The Art of Dreaming (24 page)

I engaged
my best efforts to follow this guide, but the results did not pan out as I
thought they would. I lacked the necessary control over my
dreaming
attention, and I could not quite remember the details of my sleeping attire.
Yet something else was definitely at work; somehow I always knew whether my
dreams were ordinary dreams or not. The outstanding aspect of the dreams that
were not just ordinary dreams was that my body lay asleep in bed while my
consciousness observed it.

A notable
feature of these dreams was my room. It was never like my room in the daily
world but an enormous empty hall with my bed at one end. I used to soar over a
considerable distance to be at the side of the bed where my body lay. The
moment I was next to it, a windlike force used to make me hover over it, like a
hummingbird. At times the room used to vanish; disappear piece by piece until
only my body and the bed were left. At other times, I used to experience a
complete loss of volition. My
dreaming
attention seemed then to function
independently of me. Either it was completely absorbed by the first item it
encountered in the room or it seemed unable to decide what to do. In those
instances, I had the sensation that I was helplessly floating, going from item
to item.

The voice
of the
dreaming
emissary explained to me once that all the elements of
the dreams, which were not just commonplace dreams, were really energy
configurations different from those of our normal world. The emissary's voice
pointed out that, for example, the walls were liquid. It urged me then to
plunge into one of them.

Without
thinking twice, I dived into a wall as if I were diving into a huge lake. I did
not feel the waterlike wall; what I felt was not a physical sensation of
plunging into a body of water either. It was more like the thought of diving
and the visual sensation of going through liquid matter. I was going,
head-first, into something that opened up, like water does, as I kept moving
downward.

The
sensation of going down, headfirst, was so real that I began to wonder how long
or how deep or how far I was diving. From my point of view, I spent an eternity
in there. I saw clouds and rocklike masses of matter suspended in a waterlike
substance. There were some glowing, geometric objects that resembled crystals,
and blobs of the deepest primary colors I had ever seen. There were also zones
of intense light and others of pitch blackness. Everything went by me, either slowly
or at a fast speed. I had the thought that I was viewing the cosmos. At the
instant of that thought, my speed increased so immensely that everything became
blurred, and all of a sudden, I found myself awake with my nose smack against
the wall of my room.

Some hidden
fear urged me to consult with don Juan. He listened to me, hanging on every
word.

"You
need to do some drastic maneuvering at this point," he said. "The
dreaming
emissary has no business interfering with your
dreaming
practices. Or
rather, you should not, under any conditions, permit it to do so."

"How
can I stop it?"

"Perform
a simple but difficult maneuver. Upon entering into
dreaming
, voice out
loud your desire not to have the
dreaming
emissary anymore."

"Does
that mean, don Juan, that I will never hear it again?"

"Positively.
You'll get rid of it forever."

"But
is it advisable to get rid of it forever?"

"It
most certainly is, at this point."

With those
words, don Juan involved me in a most disturbing dilemma. I did not want to put
an end to my relationship with the emissary, but, at the same time, I wanted to
follow don Juan's advice. He noticed my hesitation.

"I
know it's a very difficult affair," he conceded, "but if you don't do
it, the inorganic beings will always have a line on you. If you want to avoid
this, do what I said, and do it now."

During my
next
dreaming
session, as I prepared myself to utter my intent, the
emissary's voice interrupted me. It said, "If you refrain from stating
your request, I promise you never to interfere with your
dreaming
practices and talk to you only if you ask me direct questions."

I instantly
accepted its proposition and sincerely felt that it was a good deal. I was even
relieved it had turned out this way. I was afraid, however, that don Juan was
going to be disappointed.

"It
was a good maneuver," he remarked and laughed. "You were sincere; you
really intended to voice your request. To be sincere is all that was required.
There was, essentially, no need for you to eliminate the emissary. What you
wanted was to corner it into proposing an alternative way, convenient to you. I
am sure the emissary won't interfere anymore."

He was
right. I continued my
dreaming
practices without any meddling from the
emissary. The remarkable consequence was that I began to have dreams in which
my dream rooms were my room in the daily world, with one difference: in the
dreams, my room was always so slanted, so distorted that it looked like a giant
cubist painting; obtuse and acute angles were the rule instead of the normal right
angles of walls, ceiling, and floor. In my lopsided room, the very slant,
created by the acute or obtuse angles, was a device to display prominently some
absurd, superfluous, but real detail; for example, intricate lines in the
hardwood floor, or weather discolorations in the wall paint, or dust spots on
the ceiling, or smudged fingerprints on the edge of a door.

In those
dreams, I unavoidably got lost in the waterlike universes of the detail pointed
out by the slant. During my entire
dreaming
practices, the profusion of
detail in my room was so immense and its pull so intense that it instantly made
me dive into it.

At the
first free moment I had, I was at don Juan's place, consulting him about this
state.

"I
can't overcome my room," I said to him after I had given him the details
of my
dreaming
practices.

"What
gives you the idea you have to overcome it?" he asked with a grin.

"I
feel that I have to move beyond my room, don Juan."

"But
you are moving beyond your room. Perhaps you should ask yourself whether you
are caught again in interpretations. What do you think moving means in this
case?"

I told him
walking from my room to the street had been such a haunting dream for me that I
felt a real need to do it again.

"But
you are doing greater things than that," he protested. "You are going
to unbelievable regions. What else do you want?"

