The Art of Dreaming

Contents

Authors Note

1. - Sorcerers of Antiquity: An Introduction

2. - The First Gate of Dreaming

3. - The Second Gate of Dreaming

4. - The Fixation of The Assemblage Point

5. - The World of Inorganic Beings

6. - The Shadows' World

7. - The Blue Scout

8. - The Third Gate of Dreaming

9. - The New Area of Exploration

10. - Stalking the Stalkers

11. - The Tenant

12. - The Woman In The Church

13. - Flying On The Wings of Intent

Over the
past twenty years, I have written a series of books about my apprenticeship
with a Mexican Yaqui Indian sorcerer, don Juan Matus. I have explained in those
books that he taught me sorcery, but not as we understand sorcery in the
context of our daily world: the use of supernatural powers over others, or the
calling of spirits through charms, spells, or rituals to produce supernatural
effects. For don Juan, sorcery was the act of embodying some specialized
theoretical and practical premises about the nature and role of perception in
molding the universe around us.

Following
don Juan's suggestion, I have refrained from using shamanism, a category proper
to anthropology, to classify his knowledge. I have called it all along what he
himself called it: sorcery. On examination, however, I realized that calling it
sorcery obscures even more the already obscure phenomena he presented to me in
his teachings.

In
anthropological works, shamanism is described as a belief system of some native
people of northern Asia, prevailing also among certain native North American
Indian tribes, which maintains that an unseen world of ancestral spiritual
forces, good and evil, is pervasive around us and that these spiritual forces
can be summoned or controlled through the acts of practitioners, who are the
intermediaries between the natural and supernatural realms.

Don Juan
was indeed an intermediary between the natural world of everyday life and an
unseen world, which he called not the supernatural but the second attention.
His role as a teacher was to make this configuration accessible to me. I have
described in my previous work his teaching methods to this effect, as well as
the sorcery arts he made me practice, the most important of which is called the
art of
dreaming
.

Don Juan
contended that our world, which we believe to be unique and absolute, is only
one in a cluster of consecutive worlds, arranged like the layers of an onion.
He asserted that even though we have been energetically conditioned to perceive
solely our world, we still have the capability of entering into those other
realms, which are as real, unique, absolute, and engulfing as our own world is.

Don Juan
explained to me that, for us to perceive those other realms, not only do we have
to covet them but we need to have sufficient energy to seize them. Their
existence is constant and independent of our awareness, he said, but their
inaccessibility is entirely a consequence of our energetic conditioning. In
other words, simply and solely because of that conditioning, we are compelled
to assume that the world of daily life is the one and only possible world.

Believing
that our energetic conditioning is correctable, don Juan stated that sorcerers
of ancient times developed a set of practices designed to recondition our
energetic capabilities to perceive. They called this set of practices the art
of
dreaming
.

With the
perspective time gives, I now realize that the most fitting statement don Juan
made about
dreaming
was to call it the "gateway to infinity."
I remarked, at the time he said it, that the metaphor had no meaning to me.

"Let's
then do away with metaphors," he conceded. "Let's say that
dreaming
is the sorcerers' practical way of putting ordinary dreams to use."

"But
how can ordinary dreams be put to use?" I asked.

"We
always get tricked by words," he said. "In my own case, my teacher
attempted to describe
dreaming
to me by saying that it is the way
sorcerers say good night to the world. He was, of course, tailoring his
description to fit my mentality. I'm doing the same with you."

On another
occasion don Juan said to me, "
dreaming
can only be experienced.
Dreaming
is not just having dreams; neither is it daydreaming or wishing or imagining.
Through
dreaming
we can perceive other worlds, which we can certainly
describe, but we can't describe what makes us perceive them. Yet we can feel
how
dreaming
opens up those other realms.
Dreaming
seems to be a
sensation, a process in our bodies, an awareness in our minds."

In the
course of his general teachings, don Juan thoroughly explained to me the
principles, rationales, and practices of the art of
dreaming
. His
instruction was divided into two parts. One was about
dreaming
procedures, the other about the purely abstract explanations of these
procedures. His teaching method was an interplay between enticing my
intellectual curiosity with the abstract principles of
dreaming
and
guiding me to seek an outlet in its practices.

I have
already described all this in as much detail as I was able to. And I have also
described the sorcerers' milieu in which don Juan placed me in order to teach
me his arts. My interaction in this milieu was of special interest to me
because it took place exclusively in the second attention. I interacted there
with the ten women and five men who were don Juan's sorcerer companions and
with the four young men and the four young women who were his apprentices.

