The Art of Dreaming (7 page)

As I gained
proficiency in setting up
dreaming
, I repeatedly experienced sensations
that I deemed of great importance, such as the feeling that I was rolling into
a ditch just as I was falling asleep. Don Juan never told me that they were
nonsensical sensations but let me record them in my notes. I realize now how
absurd I must have appeared to him. Today, if I were teaching
dreaming
,
I would definitely discourage such a behavior. Don Juan merely made fun of me,
calling me a covert egomaniac who professed to be fighting self-importance yet
kept a meticulous, superpersonal diary called "My Dreams."

Every time
he had an opportunity, don Juan pointed out that the energy needed to release
our
dreaming attention
from its socialization prison comes from
redeploying our existing energy. Nothing could have been truer. The emergence
of our
dreaming attention
is a direct corollary of revamping our lives.
Since we have, as don Juan said, no way to plug into any external source for a
boost of energy, we must redeploy our existing energy, by any means available.

Don Juan
insisted that the sorcerers' way is the best means to oil, so to speak, the
wheels of energy redeployment, and that of all the items in the sorcerers' way,
the most effective is "losing self-importance." He was thoroughly
convinced that this is indispensable for everything sorcerers do, and for this
reason he put an enormous emphasis on guiding all his students to fulfill this
requirement. He was of the opinion that self-importance is not only the
sorcerers' supreme enemy but the nemesis of mankind.

Don Juan's
argument was that most of our energy goes into upholding our importance. This
is most obvious in our endless worry about the presentation of the self, about
whether or not we are admired or liked or acknowledged. He reasoned that if we
were capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would
happen to us. One, we would free our energy from trying to maintain the
illusory idea of our grandeur; and, two, we would provide ourselves with enough
energy to enter into the second attention to catch a glimpse of the actual
grandeur of the universe.

It took me
more than two years to be able to focus my unwavering
dreaming attention
on
anything I wanted. And I became so proficient that I felt as if I had been
doing it all my life. The eeriest part was that I could not conceive of not
having had that ability. Yet I could remember how difficult it had been even to
think of this as a possibility. It occurred to me that the capability of
examining the contents of one's dreams must be the product of a natural
configuration of our being, similar perhaps to our capability of walking. We
are physically conditioned to walk only in one manner, bipedally, yet it takes
a monumental effort for us to learn to walk.

This new
capacity of looking in glances at the items of my dreams was coupled with a
most insistent nagging to remind myself to look at the elements of my dreams. I
knew about my compulsive bent of character, but in my dreams my compulsiveness
was vastly augmented. It became so noticeable that not only did I resent
hearing my nagging at myself but I also began to question whether it was really
my compulsiveness or something else. I even thought I was losing my mind.

"I
talk to myself endlessly in my dreams, reminding myself to look at
things," I said to don Juan.

I had all
along respected our agreement that we would talk about
dreaming
only
when he brought up the subject. However, I thought that this was an emergency.

"Does
it sound to you like it's not you but someone else?" he asked.

"Come
to think of it, yes. I don't sound like myself at those times."

"Then
it's not you. It's not time yet to explain it. But let's say that we are not
alone in this world. Let's say that there are other worlds available to
dreamers, total worlds. From those other total worlds, energetic entities
sometimes come to us. The next time you hear yourself nagging at yourself in
your dreams, get really angry and yell a command. Say, Stop it!"

I entered
into another challenging arena: to remember in my dreams to shout that command.
I believe that, perhaps, out of being so tremendously annoyed at hearing myself
nagging, I did remember to shout, Stop it. The nagging ceased instantly and
never again was repeated. "Does every dreamer experience this?" I
asked don Juan when I saw him again. "Some do," he answered,
uninterestedly.

I began to
rant about how strange it had all been. He cut me off, saying, "You are
ready now to get to the
second gate of dreaming
."

I seized
the opportunity to seek answers for questions I had not been able to ask him.
What I had experienced the first time he made me dream had been foremost in my
mind. I told don Juan that I had observed the elements of my own dreams to my
heart's content, and never had I felt anything even vaguely similar in terms of
clarity and detail.

"The
more I think about it," I said, "the more intriguing it becomes.
Watching those people in that dream, I experienced a fear and revulsion
impossible to forget. What was that feeling, don Juan?"

"In my
opinion, your energy body hooked onto the foreign energy of that place and had
the time of its life. Naturally, you felt afraid and revolted; you were
examining alien energy for the first time in your life.

"You
have a proclivity for behaving like the sorcerers of antiquity. The moment you
have the chance, you let your assemblage point go. That time your assemblage
point shifted quite a distance. The result was that you, like the old
sorcerers, journeyed beyond the world we know. A most real but dangerous
journey."

I bypassed
the meaning of his statements in favor of my own interest and asked him,
"Was that city perhaps on another planet?"

"You
can't explain
dreaming
by way of things you know or suspect you
know," he said. "All I can tell you is that the city you visited was
not in this world."

"Where
was it, then?"

"Out
of this world, of course. You're not that stupid. That was the first thing you
noticed. What got you going in circles is that you can't imagine anything being
out of this world."

"Where
is out of this world, don Juan?"

