The Art of Dreaming (34 page)

"Where
are we going?" I asked her.

"Nowhere,"
she replied. "We simply came out here to have more space, more privacy. Here
we can talk our little heads off."

She urged
me to sit down on a quarried, half-chiseled piece of limestone.

"The
second attention has endless treasures to be discovered," she began.
"The initial position in which the dreamer places his body is of key
importance. And right there is the secret of the ancient sorcerers, who were
already ancient in my time. Think about it."

She sat so
close to me that I felt the heat of her body. She put an arm around my shoulder
and pressed me against her bosom. Her body had a most peculiar fragrance; it
reminded me of trees or sage. It was not that she was wearing perfume; her
whole being seemed to exude that characteristic odor of pine forests. Also the
heat of her body was not like mine or like that of anyone else I knew. Hers was
a cool, mentholated heat, even, balanced. The thought that came to my mind was
that her heat would press on relentlessly but knew no hurry.

She began
then to whisper in my left ear. She said that the gifts she had given to the
naguals of my line had to do with what the old sorcerers used to call, the twin
positions. That is to say, the initial position in which a dreamer holds his
physical body to begin
dreaming
is mirrored by the position in which he
holds his energy body, in dreams, to fixate his assemblage point on any spot of
his choosing. The two positions make a unit, she said, and it took the old
sorcerers thousands of years to find out the perfect relationship between any
two positions. She commented, with a giggle, that the sorcerers of today will
never have the time or the disposition to do all that work, and that the men
and women of my line were indeed lucky to have her to give them such gifts. Her
laughter had a most remarkable, crystalline sound.

I had not
quite understood her explanation of the twin positions. Boldly, I told her that
I did not want to practice those things but only know about them as
intellectual possibilities.

"What
exactly do you want to know?" she asked softly.

"Explain
to me what you mean by the twin positions, or the initial position in which a
dreamer holds his body to start
dreaming
." I said.

"How
do you lie down to start your
dreaming
?" she asked.

"Any
which way. I don't have a pattern. Don Juan never stressed this point."

"Well,
I do stress it," she said and stood up. She changed positions. She sat
down to my right and whispered in my other ear that, in accordance with what
she knew, the position in which one places the body is of utmost importance.
She proposed a way of testing this by performing an extremely delicate but
simple exercise.

"Start
your
dreaming
by lying on your right side, with your knees a bit
bent," she said. "The discipline is to maintain that position and
fall asleep in it. In
dreaming
, then, the exercise is to dream that you
lie down in exactly the same position and fall asleep again."

"What
does that do?" I asked.

"It
makes the assemblage point stay put, and I mean really stay put, in whatever
position it is at the instant of that second falling asleep."

"What
are the results of this exercise?"

"Total
perception. I am sure your teachers have already told you that my gifts are
gifts of total perception."

"Yes.
But I think I am not clear about what total perception means," I lied.

She ignored
me and went on to tell me that the four variations of the exercise were to fall
asleep lying on the right side, the left, the back, and the stomach. Then in
dreaming
the exercise was to dream of falling asleep a second time in the same position
as the
dreaming
had been started. She promised me extraordinary results,
which she said were not possible to foretell. She abruptly changed the subject
and asked me, "What's the gift you want for yourself?" "No gift
for me. I've told you that already."

"I
insist. I must offer you a gift, and you must accept it. That is our
agreement."

"Our
agreement is that we give you energy. So take it from me. This one is on me. My
gift to you."

The woman
seemed dumbfounded. And I persisted in telling her it was all right with me
that she took my energy. I even told her that I liked her immensely. Naturally,
I meant it. There was something supremely sad and, at the same time, supremely
appealing about her.

"Let's
go back inside the church," she muttered.

"If
you really want to make me a gift," I said, "take me for a stroll in
this town, in the moonlight."

She shook
her head affirmatively. "Provided that you don't say a word," she
said. "Why not?" I asked, but I already knew the answer.

"Because
we are
dreaming
," she said. "I'll be taking you deeper into my
dream."

She
explained that as long as we stayed in the church, I had enough energy to think
and converse, but that beyond the boundaries of that church it was a different
situation. "Why is that?" I asked daringly.

In a most
serious tone, which not only increased her eeriness but terrified me, the woman
said, "Because there is no out there. This is a dream. You are at the
fourth gate of
dreaming
,
dreaming
my dream."

She told me
that her art was to be capable of projecting her intent, and that everything I
saw around me was her intent. She said in a whisper that the church and the
town were the results of her intent; they did not exist, yet they did. She
added, looking into my eyes, that this is one of the mysteries of intending in
the second attention the twin positions of
dreaming
. It can be done, but
it cannot be explained or comprehended.

She told me
then that she came from a line of sorcerers who knew how to move about in the
second attention by projecting their intent. Her story was that the sorcerers
of her line practiced the art of projecting their thoughts in
dreaming
in order to accomplish the truthful reproduction of any object or structure or
landmark or scenery of their choice.

She said
that the sorcerers of her line used to start by gazing at a simple object and
memorizing every detail of it. They would then close their eyes and visualize
the object and correct their visualization against the true object until they
could see it, in its completeness, with their eyes shut. The next thing in
their developing scheme was to dream with the object and create in the dream,
from the point of view of their own perception, a total materialization of the
object. This act, the woman said, was called the first step to total
perception.

