The Art of Dreaming (23 page)

"But
it's going to be a mess," I protested.

"No,
it won't be," he assured me. "It'll be a mess if you let your
pettiness choose the events you are going to recapitulate. Instead, let the
spirit decide. Be silent, and then get to the event the spirit points
out."

The results
of that pattern of recapitulation were shocking to me on many levels. It was
very impressive to find out that, whenever I silenced my mind, a seemingly
independent force immediately plunged me into a most detailed memory of some
event in my life. But it was even more impressive that a very orderly
configuration resulted. What I thought was going to be chaotic turned out to be
extremely effective.

I asked don
Juan why he had not made me recapitulate in this manner from the start. He
replied that there are two basic rounds to the recapitulation, that the first
is called formality and rigidity, and the second fluidity.

I had no
inkling about how different my recapitulation was going to be this time. The
ability to concentrate, which I had acquired by means of my
dreaming
practices, permitted me to examine my life at a depth I would never have
imagined possible. It took me over a year to view and review all I could about
my life experiences. At the end, I had to agree with don Juan: there had been
immensities of loaded emotions hidden so deeply inside me as to be virtually
inaccessible.

The result
of my second recapitulation was a new, more relaxed attitude. The very day I
returned to my
dreaming
practices, I dreamt I saw myself asleep. I
turned around and daringly left my room, penuriously going down a flight of
stairs to the street.

I was
elated with what I had done and reported it to don Juan. My disappointment was
enormous when he did not consider this dream part of my
dreaming
practices. He argued that I had not gone to the street with my energy body,
because if I had I would have had a sensation other than walking down a flight
of stairs.

"What
kind of sensation are you talking about, don Juan?" I asked, with genuine
curiosity.

"You
have to establish some valid guide to find out whether you are actually seeing
your body asleep in your bed," he said instead of answering my question.
"Remember, you must be in your actual room, seeing your actual body.
Otherwise, what you are having is merely a dream. If that's the case, control
that dream, either by observing its detail or by changing it."

I insisted
he tell me more about the valid guide he had referred to, but he cut me short.
"Figure out a way to validate the fact that you are looking at
yourself," he said.

"Do
you have any suggestions as to what can be a valid guide?" I insisted.

"Use
your own judgment. We are coming to the end of our time together. You have to
be on your own very soon." He changed the subject then, and I was left
with a clear taste of my ineptitude. I was unable to figure out what he wanted
or what he meant by a valid guide.

In the next
dream in which I saw myself asleep, instead of leaving the room and walking
down the stairs, or waking up screaming, I remained glued, for a long time, to
the spot from which I watched. Without fretting or despairing, I observed the
details of my dream. I noticed then that I was asleep wearing a white T-shirt
that was ripped at the shoulder. I tried to come closer and examine the rip,
but moving was beyond my capabilities. I felt a heaviness that seemed to be
part of my very being. In fact, I was all weight. Not knowing what to do next,
I instantly entered into a devastating confusion. I tried to change dreams, but
some unaccustomed force kept me staring at my sleeping body.

In the
midst of my turmoil, I heard the
dreaming
emissary saying that not
having control to move around was frightening me to the point that I might have
to do another recapitulation. The emissary's voice and what it said did not
surprise me at all. I had never felt so vividly and terrifyingly unable to
move. I did not, however, give in to my terror. I examined it and found out
that it was not a psychological terror but a physical sensation of
helplessness, despair, and annoyance. It bothered me beyond words that I was
not capable of moving my limbs. My annoyance grew in proportion to my
realization that something outside me had me brutally pinned down. The effort I
made to move my arms or legs was so intense and single-minded that at one
moment I actually saw one leg of my body, sleeping on the bed, flung out as if
kicking.

My
awareness was then pulled into my inert, sleeping body, and I woke up with such
a force that it took more than half an hour to calm myself down. My heart was
beating almost erratically. I was shivering, and some of the muscles in my legs
twitched uncontrollably. I had suffered such a radical loss of body heat that I
needed blankets and hot-water bottles to raise my temperature.

Naturally,
I went to Mexico to ask don Juan's advice about the sensation of paralysis, and
about the fact that I really had been wearing a ripped T-shirt, thus, I had
indeed seen myself asleep. Besides, I was deadly afraid of hypothermia. He was
reluctant to discuss my predicament. All I got out of him was a caustic remark.

"You
like drama," he said flatly. "Of course you really saw yourself
asleep. The problem is that you got nervous, because your energy body has never
been consciously in one piece before. If you ever get nervous and cold again,
hold on to your dick. That will restore your body temperature in a jiffy and
without any fuss."

I felt a
bit offended by his crassness. However, the advice proved effective. The next
time I became frightened, I relaxed and returned to normal in a few minutes,
doing what he had prescribed. In this manner, I discovered that if I did not
fret and kept my annoyance in check, I did not panic. To remain controlled did
not help me move, but it certainly gave me a deep sensation of peace and
serenity.

After
months of useless efforts at walking, I sought don Juan's comments once again,
not so much for his advice this time but because I wanted to concede defeat. I
was up against an impassable barrier, and I knew with indisputable certainty
that I had failed.

"Dreamers
have to be imaginative," don Juan said with a malicious grin.
"Imaginative you are not. I didn't warn you about having to use your
imagination to move your energy body because I wanted to find out whether you
could resolve the riddle by yourself. You didn't, and your friends didn't help
you either."