"Believe
me, the most extravagant feature of sorcery is that configuration "called
out of this world". For instance, you assumed that I was seeing the same
things you did. The proof is that you never asked me what I saw. You and only
you saw a city and people in that city. I didn't see anything of the sort. I
saw energy. So, out of this world was, for you alone, on that occasion, a
city."

"But
then, don Juan, it wasn't a real city. It existed only for me, in my
mind."

"No.
That's not the case. Now you want to reduce something transcendental to
something mundane. You can't do that. That journey was real. You saw it as a
city. I
saw
it as energy. Neither of us is right or wrong."

"My
confusion comes when you talk about things being real. You said before that we
reached a real place. But if it was real, how can we have two versions of
it?"

"Very
simple. We have two versions because we had, at that time, two different rates
of uniformity and cohesion. I have explained to you that those two attributes
are the key to perceiving."

"Do
you think that I can go back to that particular city?"

"You
got me there. I don't know. Or perhaps I do know but can't explain it. Or
perhaps I can explain it but I don't want to. You'll have to wait and figure
out for yourself which is the case."

He refused
any further discussion.

"Let's
get on with our business," he said. "You reach the
second gate of
dreaming
when you wake up from a dream into another dream. You can have as
many dreams as you want or as many as you are capable of, but you must exercise
adequate control and not wake up in the world we know."

I had a
jolt of panic. "Are you saying that I should never wake up in this
world?" I asked.

"No, I
didn't mean that. But now that you have pointed it out, I have to tell you that
it is an alternative. The sorcerers of antiquity used to do that, never wake up
in the world we know. Some of the sorcerers of my line have done it too. It
certainly can be done, but I don't recommend it. What I want is for you to wake
up naturally when you are through with
dreaming
, but while you are
dreaming
,
I want you to dream that you wake up in another dream."

I heard
myself asking the same question I had asked the first time he told me about
setting up
dreaming
. "But is it possible to do that?"

Don Juan
obviously caught on to my mindlessness and laughingly repeated the answer he
had given me before. "Of course it's possible. This control is no
different from the control we have over any situation in our daily lives."

I quickly
got over my embarrassment and was ready to ask more questions, but don Juan anticipated
me and began to explain facets of the
second gate of dreaming
, an
explanation that made me yet more uneasy.

"There's
one problem with the second gate," he said. "It's a problem that can
be serious, depending on one's bent of character. If our tendency is to indulge
in clinging to things or situations, we are in for a sock in the jaw."

"In
what way, don Juan?"

"Think
for a moment. You've already experienced the outlandish joy of examining your
dreams' contents. Imagine yourself going from dream to dream, watching
everything, examining every detail. It's very easy to realize that one may sink
to mortal depths. Especially if one is given to indulging."

"Wouldn't
the body or the brain naturally put a stop to it?"

"If
it's a natural sleeping situation, meaning normal, yes. But this is not a
normal situation. This is
dreaming
. A dreamer on crossing the first gate
has already reached the energy body. So what is really going through the second
gate, hopping from dream to dream, is the energy body."

"What's
the implication of all this, don Juan?"

"The
implication is that on crossing the second gate you must intend a greater and
more sober control over your
dreaming attention
: the only safety valve
for dreamers."

"What
is this safety valve?"

"You
will find out for yourself that the true goal of
dreaming
is to perfect
the energy body. A perfect energy body, among other things of course, has such
a control over the
dreaming attention
that it makes it stop when needed.
This is the safety valve dreamers have. No matter how indulging they might be,
at a given time, their
dreaming attention
must make them surface."

I started
all over again on another
dreaming
quest. This time the goal was more
elusive and the difficulty even greater. Exactly as with my first task, I could
not begin to figure out what to do. I had the discouraging suspicion that all
my practice was not going to be of much help this time. After countless
failures, I gave up and settled down to simply continue my practice of fixing
my
dreaming attention
on every item of my dreams. Accepting my
shortcomings seemed to give me a boost, and I became even more adept at
sustaining the view of any item in my dreams.

A year went
by without any change. Then one day something changed. As I was watching a
window in a dream, trying to find out if I could catch a glimpse of the scenery
outside the room, some windlike force, which I felt as a buzzing in my ears,
pulled me through the window to the outside. Just before that pull, my
dreaming
attention
had been caught by a strange structure some distance away. It
looked like a tractor. The next thing I knew, I was standing by it, examining
it.

I was
perfectly aware that I was
dreaming
. I looked around to find out if I
could tell from what window I had been looking. The scene was that of a farm in
the countryside. No buildings were in sight. I wanted to ponder this. However,
the quantity of farm machinery lying around, as if abandoned, took all my
attention. I examined mowing machines, tractors, grain harvesters, disk plows,
thrashers. There were so many that I forgot my original dream. What I wanted
then was to orient myself by watching the immediate scenery. There was
something in the distance that looked like a billboard and some telephone poles
around it.

The instant
I focused my attention on that billboard, I was next to it. The steel structure
of the billboard gave me a fright. It was menacing. On the billboard itself was
a picture of a building. I read the text; it was an advertisement for a motel.
I had a peculiar certainty that I was in Oregon or northern California.

I looked
for other features in the environment of my dream. I saw mountains very far
away and some green, round hills not too far. On those hills were clumps of
what I thought were California oak trees. I wanted to be pulled by the green
hills, but what pulled me were the distant mountains. I was convinced that they
were the Sierras.