The Art of Dreaming (28 page)

I had no
comment. I was suddenly on pins and needles, hanging on every one of his words.

"By
yourself, you don't have enough energy to perform the last task of the third
gate of
dreaming
," he went on, "but you and Carol Tiggs
together can certainly do what I have in mind."

He paused,
deliberately egging me on with his silence to ask what he had in mind. I did.
His laughter only increased the ominous mood.

"I
want you two to break the boundaries of the normal world and, using awareness
as an energetic element, enter into another," he said. "This breaking
and entering amounts to stalking the stalkers. Using awareness as an element of
the environment bypasses the influence of the inorganic beings, but it still
uses their energy."

He did not
want to give me any more information, in order not to influence me, he said. His
belief was that the less I knew beforehand the better off I would be. I
disagreed, but he assured me that, in a pinch, my energy body was perfectly
capable of taking care of itself.

We went
from the restaurant to the lawyer's office. Don Juan quickly concluded his
business, and we were, in no time at all, in a taxi on our way to the airport.
Don Juan informed me that Carol Tiggs was arriving on a flight from Los Angeles, and that she was coming to Mexico City exclusively to fulfill this last
dreaming
task with me.

"The valley of Mexico is a superb place to perform the kind of sorcery feat you are after,"
he commented.

"You
haven't told me yet what the exact steps to follow are," I said.

He didn't
answer me. We did not speak any more, but while we waited for the plane to
land, he explained the procedure I had to follow. I had to go to Carol's room
at the Regis Hotel, across the street from our hotel, and, after getting into a
state of total inner silence, with her I had to slip gently into
dreaming
,
voicing our intent to go to the realm of the inorganic beings.

I
interrupted to remind him that I always had to wait for a scout to show up
before I could manifest out loud my intent to go to the inorganic beings'
world.

Don Juan
chuckled and said, "You haven't dreamt with Carol Tiggs yet. You'll find
out that it's a treat. Sorceresses don't need any props. They just go to that
world whenever they want to; for them, there is a scout on permanent
call."

I could not
bring myself to believe that a sorceress would be able to do what he was
asserting. I thought I had a degree of expertise in handling the inorganic
beings' world. When I mentioned to him what was going through my mind, he
retorted that I had no expertise whatsoever when it came to what sorceresses
are capable of.

"Why
do you think I had Carol Tiggs with me to pull you bodily out of that
world?" he asked. "Do you think it was because she's beautiful?"

"Why
was it, don Juan?"

"Because
I couldn't do it myself; and for her, it was nothing. She has a knack for that
world." "Is she an exceptional case, don Juan?"

"Women
in general have a natural bent for that realm; sorceresses are, of course, the
champions, but Carol Tiggs is better than anyone I know because she, as the
nagual woman, has superb energy."

I thought I
had caught don Juan in a serious contradiction. He had told me that the
inorganic beings were not interested at all in women. Now he was asserting the
opposite.

"No.
I'm not asserting the opposite," he remarked when I confronted him.
"I've said to you that the inorganic beings don't pursue females; they
only go after males. But I've also said to you that the inorganic beings are
female, and that the entire universe is female to a large degree. So draw your
own conclusions."

Since I had
no way to draw any conclusions, Don Juan explained to me that sorceresses, in
theory, come and go as they please in that world because of their enhanced
awareness and their femaleness.

"Do
you know this for a fact?" I asked.

"The
women of my party have never done that," he confessed, "not because
they can't but because I dissuaded them. The women of your party, on the other
hand, do it like changing skirts."

I felt a
vacuum in my stomach. I really did not know anything about the women of my
party. Don Juan consoled me, saying that my circumstances were different from
his, as was my role as a nagual. He assured me that I did not have it in me to
dissuade any of the women of my party, even if I stood on my head.

As the taxi
drove us to her hotel, Carol delighted don Juan and me with her impersonations
of people we knew. I tried to be serious and questioned her about our task. She
mumbled some apologies for not being able to answer me with the seriousness I
deserved. Don Juan laughed uproariously when she mimicked my solemn tone of
voice.

After
registering Carol at the hotel, the three of us meandered around downtown,
looking for secondhand bookstores. We ate a light dinner at the Sanborn's
restaurant in the House of Tiles. About ten o'clock, we walked to the Regis Hotel. We went directly to the elevator. My fear had sharpened my capacity to
perceive details. The hotel building was old and massive. The furniture in the
lobby had obviously seen better days. Yet there was still, all around us,
something left of an old glory that had a definite appeal. I could easily
understand why Carol liked that hotel so much.

Before we
got into the elevator, my anxiety mounted to such heights that I had to ask don
Juan for last-minute instructions.

"Tell
me again how we are going to proceed," I begged.

Don Juan
pulled us to the huge, ancient stuffed chairs in the lobby and patiently
explained to us that, once we were in the world of the inorganic beings, we had
to voice our intent to transfer our normal awareness to our energy bodies. He
suggested that Carol and I voice our intent together, although that part was
not really important. What was important, he said, was that each of us intend
the transfer of the total awareness of our daily world to our energy body.

"How
do we do this transference of awareness?" I asked.

"Transferring
awareness is purely a matter of voicing our intent and having the necessary amount
of energy," he said. "Carol knows all this. She's done it before. She
entered physically into the inorganic beings' world when she pulled you out of
it, remember? Her energy will do the trick. It'll tip the scales."

"What
does it mean to tip the scales? I am in limbo, don Juan."

