stick. The salesman
told me that it was made of iridium, which he called one of the hardest
substances in the world. It was a carved piece: the head and shoulders of a
monkey. It looked like jade to me. The salesman was insulted when I insinuated
that it might be jade, and to prove his point he hurled the object, with all
his strength, against the cement floor. It did not break but bounced like a
ball and then sailed away, spinning like a Frisbee. I followed it. It
disappeared behind some trees. I ran to look for it, and I found it, stuck on
the ground. It had been transformed into an extraordinarily beautiful, deep
green and black, full-length walking stick.

I coveted
it. I grabbed it and struggled to pull it out of the ground before anyone else
came along. But, hard as I tried, I could not make it budge. I was afraid I
would break it if I attempted to pry it loose by shaking it back and forth. So
I began to dig around it with my bare hands. As I kept on digging, it kept on
melting, until only a puddle of green water was left in its place. I stared at
the water; it suddenly seemed to explode. It turned into a white bubble, and
then it was gone. My dream continued into other images and details, which were
not outstanding, although they were crystal clear.

When I told
don Juan about this dream, he said, "You isolated a scout. Scouts are more
numerous when our dreams are average, normal ones. The dreams of dreamers are
strangely free from scouts. When they appear, they are identifiable by the
strangeness and incongruity surrounding them."

"Incongruity,
in what manner, don Juan?"

"Their
presence doesn't make any sense."

"Very
few things make sense in a dream."

"Only
in average dreams are things nonsensical. I would say that this is so because
more scouts are injected then, because average people are subject to a greater
barrage from the unknown."

"Do
you know why is that so, don Juan?"

"In my
opinion, what takes place is a balance of forces. Average people have
stupendously strong barriers to protect themselves against those onslaughts.
Barriers such as worries about the self. The stronger the barrier, the greater
the attack.

"Dreamers,
by contrast, have fewer barriers and fewer scouts in their dreams. It seems
that in dreamers' dreams nonsensical things disappear, perhaps to ensure that
dreamers catch the presence of scouts."

Don Juan
advised me to pay close attention and remember every single possible detail of
the dream I had had. He even made me repeat what I had told him.

"You
baffle me," I said. "You don't want to hear anything about my
dreaming
,
and then you do. Is there any order to your refusals and acceptances?"

"You
bet there is order behind all this," he said. "Chances are, you'll do
the same someday to another dreamer. Some items are of key importance because
they are associated with the spirit. Others are entirely unimportant by reason
of being associated with our indulging personality."

"The
first scout you isolate will always be present, in any form, even iridium. By
the way, what's iridium?"

"I
don't really know," I said in total sincerity.

"There
you are! And what will you say if it turns out to be one of the strongest
substances in the world?"

Don Juan's
eyes shone with delight, while I nervously laughed at that absurd possibility,
which, I learned later, is true.

I began to
notice from then on the presence of incongruous items in my dreams. Once I had
accepted don Juan's categorization of foreign energy in dreams, I totally
agreed with him that incongruous items were foreign invaders of my dreams. Upon
isolating them, my
dreaming
attention always focused on them with an
intensity that did not occur under any other circumstances.

Another
thing I noticed was that every time foreign energy invaded my dreams, my
dreaming
attention had to work hard to turn it into a known object. The handicap of
my
dreaming
attention was its inability to accomplish fully such a
transformation; the end result was a bastardized item, nearly unknown to me.
The foreign energy then dissipated quite easily, the bastardized item vanished,
turning into a blob of light, which was quickly absorbed by other pressing
details of my dreams.

When I
asked don Juan to comment on what was happening to me, he said, "At this
point in your
dreaming
, scouts are reconnoiterers sent by the inorganic
realm. They are very fast, meaning that they don't stay long."