The Art of Dreaming (6 page)

"Dreams
are, if not a door, a hatch into other worlds," he began. "As such,
dreams are a two-way street. Our awareness goes through that hatch into other
realms, and those other realms send scouts into our dreams."

"What
are those scouts?"

"Energy
charges that get mixed with the items of our normal dreams. They are bursts of
foreign energy that come into our dreams, and we interpret them as items
familiar or unfamiliar to us."

"I am
sorry, don Juan, but I can't make heads or tails out of your explanation."

"You
can't because you're insisting on thinking about dreams in terms known to you:
what occurs to us during sleep. And I am insisting on giving you another
version: a hatch into other realms of perception. Through that hatch, currents
of unfamiliar energy seep in. Then the mind or the brain or whatever takes
those currents of energy and turns them into parts of our dreams."

He paused,
obviously to give my mind time to take in what he was telling me.

"Sorcerers
are aware of those currents of foreign energy," he continued. "They
notice them and strive to isolate them from the normal items of their
dreams."

"Why
do they isolate them, don Juan?"

"Because
they come from other realms. If we follow them to their source, they serve us
as guides into areas of such mystery that sorcerers shiver at the mere mention
of such a possibility." "How do sorcerers isolate them from the
normal items of their dreams?"

"By
the exercise and control of their
dreaming attention
. At one moment, our
dreaming attention
discovers them among the items of a dream and focuses
on them, then the total dream collapses, leaving only the foreign energy."

Don Juan
refused to explain the topic any further. He went back to discussing my
dreaming
experience and said that, all in all, he had to take my dream as being my
first genuine attempt at
dreaming
, and that this meant I had succeeded
in reaching the
first gate of dreaming
.

During
another discussion, at a different time, he abruptly brought up the subject
again. He said, "I'm going to repeat what you must do in your dreams in
order to pass the first gate of
dreaming
. First you must focus your gaze
on anything of your choice as the starting point. Then shift your gaze to other
items and look at them in brief glances. Focus your gaze on as many things as
you can. Remember that if you glance only briefly, the images don't shift. Then
go back to the item you first looked at."

"What
does it mean to pass the
first gate of dreaming
?"

"We
reach the
first gate of dreaming
by becoming aware that we are falling
asleep, or by having, like you did, a gigantically real dream. Once we reach
the gate, we must cross it by being able to sustain the sight of any item of
our dreams."

"I can
almost look steadily at the items of my dreams, but they dissipate too
quickly."

"This
is precisely what I am trying to tell you. In order to offset the evanescent
quality of dreams, sorcerers have devised the use of the starting point item.
Every time you isolate it and look at it, you get a surge of energy, so at the
beginning don't look at too many things in your dreams. Four items will
suffice. Later on, you may enlarge the scope until you can cover all you want,
but as soon as the images begin to shift and you feel you are losing control,
go back to your starting point item and start all over again."

"Do you
believe that I really reached the
first gate of dreaming
, don
Juan?"

"You
did, and that's a lot. You'll find out, as you go along, how easy it'll be to
do
dreaming
now."

I thought
don Juan was either exaggerating or giving me incentive. But he assured me he
was being on the level.

"The
most astounding thing that happens to dreamers," he said, "is that,
on reaching the first gate, they also reach the energy body."

"What
exactly is the energy body?"

"It's
the counterpart of the physical body. A ghostlike configuration made of pure
energy." "But isn't the physical body also made out of energy?"

"Of
course it is. The difference is that the energy body has only appearance but no
mass. Since it's pure energy, it can perform acts that are beyond the
possibilities of the physical body."

"Such
as what for example, don Juan?"

"Such
as transporting itself in one instant to the ends of the universe. And
dreaming
is the art of tempering the energy body, of making it supple and coherent by
gradually exercising it.

"Through
dreaming
we condense the energy body until it's a unit capable of
perceiving. Its perception, although affected by our normal way of perceiving
the daily world, is an independent perception. It has its own sphere."

"What
is that sphere, don Juan?"

"Energy.
The energy body deals with energy in terms of energy. There are three ways in
which it deals with energy in
dreaming
: it can perceive energy as it
flows, or it can use energy to boost itself like a rocket into unexpected
areas, or it can perceive as we ordinarily perceive the world."

"What
does it mean to perceive energy as it flows?"

"It
means to
see
. It means that the energy body
sees
energy directly
as a light or as a vibrating current of sorts or as a disturbance. Or it feels
it directly as a jolt or as a sensation that can even be pain."

"What
about the other way you talked about, don Juan? The energy body using energy as
a boost."

"Since
energy is its sphere, it is no problem for the energy body to use currents of
energy that exist in the universe to propel itself. All it has to do is isolate
them, and off it goes with them."

He stopped
talking and seemed to be undecided, as if he wanted to add something but was
not sure about it. He smiled at me, and, just as I was beginning to ask him a
question, he continued his explanation.

"I've
mentioned to you before that sorcerers isolate in their dreams scouts from
other realms," he said. "Their energy bodies do that. They recognize
energy and go for it. But it isn't desirable for dreamers to indulge in searching
for scouts. I was reluctant to tell you about it, because of the facility with
which one can get swayed by that search."

