The Art of Dreaming (30 page)

"Do
you mean that I can cross the fourth gate by myself, without help?"

"Whether
or not you can do that is up to the spirit."

He abruptly
dropped the subject, but he did not leave me with the sensation that I should
try to reach and cross the fourth gate by myself.

Don Juan
then made one last appointment with me to give me, he said, a sorcerers'
send-off: the concluding touch of my
dreaming
practices. He told me to
meet him in the small town in southern Mexico where he and his sorcerer
companions lived.

I arrived
there in the late afternoon. Don Juan and I sat in the patio of his house on
some uncomfortable wicker chairs fitted with thick, oversize pillows. Don Juan
laughed and winked at me. The chairs were a gift from one of the women members
of his party, and we simply had to sit as if nothing was bothering us,
especially him. The chairs had been bought for him in Phoenix, Arizona, and with great difficulty brought into Mexico.

Don Juan
asked me to read to him a poem by Dylan Thomas, which he said had the most
pertinent meaning for me at that point in time.

I have
longed to move away From the hissing of the spent lie

And the old
terrors' continual cry

Growing
more terrible as the day

Goes over
the hill into the deep sea. . . .

I have
longed to move away but am afraid;

Some life,
yet unspent, might explode

Out of the
old lie burning on the ground,

And,
crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.

Don Juan
stood up and said that he was going for a walk in the plaza, in the center of
town. He asked me to come along. I immediately assumed that the poem had evoked
a negative response in him and he needed to dispel it.

We reached
the square plaza without having said a word. We walked around it a couple of
times, still not talking. There were quite a number of people, milling around
the stores on the streets facing the east and north sides of the park. All the
streets around the plaza were unevenly paved. The houses were massive,
one-story adobe buildings, with tiled roofs, whitewashed walls, and blue or
brown painted doors. On a side street, a block away from the plaza, the high
walls of the enormous colonial church, which looked like a Moorish mosque,
loomed ominously over the roof of the only hotel in town. On the south side, there
were two restaurants, which inexplicably coexisted side by side, doing good
business, serving practically the same menu at the same prices.

I broke the
silence and asked don Juan whether he also found it odd that both restaurants
were just about the same.

"Everything
is possible in this town," he replied.

The way he
said it made me feel uneasy.

"Why
are you so nervous?" he asked, with a serious expression. "Do you
know something you're not telling me?"

"Why
am I nervous? That's a laugh. I am always nervous around you, don Juan.
Sometimes more so than others."

He seemed
to be making a serious effort not to laugh.

"Naguals
are not really the most friendly beings on earth," he said in a tone of
apology. "I learned this the hard way, being pitted against my teacher,
the terrible nagual Julian. His mere presence used to scare the daylights out
of me. And when he used to zero in on me, I always thought my life wasn't worth
a plug nickel."

"Unquestionably,
don Juan, you have the same effect on me."

He laughed
openly. "No, no. You are definitely exaggerating. I'm an angel in
comparison." "You may be an angel in comparison, except that I don't
have the nagual Julian to compare you with."

He laughed
for a moment, then became serious again.

"I
don't know why, but I definitely feel scared," I explained.

"Do
you feel you have reason to be scared?" he asked and stopped walking to
peer at me.

His tone of
voice and his raised eyebrows gave me the impression he suspected that I knew something
I was not revealing to him. He was clearly expecting a disclosure on my part.

"Your
insistence makes me wonder," I said. "Are you sure you are not the
one who has something up his sleeve?"

"I do
have something up my sleeve," he admitted and grinned. "But that's
not the issue. The issue is that there is something in this town awaiting you.
And you don't quite know what it is or you do know what it is but don't dare to
tell me, or you don't know anything about it at all." "What's waiting
for me here?"

Instead of
answering me, don Juan briskly resumed his walking, and we kept going around
the plaza in complete silence. We circled it quite a few times, looking for a
place to sit. Then, a group of young women got up from a bench and left.

"For
years now, I have been describing to you the aberrant practices of the
sorcerers of ancient Mexico," don Juan said as he sat down on the bench
and gestured for me to sit by him.

With the
fervor of someone who has never said it before, he began to tell me again what
he had told me many times, that those sorcerers, guided by extremely selfish
interests, put all their efforts into perfecting practices that pushed them
further and further away from sobriety or mental balance, and that they were
finally exterminated when their complex edifices of beliefs and practices
became so cumbersome that they could no longer support them.

"The
sorcerers of antiquity, of course, lived and proliferated in this area,"
he said, watching my reaction. "Here in this town. This town was built on
the actual foundations of one of their towns. Here in this area, the sorcerers
of antiquity carried on all their dealings."

"Do
you know this for a fact, don Juan?"

"I do,
and so will you, very soon."

My mounting
anxiety was forcing me to do something I detested: to focus on myself. Don Juan,
sensing my frustration, egged me on.

"Very
soon, we'll know whether or not you're really like the old sorcerers or like
the new ones," he said.

"You
are driving me nuts with all this strange and ominous talk," I protested.

Being with
don Juan for thirteen years had conditioned me, above everything else, to
conceive of panic as something that was just around the corner at all times,
ready to be released.

Don Juan
seemed to vacillate. I noticed his furtive glances in the direction of the
church. He was even distracted. When I talked to him, he was not listening. I
had to repeat my question.

"Are
you waiting for someone?"

