The Art of Dreaming (10 page)

"Is
there any particular reason for this revulsion?"

"The
best reason in the world: we are antithetical. They love slavery, and I love
freedom. They love to buy, and I don't sell."

I became
inexplicably agitated and brusquely told him that the subject was so farfetched
for me that I could not take it seriously.

He stared
at me, smiling, and said, "The best thing to do with inorganic beings is
what you do: deny their existence but visit with them regularly and maintain
that you are
dreaming
and in
dreaming
anything is possible. This
way you don't commit yourself."

I felt
strangely guilty, although I could not figure out why. I felt compelled to ask,
"What are you referring to, don Juan?"

"To
your visits with the inorganic beings," he replied dryly.

"Are
you kidding? What visits?"

"I
didn't want to discuss this, but I think it's time I tell you that the nagging
voice you heard, reminding you to fix your
dreaming attention
on the
items of your dreams, was the voice of an inorganic being."

I thought
don Juan was completely irrational. I became so irritated that I even yelled at
him. He laughed at me and asked me to tell him about my irregular
dreaming
sessions. That request surprised me. I had never mentioned to anyone that every
so often I used to zoom out of a dream, pulled by a given item, but instead of
my changing dreams, as I should have, the total mood of the dream changed and I
would find myself in a dimension unknown to me. I soared in it, directed by
some invisible guide, which made me twirl around and around. I always awoke
from one of these dreams still twirling, and I continued tossing and turning
for a long time before I fully woke up.

"Those
are bona fide meetings you are having with your inorganic being friends,"
don Juan said.

I did not
want to argue with him, but neither did I want to agree. I remained silent. I
had forgotten my question about the old sorcerers, but don Juan picked up the
subject again.

"My
understanding is that the old sorcerers existed perhaps as far back as ten
thousand years ago," he said, smiling and watching my reaction.

Basing my
response on current archaeological data on the migration of Asiatic nomadic
tribes to the Americas, I said that I believed his date was incorrect. Ten
thousand years was too far back.

"You
have your knowledge and I have mine," he said. "My knowledge is that
the old sorcerers ruled for four thousand years, from seven thousand to three
thousand years ago. Three thousand years ago, they went to nothing. And from
then on, sorcerers have been regrouping, restructuring what was left of the old
ones."

"How
can you be so sure about your dates?" I asked.

"How
can you be so sure about yours?" he retorted.

I told him
that archaeologists have foolproof methods to establish the date of past
cultures. Again he retorted that sorcerers have foolproof methods of their own.

"I'm
not trying to be contrary or argue you down," he continued, "but
someday soon you may be able to ask someone who knows for sure."

"No
one can know this for sure, don Juan."

"This
is another of those impossible things to believe, but there is somebody who can
verify all this. You'll meet that person someday."

"Come
on, don Juan, you've got to be joking. Who can verify, what happened seven
thousand years ago?"

"Very
simple, one of the old sorcerers we've been talking about. The one I met. He's
the one who told me all about the old sorcerers. I hope you remember what I am
going to tell you about that particular man. He is the key to many of our
endeavors, and he's also the one you have to meet."

I told don
Juan that I was hanging on every word he said, I even though I did not
understand what he was saying. He accused me of humoring him and not believing
a word about the old sorcerers. I admitted that in my state of daily
consciousness, of course, I had not believed those farfetched stories. But
neither had I in the second attention, although there I should have had a
different reaction.

"Only
when you ponder what I said does it become a farfetched story," he
remarked. "If you don't involve your common sense, it remains purely a
matter of energy."

"Why
did you say, don Juan, that I am going to meet one of the old sorcerers?"

"Because
you are. It is vital that the two of you meet, someday. But, for the moment,
just let me tell you another farfetched story about one of the naguals of my
line, the nagual Sebastian."

Don Juan
told me then that the nagual Sebastian had been a sexton in a church in southern
Mexico around the beginning of the eighteenth century. In his account, don
Juan stressed how sorcerers, past or present, seek and find refuge in
established institutions, such as the Church. It was his idea that because of
their superior discipline, sorcerers are trustworthy employees and that they
are avidly sought by institutions that are always in dire need of such persons.
Don Juan maintained that as long as no one is aware of the sorcerers' doings,
their lack of ideological sympathies makes them appear as model workers.

Don Juan
continued his story and said that one day, while Sebastian was performing his
duties as a sexton, a strange man came to the church, an old Indian who seemed
to be ill. In a weak voice he told Sebastian that he needed help. The nagual
thought that the Indian wanted the parish priest, but the man, making a great
effort, addressed the nagual. In a harsh and direct tone, he told him that he
knew that Sebastian was not only a sorcerer but a nagual.

Sebastian,
quite alarmed by this sudden turn of events, pulled the Indian aside and
demanded an apology. The man replied that he was not there to apologize but to
get specialized help. He needed, he said, to receive the nagual's energy in
order to maintain his life, which, he assured Sebastian, had spanned thousands
of years but at the moment was ebbing away.

Sebastian,
who was a very intelligent man, unwilling to pay attention to such nonsense,
urged the Indian to stop clowning around. The old man became angry and
threatened Sebastian with exposing him and his group to the ecclesiastical
authorities if he did not comply with his request.