Don Juan
then quickly went on to another subject. He carefully outlined for me an entire
block of practices. At the time, I found that on one level it was all
incomprehensible to me, yet on another it was perfectly logical and
understandable. He reiterated that reaching, with deliberate control, the first
gate of
dreaming
is a way of arriving at the energy body. But to
maintain that gain is predicated on energy alone. Sorcerers get that energy by
redeploying, in a more intelligent manner, the energy they have and use for
perceiving the daily world.

When I
urged don Juan to explain it more clearly, he added that we all have a determined
quantity of basic energy. That quantity is all the energy we have, and we use
all of it for perceiving and dealing with our engulfing world. He repeated
various times, to emphasize it, that there is no more energy for us anywhere
and, since our available energy is already engaged, there is not a single bit
left in us for any extraordinary perception, such as
dreaming
.

"Where
does that leave us?" I asked.

"It
leaves us to scrounge energy for ourselves, wherever we can find it," he
replied.

Don Juan
explained that sorcerers have a scrounging method. They intelligently redeploy
their energy by cutting down anything they consider superfluous in their lives.
They call this method the sorcerers' way. In essence, the sorcerers' way, as
don Juan put it, is a chain of behavioral choices for dealing with the world,
choices much more intelligent than those our progenitors taught us. These
sorcerers' choices are designed to revamp our lives by altering our basic
reactions about being alive.

"What
are those basic reactions?" I asked.

"There
are two ways of facing our being alive," he said. "One is to
surrender to it, either by acquiescing to its demands or by fighting those
demands. The other is by molding our particular life situation to fit our own
configurations."

"Can
we really mold our life situation, don Juan?"

"One's
particular life situation can be molded to fit one's specifications," don
Juan insisted. "Dreamers do that. A wild statement? Not really, if you
consider how little we know about ourselves."

He said
that his interest, as a teacher, was to get me thoroughly involved with the
themes of life and being alive; that is to say, with the difference between
life, as a consequence of biological forces, and the act of being alive, as a
matter of cognition.

"When
sorcerers talk about molding one's life situation," don Juan explained,
"they mean molding the awareness of being alive. Through molding this
awareness, we can get enough energy to reach and sustain the energy body, and
with it we can certainly mold the total direction and consequences of our
lives."

Don Juan
ended our conversation about
dreaming
admonishing me not merely to think
about what he had told me but to turn his concepts into a viable way of life by
a process of repetition. He claimed that everything new in our lives, such as
the sorcerers' concepts he was teaching me, must be repeated to us to the point
of exhaustion before we open ourselves to it. He pointed out that repetition is
the way our progenitors socialized us to function in the daily world.

As I
continued my
dreaming
practices, I gained the capability of being
thoroughly aware that I was falling asleep as well as the capability of
stopping in a dream to examine at will anything that was part of that dream's
content. To experience this was for me no less than miraculous.

Don Juan
stated that as we tighten the control over our dreams, we tighten the mastery
over our
dreaming attention
. He was right in saying that the
dreaming
attention
comes into play when it is called, when it is given a purpose.
Its coming into play is not really a process, as one would normally understand
a process: an ongoing system of operations or a series of actions or functions
that bring about an end result. It is rather an awakening. Something dormant
becomes suddenly functional.

I found out
by means of my
dreaming
practices that a
dreaming
teacher must
create a didactic synthesis in order to emphasize a given point. In essence,
what don Juan wanted with my first task was to exercise my
dreaming
attention
by focusing it on the items of my dreams. To this effect he used
as a spearhead the idea of being aware of falling asleep. His subterfuge was to
say that the only way to be aware of falling asleep is to examine the elements
of one's dreams.

I realized,
almost as soon as I had begun my
dreaming
practices, that exercising the
dreaming attention
is the essential point in
dreaming
. To the
mind, however, it seems impossible that one can train oneself to be aware at
the level of dreams. Don Juan said that the active element of such training is
persistence, and that the mind and all its rational defenses cannot cope with
persistence. Sooner or later, he said, the mind's barriers fall, under its
impact, and the
dreaming attention
blooms.

As I
practiced focusing and holding my
dreaming attention
on the items of my
dreams, I began to feel a peculiar self-confidence so remarkable that I sought
a comment from don Juan.

"It's
your entering into the second attention that gives you that sense of self-assurance,"
he said. "This calls for even more sobriety on your part. Go slowly, but
don't stop, and above all, don't talk about it. Just do it!"

I told him
that in practice I had corroborated what he had already told me, that if one
takes short glances at everything in a dream, the images do not dissolve. I
commented that the difficult part is to break the initial barrier that prevents
us from bringing dreams to our conscious attention. I asked don Juan to give me
his opinion on this matter, for I earnestly believed that this barrier is a
psychological one created by our socialization, which puts a premium on
disregarding dreams.

"The
barrier is more than socialization," he replied. "It's the first
gate
of dreaming
. Now that you've overcome it, it seems stupid to you that we
can't stop at will and pay attention to the items of our dreams. That's a false
certainty. The
first gate of dreaming
has to do with the flow of energy
in the universe. It's a natural obstacle."

Don Juan
made me agree then that we would talk about
dreaming
only in the second
attention and as he saw fit. He encouraged me to practice in the meantime and
promised no interference on his part.