"Yes,
I am," he said. "Most certainly I am. I was just sensing the
surroundings. You caught me in the act of scanning the area with my energy
body."

"What
did you sense, don Juan?"

"My
energy body senses that everything is in place. The play is on tonight. You are
the main protagonist. I am a character actor with a small but meaningful role.
I exit in the first act."

"What
in the world are you talking about?"

He did not
answer me. He smiled knowingly.

"I'm
preparing the ground," he said. "Warming you up, so to speak, harping
on the idea that modern-day sorcerers have learned a hard lesson. They have
realized that only if they remain totally detached can they have the energy to
be free. Theirs is a peculiar type of detachment, which is born not out of fear
or indolence but out of conviction."

Don Juan
paused and stood up, stretched his arms in front of him, to his sides, and then
behind him.

"Do
the same," he advised me. "It relaxes the body, and you have to be
very relaxed to face what's coming to you tonight." He smiled broadly.

"Either
total detachment or utter indulging is coming to you tonight. It is a choice
that every nagual in my line has to make." He sat down again and took a
deep breath. What he had said seemed to have taken all his energy.

"I
think I can understand detachment and indulging," he went on,
"because I had the privilege of knowing two naguals: my benefactor, the
nagual Julian, and his benefactor, the nagual Elias. I witnessed the difference
between the two. The nagual Elias was detached to the point that he could put
aside a gift of power. The nagual Julian was also detached, but not enough to
put aside such a gift."

"Judging
by the way you're talking," I said, "I would say that you are going
to spring some sort of test on me tonight. Is that true?"

"I
don't have the power to spring tests of any sort on you, but the spirit
does." He said this with a grin, then added, "I am merely its
agent."

"What
is the spirit going to do to me, don Juan?"

"All I
can say is that tonight you're going to get a lesson in
dreaming
, the
way lessons in
dreaming
used to be, but you are not going to get that
lesson from me. Someone else is going to be your teacher and guide you
tonight."

"Who
is going to be my teacher and guide?"

"A
visitor, who might be a horrendous surprise to you or no surprise at all."

"And
what's the lesson in
dreaming
I am going to get?"

"It's
a lesson about the fourth gate of
dreaming
. And it is in two parts. The
first part I'll explain to you presently. The second part nobody can explain to
you, because it is something that pertains only to you. All the naguals of my
line got this two-part lesson, but no two of those lessons were alike; they
were tailored to fit those naguals' personal bents of character."

"Your
explanation doesn't help me at all, don Juan. I am getting more and more
nervous."

We remained
quiet for a long moment. I was shaken up and fidgety and did not know what else
to say without actually nagging.

"As
you already know, for modern-day sorcerers to perceive energy directly is a
matter of personal attainment," don Juan said. "We maneuver the
assemblage point through self-discipline. For the old sorcerers, the displacement
of the assemblage point was a consequence of their subjugation to others, their
teachers, who accomplished those displacements through dark operations and gave
them to their disciples as gifts of power.

"It's
possible for someone with greater energy than ours to do anything to us,"
he went on. For example, the nagual Julian could have turned me into anything
he wanted, a fiend or a saint. But he was an impeccable nagual and let me be
myself. The old sorcerers were not that impeccable, and, by means of their
ceaseless efforts to gain control over others, they created a situation of
darkness and terror that was passed on from teacher to disciple."

He stood up
and swept his gaze all around us.

"As
you can see, this town isn't much," he continued, "but it has a
unique fascination for the warriors of my line. Here lies the source of what we
are and the source of what we don't want to be.

"Since
I am at the end of my time, I must pass on to you certain ideas, recount to you
certain stories, put you in touch with certain beings, right here in this town,
exactly as my benefactor did with me."

Don Juan
said that he was reiterating something I already was familiar with, that
whatever he was and everything he knew were a legacy from his teacher, the
nagual Julian. He in turn inherited everything from his teacher, the nagual
Elias. The nagual Elias from the nagual Rosendo; he from the nagual Lujan; the
nagual Lujan from the nagual Santisteban; and the nagual Santisteban from the
nagual Sebastian.

He told me
again, in a very formal tone, something he had explained to me many times
before, that there were eight naguals before the nagual Sebastian, but that
they were quite different. They had a different attitude toward sorcery, a
different concept of it, although they were still directly related to his
sorcery lineage.

"You
must recollect now, and repeat to me, everything I've told you about the nagual
Sebastian," he demanded.

His request
seemed odd to me, but I repeated everything I had been told by him or by any of
his companions about the nagual Sebastian and the mythical old sorcerer, the
death defier, known to them as the tenant.

"You
know that the death defier makes us gifts of power every generation," don
Juan said. "And the specific nature of those gifts of power is what
changed the course of our lineage."

He
explained that the tenant, being a sorcerer from the old school, had learned
from his teachers all the intricacies of shifting his assemblage point. Since
he had perhaps thousands of years of strange life and awareness-ample time to
perfect anything - he knew now how to reach and hold hundreds, if not
thousands, of positions of the assemblage point. His gifts were like both maps
for shifting the assemblage point to specific spots and manuals on how to immobilize
it on any of those positions and thus acquire cohesion.

Don Juan
was at the peak of his raconteur's form. I had never seen him more dramatic. If
I had not known him better, I would have sworn that his voice had the deep and
worried inflection of someone gripped by fear or preoccupation. His gestures
gave me the impression of a good actor portraying nervousness and concern to
perfection.