I tried to
explain to him that I had a physical urge to move away from the trap of detail.
What upset me the most was my incapacity to free myself from whatever caught my
attention. To have a modicum of volition was the bottom line for me.

A very long
silence followed. I waited to hear more about the trap of detail. After all, he
had warned me about its dangers.

"You
are doing fine," he finally said. "Dreamers take a very long time to
perfect their energy bodies. And this is exactly what's at stake here:
perfecting your energy body."

Don Juan
explained that the reason my energy body was compelled to examine detail and
get inextricably stuck in it was its inexperience, its incompleteness. He said
that sorcerers spend a lifetime consolidating the energy body by letting it
sponge up everything possible.

"Until
the energy body is complete and mature, it is self-absorbed," don Juan
went on. "It can't get free from the compulsion to be absorbed by
everything. But if one takes this into consideration, instead of fighting the
energy body, as you're doing now, one can lend it a hand."

"How
can I do that, don Juan?"

"By
directing its behavior, that is to say, by stalking it."

He
explained that since everything related to the energy body depends on the
appropriate position of the assemblage point, and since
dreaming
is
nothing else but the means to displace it, stalking is, consequently, the way
to make the assemblage point stay put on the perfect position, in this case,
the position where the energy body can become consolidated and from which it
can finally emerge.

Don Juan
said that the moment the energy body can move on its own, sorcerers assume that
the optimum position of the assemblage point has been reached. The next step is
to stalk it, that is, to fixate it on that position in order to complete the
energy body. He remarked that the procedure is simplicity itself. One intends
to stalk it.

Silence and
looks of expectation followed that statement. I expected him to say more, and
he expected me to have understood what he had said. I had not.

"Let
your energy body intend to reach the optimum
dreaming
position," he
explained. "Then, let your energy body intend to stay at that position and
you will be stalking."

He paused
and, with his eyes, urged me to consider his statement.

"Intending
is the secret, but you already know that," he said. "Sorcerers
displace their assemblage points through intending and fixate them, equally,
through intending. And there is no technique for intending. One intends through
usage."

To have
another of my wild assumptions about my worth as a sorcerer was unavoidable at
that point. I had boundless confidence that something was going to put me on
the right track to intend the fixation of my assemblage point on the ideal
spot. I had accomplished in the past all kinds of successful maneuvers without
knowing how I performed them. Don Juan himself had marveled at my ability or my
luck, and I was sure this was going to be one of those instances. I was gravely
mistaken. No matter what I did, or how long I waited, I had no success
whatsoever in fixing my assemblage point on any spot, much less on the ideal
one.

After
months of serious but unsuccessful struggling, I gave up.

"I really
believed I could do it," I said to don Juan, the moment I was in his
house. "I am afraid that nowadays I am more of an egomaniac than
ever."

"Not
really," he said with a smile. "What happens is that you are caught
in another of your routinary misinterpretations of terms. You want to find the
ideal spot, as if you were finding your lost car keys. Then you want to tie
your assemblage point, as if you were tying your shoes. The ideal spot and the
fixation of the assemblage point are metaphors. They have nothing to do with
the words used to describe them."

He asked me
then to tell him the latest events of any
dreaming
practices. The first
thing I mentioned was that my urge to be absorbed by detail had subsided
notably. I said that perhaps because I moved in my dreams, compulsively and
incessantly, the movement might have been what always managed to stop me before
I plunged into the detail I was observing. To be stopped in that fashion gave
me the opportunity to examine the act of being absorbed by detail. I came to
the conclusion that inanimate matter actually possesses an immobilizing force,
which I saw as a beam of dull light that kept me pinned down. For example, many
times some minute mark on the walls or in the wood lines of the hardwood floor
of my room used to send a line of light that transfixed me; from the moment my
dreaming
attention was focused on that light, the whole dream rotated around that minute
mark. I saw it enlarged perhaps to the size of the cosmos. That view used to
last until I woke up, usually with my nose pressed against the wall or the wood
floor. My own observations were that, in the first place, the detail was real,
and, in the second place, I seemed to have been observing it while I was
asleep.

Don Juan
smiled and said, "All this is happening to you because the forging of your
energy body was completed the moment it moved by itself. I didn't tell you
that, but I insinuated it. I wanted to know whether or not you were capable of
finding it out by yourself, which, of course, you did."

I had no
idea what he meant. Don Juan scrutinized me in his usual manner. His
penetrating gaze scanned my body.

"What
exactly did I find out by myself, don Juan?" I was forced to ask.

"You
found out that your energy body had been completed," he answered.

"I
didn't find out anything of the kind, I assure you."

"Yes,
you did. It started some time ago, when you couldn't find a guide to validate
the realness of your dreams, but then something went to work for you and let
you know whether you were having a regular dream. That something was your
energy body. Now, you despair that you couldn't find the ideal spot to fix your
assemblage point. And I tell you that you did. The proof is that, by moving
around, your energy body curtailed its obsession with detail."

I was
nonplussed. I could not even ask one of my feeble questions.

"What
comes next for you is a sorcerers' gem," don Juan went on. "You are
going to practice seeing energy, in your
dreaming
. You have fulfilled
the drill for the third gate of
dreaming
: moving your energy body by
itself. Now you are going to perform the real task:
seeing
energy with
your energy body.