The Art of Dreaming (35 page)

Its
stunning realness put an immediate end to my longing and renewed my interest in
watching everything. I was looking, specifically, for features that could be
correlated with the town of my day. However, no matter how intently I observed,
I had no success. There was a plaza in that town, but it was in front of the
church, facing the portico.

In the
moonlight the mountains around the town were clearly visible and almost
recognizable. I tried to orient myself, observing the moon and the stars, as if
I were in the consensual reality of everyday life. It was a waning moon,
perhaps a day after full. It was high over the horizon. It must have been
between eight and nine in the evening. I could see Orion to the right of the
moon; its two main stars, Betelgeuse and Rigel, were on a horizontal straight
line with the moon. I estimated it to be early December. My time was May. In
May, Orion is nowhere in sight at that time. I gazed at the moon as long as I
could. Nothing shifted. It was the moon as far as I could tell. The disparity
in time got me very excited.

As I
reexamined the southern horizon, I thought I could distinguish the bell-like
peak visible from don Juan's patio. I tried next to figure out where his house
might have been. For one instant I thought I found it. I became so enthralled
that I pulled my hand out of the woman's grip.

Instantly,
a tremendous anxiety possessed me. I knew that I had to go back to the church,
because if I did not I would simply drop dead on the spot. I turned around and
bolted for the church. The woman quickly grabbed my hand and followed me.

As we
approached the church at a running pace, I became aware that the town in that
dreaming
was behind the church. Had I taken this into consideration, orientation might
have been possible. As it was, I had no more
dreaming
attention. I
focused all of it on the architectural and ornamental details on the back of
the church. I had never seen that part of the building in the world of everyday
life, and I thought that if I could record its features in my memory, I could
check them later against the details of the real church.

That was
the plan I concocted on the spur of the moment. Something inside me, however,
scorned my efforts at validation. During all my apprenticeship, I had been
plagued by the need for objectivity, which had forced me to check and recheck
everything about don Juan's world. Yet it was not validation per se that was
always at stake but the need to use this drive for objectivity as a crutch to
give me protection at the moments of most intense cognitive disruption; when it
was time to check what I had validated, I never went through with it.

Inside the
church, the woman and I knelt in front of the small altar on the left side,
where we had been, and the next instant, I woke up in the well-illuminated
church of my day.

The woman
crossed herself and stood up. I did the same automatically. She took my arm and
began to walk toward the door.

"Wait,
wait," I said and was surprised that I could talk. I could not think
clearly, yet I wanted to ask her a convoluted question. What I wanted to know
was how anyone could have the energy to visualize every detail of a whole town.

Smiling,
the woman answered my unvoiced question; she said that she was very good at
visualizing because after a lifetime of doing it, she had many, many lifetimes
to perfect it. She added that the town I had visited and the church where we
had talked were examples of her recent visualizations. The church was the same
church where Sebastian had been a sexton. She had given herself the task of
memorizing every detail of every corner of that church and that town, for that
matter, out of a need to survive.

She ended
her talk with a most disturbing afterthought.

"Since
you know quite a bit about this town, even though you've never tried to
visualize it," she said, "you are now helping me to intend it. I bet
you won't believe me if I tell you that this town you are looking at now
doesn't really exist, outside your intent and mine."

She peered
at me and laughed at my sense of horror, for I had just fully realized what she
was saying.

"Are
we still
dreaming
?" I asked, astonished.

"We
are," she said. "But this
dreaming
is more real than the
other, because you're helping me. It is not possible to explain it beyond
saying that it is happening. Like everything else." She pointed all around
her. "There is no way to tell how it happens, but it does. Remember always
what I've told you: this is the mystery of intending in the second
attention."

She gently
pulled me closer to her. "Let's stroll to the plaza of this dream,"
she said. "But perhaps I should fix myself a little bit so you'll be more
at ease."

I looked at
her uncomprehendingly as she expertly changed her appearance. She did this with
very simple, mundane maneuvers. She undid her long skirt, revealing the very average
midcalf skirt she was wearing underneath. She then twisted her long braid into
a chignon and changed from her guaraches into inch-heel shoes she had in a
small cloth sack.

She turned
over her reversible black shawl to reveal a beige stole. She looked like a
typical middle-class Mexican woman from the city, perhaps on a visit to that
town.

She took my
arm with a woman's aplomb and led the way to the plaza.

"What
happened to your tongue?" she said in English. "Did the cat eat
it?"

I was
totally engrossed in the unthinkable possibility that I was still in a dream;
what is more, I was beginning to believe that if it were true, I ran the risk
of never waking up.

In a
nonchalant tone that I could not recognize as mine, I said, "I didn't
realize until now that you spoke in English to me before. Where did you learn
it?"

"In
the world out there. I speak many languages." She paused and scrutinized
me. "I've had plenty of time to learn them. Since we're going to spend a
lot of time together, I'll teach you my own language sometime."

She
giggled, no doubt at my look of despair.

I stopped
walking. "Are we going to spend a lot of time together?" I asked,
betraying my feelings.

"Of
course," she replied in a joyful tone. "You are, and I should say
very generously, going to give me your energy, for free. You said that
yourself, didn't you?" I was aghast.

"What's
the problem?" the woman asked, shifting back into Spanish. "Don't
tell me that you regret your decision. We are sorcerers. It's too late to
change your mind. You are not afraid, are you?"

