The Art of Dreaming (5 page)

"There
are seven gates," he said as a way of answering, "and dreamers have
to open all seven of them, one at the time. You're up against the first gate
that must be opened if you are to dream." "Why didn't you tell me
this before?"

"It
would've been useless to tell you about the
gates of dreaming
before you
smacked your head against the first one. Now you know that it is an obstacle
and that you have to overcome it."

Don Juan
explained that there are entrances and exits in the energy flow of the universe
and that, in the specific case of
dreaming
, there are seven entrances,
experienced as obstacles, which sorcerers call the
seven gates of dreaming
.

"The
first gate is a threshold we must cross by becoming aware of a particular
sensation before deep sleep," he said. "A sensation which is like a
pleasant heaviness that doesn't let us open our eyes. We reach that gate the
instant we become aware that we're falling asleep, suspended in darkness and
heaviness."

"How
do I become aware that I am falling asleep? Are there any steps to
follow?" "No. There are no steps to follow. One just intends to
become aware of falling asleep." "But how does one intend to become
aware of it?"

"Intent
or intending is something very difficult to talk about. I or anyone else would
sound idiotic trying to explain it. Bear that in mind when you hear what I have
to say next: sorcerers intend anything they set themselves to intend, simply by
intending it."

"That
doesn't mean anything, don Juan."

"Pay
close attention. Someday it'll be your turn to explain. The statement seems
nonsensical because you are not putting it in the proper context. Like any
rational man, you think that understanding is exclusively the realm of our
reason, of our mind.

"For
sorcerers, because the statement I made pertains to intent and intending,
understanding it pertains to the realm of energy. Sorcerers believe that if one
would intend that statement for the energy body, the energy body would
understand it in terms entirely different from those of the mind. The trick is
to reach the energy body. For that you need energy."

"In
what terms would the energy body understand that statement, don Juan?"

"In
terms of a bodily feeling, which it's hard to describe. You'll have to
experience it to know what I mean."

I wanted a
more precise explanation, but don Juan slapped my back and made me enter into
the second attention. At that time, what he did was still utterly mysterious to
me. I could have sworn that his touch hypnotized me. I believed he had
instantaneously put me to sleep, and I dreamt that I found myself walking with
him on a wide avenue lined with trees in some unknown city. It was such a vivid
dream, and I was so aware of everything, that I immediately tried to orient
myself by reading signs and looking at people. It definitely was not any
English- or Spanish-speaking city, but it was a Western city. The people seemed
to be northern Europeans, perhaps Lithuanians. I became absorbed in trying to
read billboards and street signs.

Don Juan
nudged me gently. "Don't bother with that," he said. "We are
nowhere identifiable. I've just lent you my energy so you would reach your
energy body, and with it you've just crossed into another world. This won't
last long, so use your time wisely.

"Look
at everything, but without being obvious. Don't let anyone notice you."

We walked
in silence. It was a block-long walk, which had a remarkable effect on me. The
more we walked, the greater my sensation of visceral anxiety. My mind was curious,
but my body was alarmed. I had the clearest understanding that I was not in
this world. When we got to an intersection and stopped walking, I saw that the
trees on the street had been carefully trimmed. They were short trees with
hard-looking, curled leaves. Each tree had a big square space for watering.
There were no weeds or trash in those spaces, as one would find around trees in
the city, only charcoal black, loose dirt.

The moment
I focused my eyes on the curb, before I stepped off it to cross the street, I
noticed that there were no cars. I tried desperately to watch the people who
milled around us, to discover something about them that would explain my
anxiety. As I stared at them, they stared back at me. In one instant a circle
of hard blue and brown eyes had formed around us.

A certainty
hit me like a blow: this was not a dream at all; we were in a reality beyond
what I know to be real. I turned to face don Juan. I was about to realize what
was different about those people, but a strange dry wind that went directly to
my sinuses hit my face, blurred my view, and made me forget what I wanted to
tell don Juan. The next instant, I was back where I had started from: don
Juan's house. I was lying on a straw mat, curled up on my side.

"I
lent you my energy, and you reached your energy body," don Juan said
matter-of-factly.

I heard him
talk, but I was numb. An unusual itching on my solar plexus kept my breaths
short and painful. I knew that I had been on the verge of finding something
transcendental about
dreaming
and about the people I had seen, yet I
could not bring whatever I knew into focus.

"Where
were we, don Juan?" I asked. "Was it all a dream? A hypnotic
state?"

"It
wasn't a dream," he replied. "It was
dreaming
. I helped you
reach the second attention so that you would understand intending as a subject
not for your reason but for your energy body.

"At
this point, you can't yet comprehend the importance of all this, not only
because you don't have sufficient energy but because you're not intending
anything. If you were, your energy body would comprehend immediately that the
only way to intend is by focusing your intent on whatever you want to intend.
This time I focused it for you on reaching your energy body."

"Is
the goal of
dreaming
to intend the energy body?" I asked, suddenly
empowered by some strange reasoning.

"One
can certainly put it that way," he said. "In this particular
instance, since we're talking about the
first gate of dreaming
, the goal
of
dreaming
is to intend that your energy body becomes aware that you
are falling asleep. Don't try to force yourself to be aware of falling asleep.
Let your energy body do it. To intend is to wish without wishing, to do without
doing.