Don Juan
explained that to tip the scales meant to add one's total physical mass to the
energy body. He said that using awareness as a medium to make the journey into
another world is not the result of applying any techniques but the corollary of
intending and having enough energy. The bulk of energy from Carol Tiggs added
to mine, or the bulk of my energy added to Carol's, was going to make us into
one single entity, energetically capable of pulling our physicality and placing
it on the energy body in order to make that journey.

"What
exactly do we have to do in order to enter into that other world?" Carol
asked. Her question scared me half to death; I thought she knew what was going
on.

"Your
total physical mass has to be added to your energy body," don Juan
replied, looking into her eyes. "The great difficulty of this maneuver is
to discipline the energy body, a thing the two of you have already done. Lack
of discipline is the only reason the two of you may fail in performing this
feat of ultimate stalking. Sometimes, as a fluke, an average person ends up
performing it and entering into another world. But this is immediately
explained away as insanity or hallucination."

I would
have given anything in the world for don Juan to continue talking. But he put
us in the elevator, and we went up to the second floor, to Carol's room,
despite my protests and my rational need to know. Deep down, however, my
turmoil was not so much that I needed to know; the bottom line was my fear.
Somehow, this sorcerers' maneuver was more frightening to me than anything I
had done so far.

Don Juan's
parting words to us were "Forget the self and you will fear nothing."
His grin and the nodding of his head were invitations to ponder the statement.

Carol
laughed and began to clown, imitating don Juan's voice as he gave us his
cryptic instructions. Her lisping added quite a bit of color to what don Juan
had said. Sometimes I found her lisping adorable. Most of the time, I detested
it. Fortunately, that night her lisping was hardly noticeable.

We went to
her room and sat down on the edge of the bed. My last conscious thought was
that the bed was a relic from the beginning of the century. Before I had time
to utter a single word, I found myself in a strange-looking bed. Carol was with
me. She half sat up at the same time I did. We were naked, each covered with a
thin blanket.

"What's
going on?" she asked in a feeble voice.

"Are
you awake?" I asked inanely.

"Of
course I am awake," she said in an impatient tone.

"Do
you remember where we were?" I asked. There was a long silence, as she
obviously tried to put her thoughts in order.

"I
think I am real, but you are not," she finally said. "I know where I
was before this. And you want to trick me."

I thought
she was doing the same thing herself. She knew what was going on and was
testing me or pulling my leg. Don Juan had told me that her demons and mine
were caginess and distrust. I was having a grand sample of that.

"I
refuse to be part of any shit where you are in control," she said. She
looked at me with venom in her eyes. "I am talking to you, whoever you
are."

She took
one of the blankets we had been covered with and wrapped herself with it.
"I am going to lie here and go back to where I came from," she said,
with an air of finality. "You and the nagual go and play with each
other."

"You
have to stop this nonsense," I said forcefully. "We are in another world."

She didn't
pay any attention and turned her back to me like an annoyed, pampered child. I
did not want to waste my
dreaming
attention in futile discussions of
realness. I began to examine my surroundings. The only light in the room was
moonlight shining through the window directly in front of us. We were in a
small room, on a high bed. I noticed that the bed was primitively constructed.
Four thick posts had been planted in the ground, and the bed frame was a
lattice, made of long poles attached to the posts. The bed had a thick
mattress, or rather a compact mattress. There were no sheets or pillows. Filled
burlap sacks were stacked up against the walls. Two sacks by the foot of the
bed, staggered one on top of the other, served as a stepladder to climb onto
it.

Looking for
a light switch, I became aware that the high bed was in a corner, against the
wall. Our heads were to the wall; I was on the outside of the bed and Carol on
the inside. When I sat on the edge of the bed, I realized that it was perhaps
over three feet above the ground.

Carol sat
up suddenly and said with a heavy lisp, "This is disgusting! The nagual
certainly didn't tell me I was going to end up like this."

"I
didn't know it either," I said. I wanted to say more and start a
conversation, but my anxiety had grown to extravagant proportions.

"You
shut up," she snapped at me, her voice cracking with anger. "You
don't exist. You're a ghost. Disappear! Disappear!"

Her lisping
was actually cute and distracted me from my obsessive fear. I shook her by the
shoulders. She yelled, not so much in pain as in surprise or annoyance.

"I'm
not a ghost," I said. "We made the journey because we joined our
energy."

Carol Tiggs
was famous among us for her speed in adapting to any situation. In no time at
all she was convinced of the realness of our predicament and began to look for
her clothes in the semidarkness. I marveled at the fact that she was not
afraid. She became busy, reasoning out loud where she might have put her
clothes had she gone to bed in that room.

"Do
you see any chair?" she asked.

I faintly
saw a stack of three sacks that might have served as a table or high bench. She
got out of the bed, went to it, and found her clothes and mine, neatly folded,
the way she always handled garments. She handed my clothes to me; they were my
clothes, but not the ones I had been wearing a few minutes before, in Carol's
room at the Regis Hotel.

"These
are not my clothes," she lisped. "And yet they are mine. How
strange!"

We dressed
in silence. I wanted to tell her that I was about to burst with anxiety. I also
wanted to comment on the speed of our journey, but, in the time I had taken to
dress, the thought of our journey had become very vague. I could hardly
remember where we had been before waking up in that room. It was as if I had
dreamt the hotel room. I made a supreme effort to recollect, to push away the
vagueness that had begun to envelop me. I succeeded in dispelling the fog, but
that act exhausted all my energy. I ended up panting and sweating.