The Art of Dreaming (8 page)

All my
dreaming
energy left me on those mountains. But before it did, I was pulled by every
possible feature. My dream ceased to be a dream. As far as my capacity to
perceive was concerned, I was veritably in the Sierras, zooming into ravines,
boulders, trees, caves. I went from scarp faces to mountain peaks until I had
no more drive and could not focus my
dreaming attention
on anything. I
felt myself losing control. Finally, there was no more scenery, just darkness.

"You
have reached the second gate of
dreaming
," don Juan said when I
narrated my dream to him. "What you should do next is to cross it.
Crossing the second gate is a very serious affair; it requires a most
disciplined effort."

I was not
sure I had fulfilled the task he outlined for me, because I had not really
woken up in another dream. I asked don Juan about this irregularity.

"The
mistake was mine," he said. "I told you that one has to wake up in
another dream, but what I meant is that one has to change dreams in an orderly
and precise manner, the way you have done it.

"With
the first gate, you wasted a lot of time looking exclusively for your hands.
This time, you went directly to the solution without bothering to follow the
given command: to wake up in another dream."

Don Juan
said that there are two ways of properly crossing the
second gate of
dreaming
. One is to wake up in another dream, that is to say, to dream that
one is having a dream and then dream that one wakes up from it. The alternative
is to use the items of a dream to trigger another dream, exactly as I had done.

Just as he
had been doing all along, don Juan let me practice without any interference on
his part. And I corroborated the two alternatives he described. Either I dreamt
that I was having a dream from which I dreamt I woke up or I zoomed from a
definite item accessible to my immediate
dreaming attention
to another
one, not quite accessible. Or I entered into a slight variation of the second:
I gazed at any item of a dream, maintaining the gaze until the item changed
shape and, by changing shape, pulled me into another dream through a buzzing
vortex. Never was I capable, however, of deciding beforehand which of the three
I would follow. My
dreaming
practices always ended by my running out of
dreaming
attention
and finally waking up or by my falling into dark, deep slumber.

Everything
went smoothly in my practices. The only disturbance I had was a peculiar
interference, a jolt of fear or discomfort I had begun to experience with
increasing frequency. My way of discarding it was to believe that it was
related to my ghastly eating habits or to the fact that, in those days, don
Juan was giving me a profusion of hallucinogenic plants as part of my training.
Those jolts became so prominent, however, that I had to ask don Juan's advice.

"You
have entered now into the most dangerous facet of the sorcerers'
knowledge," he began. "It is sheer dread, a veritable nightmare. I
could joke with you and say that I didn't mention this possibility to you out
of regard for your cherished rationality, but I can't. Every sorcerer has to
face it. Here is where, I fear, you might very well think you're going off the
deep end."

Don Juan
very solemnly explained that life and consciousness, being exclusively a matter
of energy, are not solely the property of organisms. He said that sorcerers
have seen that there are two types of conscious beings roaming the earth, the
organic and the inorganic, and that in comparing one with the other, they have
seen that both are luminous masses crossed from every imaginable angle by
millions of the universe's energy filaments. They are different from each other
in their shape and in their degree of brightness. Inorganic beings are long and
candlelike but opaque, whereas organic beings are round and by far the
brighter. Another noteworthy difference,
 
which don Juan said sorcerers have seen, is that the life
and consciousness of organic beings is short-lived, because they are made to
hurry, whereas the life of inorganic beings is infinitely longer and their
consciousness infinitely more calm and deeper.

"Sorcerers
find no problem interacting with them," don Juan went on. "Inorganic
beings possess the crucial ingredient for interaction, consciousness."

"But
do these inorganic beings really exist? Like you and I exist?" I asked.

"Of
course they do," he replied. "Believe me, sorcerers are very
intelligent creatures; under no condition would they toy with aberrations of
the mind and then take them for real."

"Why
do you say they are alive?"

"For
sorcerers, having life means having consciousness. It means having an
assemblage point and its surrounding glow of awareness, a condition that points
out to sorcerers that the being in front of them, organic or inorganic, is
thoroughly capable of perceiving. Perceiving is understood by sorcerers as the
precondition of being alive."

"Then
the inorganic beings must also die. Is that true, don Juan?"

"Naturally.
They lose their awareness just like we do, except that the length of their
consciousness is staggering to the mind."

"Do
these inorganic beings appear to sorcerers?"

"It's
very difficult to tell what is what with them. Let's say that those beings are
enticed by us or, better yet, compelled to interact with us."

Don Juan
peered at me most intently. "You're not taking in any of this at
all," he said with the tone of someone who has reached a conclusion.

"It's
nearly impossible for me to think about this rationally," I said.

"I
warned you that the subject will tax your reason. The proper thing to do then
is to suspend judgment and let things take their course, meaning that you let
the inorganic beings come to you." "Are you serious, don Juan?"

"Deadly
serious. The difficulty with inorganic beings is that their awareness is very
slow in comparison with ours. It will take years for a sorcerer to be
acknowledged by inorganic beings. So, it is advisable to have patience and
wait. Sooner or later they show up. But not like you or I would show up. Theirs
is a most peculiar way to make themselves known."

"How
do sorcerers entice them? Do they have a ritual?"

"Well,
they certainly don't stand in the middle of the road and call out to them with
trembling voices at the stroke of midnight, if that's what you mean."

"What
do they do then?"

"They
entice them in
dreaming
. I said that what's involved is more than
enticing them; by the act of
dreaming
, sorcerers compel those beings to
interact with them."