I was again
more than terrified, but, if I had been put on the spot to describe what
terrified me, I would not have known. I was certainly not afraid of being with
the death defier in another dream or of losing my mind or even my life. Was I
afraid of evil? I asked myself. But the thought of evil could not withstand
examination. As a result of all those years on the sorcerers' path, I knew
without the shadow of a doubt that in the universe only energy exists; evil is
merely a concatenation of the human mind, overwhelmed by the fixation of the
assemblage point on its habitual position. Logically, there was really nothing
for me to be afraid of. I knew that, but I also knew that my real weakness was
to lack the fluidity to fix my assemblage point instantly on any new position
to which it was displaced. The contact with the death defier was displacing my
assemblage point at a tremendous rate, and I did not have the prowess to keep
up with the push. The end result was a vague pseudo-sensation of fearing that I
might not be able to wake up.

"There
is no problem," I said. "Let's continue our dream walk."

She linked
her arm with mine, and we reached the park in silence. It was not at all a
forced silence. But my mind was running in circles. How strange, I thought;
only a while ago I had walked with don Juan from the park to the church, in the
midst of the most terrifying normal fear. Now I was walking back from the
church to the park with the object of my fear, and I was more terrified than ever,
but in a different, more mature, more deadly manner.

To fend off
my worries, I began to look around. If this was a dream, as I believed it was,
there was a way to prove or disprove it. I pointed my finger at the houses, at
the church, at the pavement in the street. I pointed at people. I pointed at
everything. Daringly, I even grabbed a couple of people, whom I seemed to scare
considerably. I felt their mass. They were as real as anything I consider real,
except that they did not generate energy. Nothing in that town generated
energy. Everything seemed real and normal, yet it was a dream.

I turned to
the woman, who was holding on to my arm, and questioned her about it. "We
are
dreaming
," she said in her raspy voice and giggled.

"But
how can people and things around us to be so real, so three-dimensional?"

"The
mystery of intending in the second attention!" she exclaimed reverently.
"Those people out there are so real that they even have thoughts."

That was
the last stroke. I did not want to question anything else. I wanted to abandon
myself to that dream. A considerable jolt on my arm brought me back to the
moment. We had reached the plaza. The woman had stopped walking and was pulling
me to sit down on a bench. I knew I was in trouble when I did not feel the
bench underneath me as I sat down. I began to spin. I thought I was ascending.
I caught a most fleeting glimpse of the park, as if I were looking at it from
above.

"This
is it!" I yelled. I thought I was dying. The spinning ascension turned
into a twirling descent into blackness.

"Make
an effort, nagual," a woman's voice urged me. "Don't sink. Surface,
surface. Use your dream techniques!"

My mind
began to work. I thought it was the voice of an English speaker, and I also
thought that if I were to use
dreaming
techniques, I had to find a point
of departure to energize myself.

"Open
your eyes," the voice said. "Open them now. Use the first thing you
see as a point of departure."

I made a
supreme effort and opened my eyes. I saw trees and blue sky. It was daytime! A
blurry face was peering at me. But I could not focus my eyes. I thought that it
was the woman in the church looking at me.

"Use
my face," the voice said. It was a familiar voice, but I could not
identify it. "Make my face your home base; then look at everything,"
the voice went on.

My ears
were clearing up, and so were my eyes. I gazed at the woman's face, then at the
trees in the park, at the wrought-iron bench, at people walking by, and back
again at her face.

In spite of
the fact that her face changed every time I gazed at her, I began to experience
a minimum of control. When I was more in possession of my faculties, I realized
that a woman was sitting on the bench, holding my head on her lap. And she was
not the woman in the church; she was Carol Tiggs.

"What
are you doing here?" I gasped.

My fright
and surprise were so intense that I wanted to jump up and run, but my body was
not ruled at all by my mental awareness. Anguishing moments followed, in which
I tried desperately but uselessly to get up. The world around me was too clear
for me to believe I was still
dreaming
, yet my impaired motor control
made me suspect that this was really a dream. Besides, Carol's presence was too
abrupt; there were no antecedents to justify it.

Cautiously,
I attempted to will myself to get up, as I had done hundreds of times in
dreaming
,
but nothing happened. If I ever needed to be objective, this was the time. As
carefully as I could, I began to look at everything within my field of vision
with one eye first. I repeated the process with the other eye. I took the
consistency between the images of my two eyes as an indication that I was in
the consensual reality of everyday life.

Next, I
examined Carol. I noticed at that moment that I could move my arms. It was only
my lower body that was veritably paralyzed. I touched Carol's face and hands; I
embraced her. She was solid and, I believed, the real Carol Tiggs. My relief
was enormous, because for a moment I'd had the dark suspicion that she was the
death defier masquerading as Carol.

With utmost
care, Carol helped me to sit up on the bench. I had been sprawled on my back,
half on the bench and half on the ground. I noticed then something totally out
of the norm. I was wearing faded blue Levi's and worn brown leather boots. I
also had on a Levi's jacket and a denim shirt.

"Wait
a minute," I said to Carol. "Look at me! Are these my clothes? Am I
myself?"

Carol
laughed and shook me by the shoulders, the way she always did to denote camaraderie,
manliness, that she was one of the boys.

"I'm
looking at your beautiful self," she said in her funny forced falsetto.
"Oh massa, who else could it possibly be?"

"How
in the hell can I be wearing Levi's and boots?" I insisted. "I don't
own any." "Those are my clothes you are wearing. I found you
naked!"