In the
past, I had been driven to defend myself viciously whenever he accused me of
lacking imagination. I thought I was imaginative, but having don Juan as a
teacher had taught me, the hard way, that I am not. Since I was not going to
engage my energy in futile defenses of myself, I asked him instead, "What
is this riddle you are talking about, don Juan?"

"The
riddle of how impossible and yet how easy it is to move the energy body. You
are trying to move it as if you were in the daily world. We spend so much time
and effort learning to walk that we believe our
dreaming
bodies should
also walk. There is no reason why they should, except that walking is foremost
in our minds."

I marveled
at the simplicity of the solution. I instantly knew that don Juan was right. I
had gotten stuck again at the level of interpretation. He had told me I had to
move around once I reached the third gate of
dreaming
, and to me moving
around meant walking. I told him that I understood his point.

"It
isn't my point," he curtly answered. "It's a sorcerers' point.
Sorcerers say that at the third gate the entire energy body can move like
energy moves: fast and directly. Your energy body knows exactly how to move. It
can move as it moves in the inorganic beings' world.

"And
this brings us to the other issue here," don Juan added with an air of
pensiveness. "Why didn't your inorganic being friends help you?"

"Why
do you call them my friends, don Juan?"

"They
are like the classic friends who are not really thoughtful or kind to us but
not mean either. The friends who are just waiting for us to turn our backs so
they can stab us there."

I
understood him completely and agreed with him one hundred percent.

"What
makes me go there? Is it a suicidal tendency?" I asked him, more
rhetorically than not.

"You
don't have any suicidal tendency," he said. "What you have is a total
disbelief that you were near death. Since you were not in physical pain, you
can't quite convince yourself you were in mortal danger."

His
argument was most reasonable, except that I did believe a deep, unknown fear
had been ruling my life since my bout with the inorganic beings. Don Juan
listened in silence as I described to him my predicament. I could not discard
or explain away my urge to go to the inorganic beings' world, in spite of what
I knew about it.

"I
have a streak of insanity," I said. "What I do doesn't make
sense."

"It
does make sense. The inorganic beings are still reeling you in, like a fish
hooked at the end of a line," he said. "They throw worthless bait at
you from time to time to keep you going. To arrange your dreams to occur every
four days without fail is worthless bait. But they didn't teach you how to move
your energy body."

"Why
do you think they didn't?"

"Because
when your energy body learns to move by itself, you'll be thoroughly out of
their reach. It was premature of me to believe that you are free from them. You
are relatively but not completely free. They are still bidding for your
awareness."

I felt a
chill in my back. He had touched a sore spot in me.

"Tell
me what to do, don Juan, and I'll do it," I said.

"Be
impeccable. I have told you this dozens of times. To be impeccable means to put
your life on the line in order to back up your decisions, and then to do quite
a lot more than your best to realize those decisions. When you are not deciding
anything, you are merely playing roulette with your life in a helter-skelter
way."

Don Juan
ended our conversation, urging me to ponder what he had said.

At the
first opportunity I had, I put don Juan's suggestion about moving my energy
body to the test. When I found myself looking at my body asleep, instead of
struggling to walk toward it I simply willed myself to move closer to the bed.
Instantly, I was nearly touching my body. I saw my face. In fact, I could see
every pore in my skin. I cannot say that I liked what I saw. My view of my own
body was too detailed to be aesthetically pleasing. Then something like a wind
came into the room, totally disarranged everything, and erased my view.

During
subsequent dreams, I entirely corroborated that the only way the energy body
can move is to glide or soar. I discussed this with don Juan. He seemed
unusually satisfied with what I had done, which certainly surprised me. I was
accustomed to his cold reaction to anything I did in my
dreaming
practices.

"Your
energy body is used to moving only when something pulls it," he said.
"The inorganic beings have been pulling your energy body right and left,
and until now you have never moved it by yourself, with your own volition. It
doesn't seem like you've done much, moving the way you did, yet I assure you
that I was seriously considering ending your practices. For a while, I believed
you were not going to learn how to move on your own."

"Were
you considering ending my
dreaming
practices because I am slow?"

"You're
not slow. It takes sorcerers forever to learn to move the energy body. I was
going to end your
dreaming
practices because I have no more time. There
are other topics, more pressing than
dreaming
, on which you can use your
energy."

"Now
that I've learned how to move my energy body by myself, what else should I do,
don Juan?"

"Continue
moving. Moving your energy body has opened up a new area for you, an area of
extraordinary exploration."

He urged me
again to come up with an idea to validate the faithfulness of my dreams; that
request did not seem as odd as it had the first time he voiced it.

"As
you know, to be transported by a scout is the real
dreaming
task of the
second gate," he explained. "It is a very serious matter, but not as
serious as forging and moving the energy body. Therefore, you have to make
sure, by some means of your own, whether you are actually seeing yourself
asleep or whether you are merely
dreaming
that you're seeing yourself
asleep. Your new extraordinary exploration hinges on really seeing yourself
asleep."

After some
heavy pondering and wondering, I believed that I had come up with the right
plan. Having seen my ripped T-shirt gave me an idea for a valid guide. I
started from the assumption that, if I were actually observing myself asleep, I
would also be observing whether I had the same sleeping attire I had gone to
bed in, an attire that I had decided to change radically every four days. I was
confident that I was not going to have any difficulty in remembering, in
dreams, what I was wearing when I went to bed; the discipline I had acquired
through my
dreaming
practices made me think that I had the ability to
record things like this in my mind and remember them in dreams.