Don Juan
reminded me that those were the times when the ecclesiastical authorities were
brutally and systematically eradicating heretical practices among the Indians
of the New Worlds. The man's threat was not something to be taken lightly; the
nagual and his group were indeed in mortal danger. Sebastian asked the Indian
how he could give him energy. The man explained that naguals, by means of their
discipline, gain a peculiar energy that they store in their bodies and that he
would get it painlessly from Sebastian's energy center on his navel. In return
for it, Sebastian would get not only the opportunity to continue his activities
unscathed but also a gift of power.

The
knowledge that he was being manipulated by the old Indian did not sit right
with the nagual, but the man was inflexible and left him no alternative but to
comply with his request.

Don Juan
assured me that the old Indian was not exaggerating about his claims at all. He
turned out to be one of the sorcerers of ancient times, one of those known as
the
death defiers
. He had apparently survived to the present by
manipulating his assemblage point in ways that only he knew about.

Don Juan
said that what transpired between Sebastian and that man later became the
ground for an agreement that had bound all six naguals who followed Sebastian.
The death defier, kept his word; in exchange for energy from every one of those
men, he made a donation to the giver, a gift of power. Sebastian had to accept
such a gift, although reluctantly; he had been cornered and had no other
choice. All the other naguals who followed him, however, gladly and proudly
accepted their gifts.

Don Juan
concluded his story, saying that over time the death defier came to be known as
the tenant. And for over two hundred years, the naguals of don Juan's line
honored that binding agreement, creating a symbiotic relationship that changed
the course and final goal of their lineage.

Don Juan
did not care to explain the story any further, and I was left with a strange
sensation of truthfulness, which was more bothersome to me than I could have
imagined.

"How
did he get to live that long?" I asked.

"No
one knows," don Juan replied. "All we've known about him, for
generations, is what he tells us. The death defier is the one I asked about the
old sorcerers, and he told me that they were at their peak three thousand years
ago."

"How
do you know he was telling you the truth?" I asked.

Don Juan
shook his head in amazement, if not revulsion. "When you're facing that
inconceivable unknown out there," he said, pointing all around him,
"you don't fool around with petty lies. Petty lies are only for people who
have never witnessed what's out there, waiting for them."

"What's
waiting for us out there, don Juan?"

His answer,
a seemingly innocuous phrase, was more terrifying to me than if he had
described the most horrendous thing.

"Something
utterly impersonal," he said. He must have noticed that I was coming
apart. He made me change levels of awareness to make my fright vanish.

A few
months later, my
dreaming
practices took a strange turn. I began to get,
in my dreams, replies to questions I was planning to ask don Juan. The most
impressive part of this oddity was that it quickly lapsed into my waking hours.
And one day, while I was sitting at my desk, I got a reply to an unvoiced
question about the realness of inorganic beings. I had
seen
inorganic
beings in dreams so many times I had begun to think of them as real. I reminded
myself I had even touched one, in a state of seminormal consciousness in the
Sonoran desert. And my dreams had been periodically deviated to views of worlds
I seriously doubted could have been products of my mentality. I wished to give
don Juan my best shot, in terms of a concise query, so I molded a question in
my mind: if one is to accept that inorganic beings are as real as people,
where, in the physicality of the universe, is the realm in which they exist?

After
formulating the question to myself, I heard a strange laughter, just as I had
the day I wrestled with the inorganic being. Then a man's voice answered me.
"That realm exists in a particular position of the assemblage point,"
it said. "Just like your world exists in the habitual position of the
assemblage point."

The last
thing I wanted was to enter into a dialogue with a disembodied voice, so I
stood up and ran out of my house. The thought occurred to me that I was losing
my mind. Another worry to add to my collection of worries.

The voice
had been so clear and authoritative that it not only intrigued me but terrified
me. I waited with great trepidation for oncoming barrages of that voice, but
the event was never repeated. At the first opportunity I had, I consulted with
don Juan.

He was not
impressed in the least.

"You
must understand, once and for all, that things like this are very normal in the
life of a sorcerer," he said. "You are not going mad; you are simply
hearing the voice of the
dreaming emissary
. Upon crossing the first or
second
gate of dreaming
, dreamers reach a threshold of energy and begin to see
things or to hear voices. Not really plural voices, but a singular voice.
Sorcerers call it the voice of the
dreaming emissary
."

"What
is the
dreaming emissary
?"

"Alien
energy that has conciseness. Alien energy that purports to aid dreamers by
telling them things. The problem with the
dreaming emissary
is that it
can tell only what the sorcerers already know or should know, were they worth
their salt."

"To
say that it's alien energy that has conciseness doesn't help me at all, don
Juan. What kind of energy - benign, malignant, right, wrong, what?"

"It's
just what I said, alien energy. An impersonal force that we turn into a very
personal one because it has voice. Some sorcerers swear by it. They even see
it. Or, as you yourself have done, they simply hear it as a man's or a woman's
voice. And the voice can tell them about the state of things, which most of the
time they take as sacred advice."

"Why
do some of us hear it as a voice?"

"We
see it or hear it because we maintain our assemblage points fixed on a specific
new position; the more intense this fixation, the more intense our experience
of the emissary. Watch out! You may see it and feel it as a naked woman."

Don Juan laughed
at his own remark, but I was too scared for levity.

"Is
this force capable of materializing itself?" I asked.

"Certainly,"
he replied. "And it all depends on how fixed the assemblage point is. But,
rest assured, if you are capable of maintaining a degree of detachment, nothing
happens. The emissary remains what it is: an impersonal force that acts on us
because of the fixation of our assemblage points."