"Accept
the challenge of intending," he went on. "Put your silent
determination, without a single thought, into convincing yourself that you have
reached your energy body and that you are a dreamer. Doing this will
automatically put you in the position to be aware that you are falling
asleep."

"How
can I convince myself that I am a dreamer when I am not?"

"When
you hear that you have to convince yourself, you automatically become more
rational. How can you convince yourself you are a dreamer when you know you are
not? Intending is both: the act of convincing yourself you are indeed a
dreamer, although you have never dreamt before, and the act of being
convinced."

"Do
you mean I have to tell myself I am a dreamer and try my best to believe it? Is
that it?"

"No,
it isn't. Intending is much simpler and, at the same time, infinitely more
complex than that. It requires imagination, discipline, and purpose. In this
case, to intend means that you get an unquestionable bodily knowledge that you
are a dreamer. You feel you are a dreamer with all the cells of your
body."

Don Juan added
in a joking tone that he did not have sufficient energy to make me another loan
for intending and that the thing to do was to reach my energy body on my own.
He assured me that intending the
first gate of dreaming
was one of the
means discovered by the sorcerers of antiquity for reaching the second
attention and the energy body.

After
telling me this, he practically threw me out of his house, commanding me not to
come back until I had intended the first gate of
dreaming
.

I returned
home, and every night for months I went to sleep intending with all my might to
become aware that I was falling asleep and to see my hands in my dreams. The
other part of the task, to convince myself that I was a dreamer and that I had
reached my energy body, was totally impossible for me.

Then, one
afternoon while taking a nap, I dreamt I was looking at my hands. The shock was
enough to wake me up. It proved to be a unique dream that could not be
repeated. Weeks went by, and I was unable either to become aware that I was falling
asleep or to find my hands. I began to notice, however, that I was having in my
dreams a vague feeling that there was something I should have been doing but
could not remember. This feeling became so strong that it kept on waking me up
at all hours of the night.

When I told
don Juan about my futile attempts to cross the
first gate of dreaming
,
he gave me some guidelines.

"To
ask a dreamer to find a determined item in his dreams is a subterfuge," he
said. "The real issue is to become aware that one is falling asleep. And,
strange as it may seem, that doesn't happen by commanding oneself to be aware
that one is falling asleep but by sustaining the sight of whatever one is
looking at in a dream."

He told me
that dreamers take quick, deliberate glances at everything present in a dream.
If they focus their
dreaming attention
on something specific, it is only
as a point of departure. From there, dreamers move on to look at other items in
the dream's content, returning to the point of departure as many times as
possible.

After a
great effort, I indeed found hands in my dreams, but they never were mine. They
were hands that only seemed to belong to me, hands that changed shape, becoming
quite nightmarish at times. The rest of my dreams' content, nonetheless, was
always pleasantly steady. I could almost sustain the view of anything I focused
my attention on.

It went on
like this for months, until one day when my capacity to dream changed seemingly
by itself. I had done nothing special besides my constant earnest determination
to be aware that I was falling asleep and to find my hands.

I dreamt I
was visiting my hometown. Not that the town I was
dreaming
about looked
at all like my hometown, but somehow I had the conviction that it was the place
where I was born. It all began as an ordinary, yet very vivid dream. Then the
light in the dream changed. Images became sharper. The street where I was
walking became noticeably more real than a moment before. My feet began to
hurt. I could feel that things were absurdly hard. For instance, on bumping
into a door, not only did I experience pain on the knee that hit the door but I
also was enraged by my clumsiness.

I
realistically walked in that town until I was completely exhausted. I saw
everything I could have seen had I been a tourist walking through the streets
of a city. And there was no difference whatsoever between that dream walk and
any walk I had actually taken on the streets of a city I visited for the first
time.

"I
think you went a bit too far," don Juan said after listening to my
account. "All that was required was your awareness of falling asleep. What
you've done is equivalent to bringing a wall down just to squash a mosquito
sitting on it."

"Do
you mean, don Juan, that I flubbed it?"

"No.
But apparently you're trying to repeat something you did before. When I made
your assemblage point shift and you and I ended up in that mysterious city, you
were not asleep. You were
dreaming
, but not asleep, meaning that your
assemblage point didn't reach that position through a normal dream. I forced it
to shift.

"You
certainly can reach the same position through
dreaming
, but I wouldn't
advise you to do that at this time."

"Is it
dangerous?"

"And
how!
dreaming
has to be a very sober affair. No false movement can be
afforded.
Dreaming
is a process of awakening, of gaming control. Our
dreaming
attention
must be systematically exercised, for it is the door to the
second attention."

"What's
the difference between the
dreaming attention
and the second
attention?"

"The
second attention is like an ocean, and the
dreaming attention
is like a
river feeding into it. The second attention is the condition of being aware of
total worlds, total like our world is total, while the
dreaming attention
is
the condition of being aware of the items of our dreams."

He heavily
stressed that the
dreaming attention
is the key to every movement in the
sorcerers' world. He said that among the multitude of items in our dreams,
there exist real energetic interferences, things that have been put in our
dreams extraneously, by an alien force. To be able to find them and follow them
is sorcery.

The
emphasis he put on those statements was so pronounced that I had to ask him to
explain them. He hesitated for a moment before answering.