"How
do sorcerers compel them by the act of
dreaming
?"

"
dreaming
is sustaining the position where the assemblage point has shifted in dreams.
This act creates a distinctive energy charge, which attracts their attention.
It's like bait to fish; they'll go for it. Sorcerers, by reaching and crossing
the first two gates of
dreaming
, set bait for those beings and compel
them to appear.

"By
going through the two gates, you have made your bidding known to them. Now, you
must wait for a sign from them."

"What
would the sign be, don Juan?"

"Possibly
the appearance of one of them, although that seems too soon. I am of the
opinion that their sign will be simply some interference in your
dreaming
.
I believe that the jolts of fear you are experiencing nowadays are not
indigestion but energy jolts sent to you by the inorganic beings."

"What
should I do?"

"You
must gauge your expectations."

I could not
understand what he meant, and he carefully explained that our normal
expectation when engaging in interaction with our fellow men or with other
organic beings is to get an immediate reply to our solicitation. With inorganic
beings, however, since they are separated from us by a most formidable barrier,
energy that moves at a different speed, sorcerers must gauge their expectations
and sustain the solicitation for as long as it takes to be acknowledged.

"Do
you mean, don Juan, that the solicitation is the same as the
dreaming
practices?"

"Yes.
But for a perfect result, you must add to your practices the intent of reaching
those inorganic beings. Send a feeling of power and confidence to them, a
feeling of strength, of detachment. Avoid at any cost sending a feeling of fear
or morbidity. They are pretty morbid by themselves; to add your morbidity to
them is unnecessary, to say the least."

"I'm
not clear, don Juan, about the way they appear to sorcerers. What is the
peculiar way they make themselves known?"

"They
do, at times, materialize themselves in the daily world, right in front of us.
Most of the time, though, their invisible presence is marked by a bodily jolt,
a shiver of sorts that comes from the marrow of the bones."

"What
about in
dreaming
, don Juan?"

"In
dreaming
we have the total opposite. At times, we feel them the way you are feeling
them, as a jolt of fear. Most of the time, they materialize themselves right in
front of us. Since at the beginning of
dreaming
we have no experience
whatsoever with them, they might imbue us with fear beyond measure. That is a
real danger to us. Through the channel of fear, they can follow us to the daily
world, with disastrous results for us."

"In
what way, don Juan?"

"Fear
can settle down in our lives, and we would have to be mavericks to deal with
it. Inorganic beings can be worse than a pest. Through fear they can easily
drive us raving mad." "What do sorcerers do with inorganic
beings?"

"They
mingle with them. They turn them into allies. They form associations, create
extraordinary friendships. I call them vast enterprises, where perception plays
the uppermost role. We are social beings. We unavoidably seek the company of
consciousness.

"With
inorganic beings, the secret is not to fear them. And this must be done from
the beginning. The intent one has to send out to them has to be of power and
abandon. In that intent one must encode the message "I don't fear you. Come
to see me. If you do, I'll welcome you. If you don't want to come, I'll miss
you." With a message like this, they'll get so curious that they'll come
for sure."

"Why
should they come to seek me, or why on earth should I seek them?"

"Dreamers,
whether they like it or not, in their
dreaming
seek associations with
other beings. This may come to you as a shock, but dreamers automatically seek
groups of beings, nexuses of inorganic beings in this case. Dreamers seek them
avidly."

"This
is very strange to me, don Juan. Why would dreamers do that?"

"The
novelty for us is the inorganic beings. And the novelty for them is one of our
kind crossing the boundaries of their realm. The thing you must bear in mind
from now on is that inorganic beings with their superb consciousness exert a
tremendous pull over dreamers and can easily transport them into worlds beyond
description.

"The
sorcerers of antiquity used them, and they are the ones who coined the name
"allies". Their allies taught them to move the assemblage point out
of the egg's boundaries into the nonhuman universe. So when they transport a
sorcerer, they transport him to worlds beyond the human domain."

As I heard
him talk, I was plagued by strange fears and misgivings, which he promptly
realized.

"You
are a religious man to the end." He laughed. "Now, you're feeling the
devil breathing down your neck. Think about
dreaming
in these terms:
dreaming
is perceiving more than what we believe it is possible to perceive."

In my
waking hours, I worried about the possibility that inorganic conscious beings
really existed. When I was
dreaming
, however, my conscious worries did
not have much effect. The jolts of physical fear continued, but whenever they
happened a strange calmness always trailed behind, a calmness that took control
of me and let me proceed as if I had no fear at all.

It seemed
at that time that every breakthrough in
dreaming
happened to me
suddenly, without warning. The presence of inorganic beings in my dreams was no
exception. It happened while I was
dreaming
about a circus I knew in my
childhood. The setting looked like a town in the mountains in Arizona. I began
to watch people with the vague hope I always had that I would see again the
people I had seen the first time don Juan made me enter into the second
attention. As I watched them, I felt a sizable jolt of nervousness in the pit
of my stomach; it was like a punch. The jolt distracted me, and I lost sight of
the people, the circus, and the mountain town in Arizona. In their place stood
two strange-looking figures. They were thin, less than a foot wide, but long,
perhaps seven feet. They were looming over me like two gigantic earthworms.

I knew that
it was a dream, but I also knew that I was
seeing
. Don Juan had
discussed
seeing
in my normal awareness and in the second attention as
well. Although I was incapable of experiencing it myself, I thought I had
understood the idea of directly perceiving energy. In that dream, looking at
those two strange apparitions, I realized that I was
seeing
the energy
essence of something unbelievable.