From a
simple object, those sorcerers went on to take more and more complex items.
Their final aim was for all of them together to visualize a total world, then
dream that world and thus re-create a totally veritable realm where they could
exist.

"When
any of the sorcerers of my line were able to do that," the woman went on,
"they could easily pull anyone into their intent, into their dream. This
is what I am doing to you now, and what I did to all the naguals of your
line."

The woman
giggled. "You better believe it," she said, as if I did not.

"Whole
populations disappeared in
dreaming
like that. This is the reason I said
to you that this church and this town are one of the mysteries of intending in
the second attention."

"You
say that whole populations disappeared that way. How was it possible?" I
asked.

"They
visualized and then re-created in
dreaming
the same scenery," she
replied. "You've never visualized anything, so it's very dangerous for you
to go into my dream."

She warned
me, then, that to cross the fourth gate and travel to places that exist only in
someone else's intent was perilous, since every item in such a dream had to be
an ultimately personal item.

"Do
you still want to go?" she asked.

I said yes.
Then she told me more about the twin positions. The essence of her explanation
was that if I were, for instance,
dreaming
of my hometown and my dream
had started when I lay down on my right side, I could very easily stay in the
town of my dream if I would lie on my right side, in the dream, and dream that
I had fallen asleep. The second dream not only would necessarily be a dream of
my hometown, but would be the most concrete dream one can imagine.

She was
confident that in my
dreaming
training I had gotten countless dreams of
great concreteness, but she assured me that every one of them had to be a fluke.
For the only way to have absolute control of dreams was to use the technique of
the twin positions.

"And
don't ask me why," she added. "It just happens. Like everything
else."

She made me
stand up and admonished me again not to talk or stray from her. She took my
hand gently, as if I were a child, and headed toward a clump of dark
silhouettes of houses. We were on a cobbled street. Hard river rocks had been
pounded edgewise into the dirt. Uneven pressure had created uneven surfaces. It
seemed that the cobblers had followed the contours of the ground without
bothering to level it.

The houses
were big, whitewashed, one-story, dusty buildings with tiled roofs. There were
people meandering quietly. Dark shadows inside the houses gave me the feeling
of curious but frightened neighbors gossiping behind doors. I could also see
the flat mountains around the town.

Contrary to
what had happened to me all along in my
dreaming
, my mental processes
were unimpaired. My thoughts were not pushed away by the force of the events in
the dream. And my mental calculations told me I was in the dream version of the
town where don Juan lived, but at a different time. My curiosity was at its
peak. I was actually with the death defier in her dream. But was it a dream?
She herself had said it was a dream. I wanted to watch everything, to be
superalert. I wanted to test everything by seeing energy. I felt embarrassed,
but the woman tightened her grip on my hand as if to signal me that she agreed
with me.

Still
feeling absurdly bashful, I automatically stated out loud my intent to
see
.
In my
dreaming
practices, I had been using all along the phrase "I
want to
see
energy." Sometimes, I had to say it over and over until
I got results. This time, in the woman's dream town, as I began to repeat it in
my usual manner, the woman began to laugh. Her laughter was like don Juan's: a
deep, abandoned belly laugh.

"What's
so funny?" I asked, somehow contaminated by her mirth.

"Juan
Matus doesn't like the old sorcerers in general and me in particular," the
woman said between fits of laughter. "All we have to do, in order to
see
in our dreams, is to point with our little finger at the item we want to
see
.
To make you yell in my dream is his way to send me his message. You have to
admit that he's really clever." She paused for a moment, then said in the
tone of a revelation, "Of course, to yell like an asshole works too."

The
sorcerers' sense of humor bewildered me beyond measure. She laughed so hard she
seemed to be unable to proceed with our walk. I felt stupid. When she calmed
down and was perfectly poised again, she politely told me that I could point at
anything I wanted in her dream, including herself.

I pointed
at a house with the little finger of my left hand. There was no energy in that
house. The house was like any other item of a regular dream. I pointed at
everything around me with the same result.

"Point
at me," she urged me. "You must corroborate that this is the method
dreamers follow in order to
see
."

She was
thoroughly right. That was the method. The instant I pointed my finger at her,
she was a blob of energy. A very peculiar blob of energy, I may add. Her
energetic shape was exactly as don Juan had described it; it looked like an
enormous seashell, curled inwardly along a cleavage that ran its length.

"I am
the only energy-generating being in this dream," she said. "So the
proper thing for you to do is just watch everything."

At that
moment I was struck, for the first time, by the immensity of don Juan's joke.
He had actually contrived to have me learn to yell in my
dreaming
so
that I could yell in the privacy of the death defier's dream. I found that
touch so funny that laughter spilled out of me in suffocating waves.

"Let's
continue our walk," the woman said softly when I had no more laughter in
me.

There were
only two streets that intersected; each had three blocks of houses. We walked
the length of both streets, not once but four times. I looked at everything and
listened with my
dreaming
attention for any noises. There were very few,
only dogs barking in the distance, or people speaking in whispers as we went
by.

The dogs
barking brought me an unknown and profound longing. I had to stop walking. I
sought relief by leaning my shoulder against a wall. The contact with the wall
was shocking to me, not because the wall was unusual but because what I had
leaned on was a solid wall, like any other wall I had ever touched. I felt it
with my free hand. I ran my fingers on its rough surface. It was indeed a wall!