Don Juan
gathered them immediately after I came into his world. He made it clear to me
that they formed a traditional sorcerers' group, a replica of his own party,
and that I was supposed to lead them. However, working with me he realized that
I was different than he expected. He explained that difference in terms of an
energy configuration seen only by sorcerers: instead of having four
compartments of energy, as he himself had, I had only three. Such a
configuration, which he had mistakenly hoped was a correctable flaw, made me so
completely inadequate for interacting with or leading those eight apprentices
that it became imperative for don Juan to gather another group of people more
akin to my energetic structure.

I have
written extensively about those events. Yet I have never mentioned the second
group of apprentices; don Juan did not permit me to do so. He argued that they
were exclusively in my field and that the agreement I had with him was to write
about his field, not mine.

The second
group of apprentices was extremely compact. It had only three members: a
dreamer, Florinda Grau; a stalker, Taisha Abelar; and a nagual woman, Carol
Tiggs.

We
interacted with one another solely in the second attention. In the world of
everyday life, we did not have even a vague notion of one another. In terms of
our relationship with don Juan, however, there was no vagueness; he put enormous
effort into training all of us equally. Nevertheless, toward the end, when don
Juan's time was about to finish, the psychological pressure of his departure
started to collapse the rigid boundaries of the second attention. The result
was that our interaction began to lapse into the world of everyday affairs, and
we met, seemingly for the first time.

None of us,
consciously, knew about our deep and arduous interaction in the second
attention. Since all of us were involved in academic studies, we ended up more
than shocked when we found out we had met before. This was and still is, of
course, intellectually inadmissible to us, yet we know that it was thoroughly
within our experience. We have been left, therefore, with the disquieting
knowledge that the human psyche is infinitely more complex than our mundane or
academic reasoning had led us to believe.

Once we
asked don Juan, in unison, to shed light on our predicament. He said that he
had two explanatory options. One was to cater to our hurt rationality and patch
it up, saying that the second attention is a state of awareness as illusory as
elephants flying in the sky and that everything we thought we had experienced
in that state was simply a product of hypnotic suggestions. The other option
was to explain it the way sorcerer dreamers understand it: as an
 
energetic configuration of awareness.

During the
fulfillment of my
dreaming
tasks, however, the barrier of the second
attention remained unchanged. Every time I entered into
dreaming
, I also
entered into the second attention, and waking up from
dreaming
did not
necessarily mean I had left the second attention. For years I could remember
only bits of my
dreaming
experiences. The bulk of what I did was
energetically unavailable to me. It took me fifteen years of uninterrupted
work, from 1973 to 1988, to store enough energy to rearrange everything
linearly in my mind. I remembered then sequences upon sequences of
dreaming
events, and I was able to fill in, at last, some seeming lapses of memory. In
this manner I captured the inherent continuity of don Juan's lessons in the art
of
dreaming
, a continuity that had been lost to me because of his making
me weave between the awareness of our everyday life and the awareness of the
second attention. This work is a result of that rearrangement.

All this
brings me to the final part of my statement: the reason for writing this book.
Being in possession of most of the pieces of don Juan's lessons in the art of
dreaming
,
I would like to explain, in a future work, the current position and interest of
his last four students: Florinda Grau, Taisha Abelar, Carol Tiggs, and myself.
But before I describe and explain the results of don Juan's guidance and
influence on us, I must review, in light of what I know now, the parts of don
Juan's lessons in
dreaming
to which I did not have access before.

The
definitive reason for this work, however, was given by Carol Tiggs. Her belief
is that explaining the world that don Juan made us inherit is the ultimate
expression of our gratitude to him and our commitment to his quest.

Don Juan
stressed, time and time again, that everything he was teaching me had been
envisioned and worked out by men he referred to as sorcerers of antiquity. He
made it very clear that there was a profound distinction between those
sorcerers and the sorcerers of modern times. He categorized sorcerers of
antiquity as men who existed in Mexico perhaps thousands of years before the
Spanish Conquest, men whose greatest accomplishment had been to build the
structures of sorcery, emphasizing practicality and concreteness. He rendered
them as men who were brilliant but lacking in wisdom. Modern sorcerers, by
contrast, don Juan portrayed as men renowned for their sound minds and their capacity
to rectify the course of sorcery if they deemed it necessary.

Don Juan
explained to me that the sorcery premises pertinent to
dreaming
were
naturally envisioned and developed by sorcerers of antiquity. Out of necessity,
for those premises are key in explaining and understanding
dreaming
, I
again have to write about and discuss them. The major part of this book is,
therefore, a reintroduction and amplification of what I have presented in my
previous works.

During one
of our conversations, don Juan stated that, in order to appreciate the position
of dreamers and
dreaming
, one has to understand the struggle of
modern-day sorcerers to steer sorcery away from concreteness toward the
abstract.