The Art of Dreaming (36 page)

"Where?
When?"

"Around
the church, about an hour ago. I came to the plaza here to look for you. The
nagual sent me to see if I could find you. I brought the clothes, just in
case."

I told her
that I felt terribly vulnerable and embarrassed to have wandered around without
my clothes.

"Strangely
enough, there was no one around," she assured me, but I felt she was
saying it just to ease my discomfort. Her playful smile told me so.

"I
must have been with the death defier all last night, maybe even longer," I
said. "What day is it today?"

"Don't
worry about dates," she said, laughing. "When you are more centered,
you'll count the days yourself."

"Don't
humor me, Carol Tiggs. What day is it today?" My voice was a gruff,
no-nonsense voice that did not seem to belong to me.

"It's
the day after the big fiesta," she said and slapped me gently on my
shoulder. "We all have been looking for you since last night."

"But
what am I doing here?"

"I
took you to the hotel across the plaza. I couldn't carry you all the way to the
nagual's house; you ran out of the room a few minutes ago, and we ended up
here."

"Why
didn't you ask the nagual for help?"

"Because
this is an affair that concerns only you and me. We must solve it together."
That shut me up. She made perfect sense to me. I asked her one more nagging
question. "What did I say when you found me?"

"You
said that you had been so deeply into the second attention and for such a long
time that you were not quite rational yet. All you wanted to do was to fall
asleep."

"When
did I lose my motor control?"

"Only
a moment ago. You'll get it back. You yourself know that it is quite normal,
when you enter into the second attention and receive a considerable energy
jolt, to lose control of your speech or of your limbs."

"And
when did you lose your lisping, Carol?" I caught her totally by surprise.
She peered at me and broke into a hearty laugh.

"I've
been working on it for a long time," she confessed. "I think that
it's terribly annoying to hear a grown woman lisping. Besides, you hate
it."

Admitting
that I detested her lisping was not difficult. Don Juan and I had tried to cure
her, but we had concluded she was not interested in getting cured. Her lisping
made her extremely cute to everyone, and don Juan's feelings were that she
loved it and was not going to give it up. Hearing her speak without lisping was
tremendously rewarding and exciting to me. It proved to me that she was capable
of radical changes on her own, a thing neither don Juan nor I was ever sure
about.

"What
else did the nagual say to you when he sent you to look for me?" I asked.
"He said you were having a bout with the death defier."

In a
confidential tone, I revealed to Carol that the death defier was a woman.
Nonchalantly, she said that she knew it.

"How
can you know it?" I shouted. "No one has ever known this, apart from
don Juan. Did he tell you that himself?"

"Of
course he did," she replied, unperturbed by my shouting. "What you
have overlooked is that I also met the woman in the church. I met her before
you did. We amiably chatted in the church for quite a while."

I believed
Carol was telling me the truth. What she was describing was very much what don
Juan would do. He would in all likelihood send Carol as a scout in order to
draw conclusions.

"When
did you see the death defier?" I asked.

"A
couple of weeks ago," she replied in a matter-of-fact tone. "It was
no great event for me. I had no energy to give her, or at least not the energy
that woman wants."

"Why
did you see her then? Is dealing with the nagual woman also part of the death
defier's and sorcerers' agreement?"

"I saw
her because the nagual said that you and I are interchangeable, and for no
other reason. Our energy bodies have merged many times. Don't you remember? The
woman and I talked about the ease with which we merge. I stayed with her maybe
three or four hours, until the nagual came in and got me out."

"Did
you stay in the church all that time?" I asked, because I could hardly
believe that they had knelt in there for three or four hours only talking about
the merging of our energy bodies.

"She
took me into another facet of her intent," Carol conceded after a moment's
thought. "She made me
see
how she actually escaped her
captors."

Carol
related then a most intriguing story. She said that according to what the woman
in the church had made her
see
, every sorcerer of antiquity fell,
inescapably, prey to the inorganic beings. The inorganic beings, after
capturing them, gave them power to be the intermediaries between our world and
their realm, which people called the netherworld.

The death
defier was unavoidably caught in the nets of the inorganic beings. Carol
estimated that he spent perhaps thousands of years as a captive, until the
moment he was capable of transforming himself into a woman. He had clearly seen
this as his way out of that world the day he found out that the inorganic
beings regard the female principle as imperishable. They believe that the
female principle has such a pliability and its scope is so vast that its
members are impervious to traps and setups and can hardly be held captive. The
death defier's transformation was so complete and so detailed that she was
instantly spewed out of the inorganic beings' realm.

"Did
she tell you that the inorganic beings are still after her?" I asked.

"Naturally
they are after her," Carol assured me. "The woman told me she has to
fend off her pursuers every moment of her life."

"What
can they do to her?"

"Realize
she was a man and pull her back to captivity, I suppose. I think she fears them
more than you can think it's possible to fear anything."

Nonchalantly,
Carol told me that the woman in the church was thoroughly aware of my run-in
with the inorganic beings and that she also knew about the blue scout.

"She
knows everything about you and me," Carol continued. "And not because
I told her anything, but because she is part of our lives and our lineage. She
mentioned that she had always followed all of us, you and me in
particular."

Carol
related to me the instances that the woman knew in which Carol and I had acted
together. As she spoke, I began to experience a unique nostalgia for the very
person who was in front of me: Carol Tiggs. I wished desperately to embrace
her. I reached out to her, but I lost my balance and fell off the bench.

Carol
helped me up from the pavement and anxiously examined my legs and the pupils of
my eyes, my neck and my lower back. She said that I was still suffering from an
energetic jolt.

She propped
my head on her bosom and caressed me as if I were a malingering child she was humoring.

After a
while I did feel better; I even began to regain my motor control.

"How
do you like the clothes I am wearing?" Carol asked me all of a sudden.
"Am I overdressed for the occasion? Do I look all right to you?"

Carol was
always exquisitely dressed. If there was anything certain about her, it was her
impeccable taste in clothes. In fact, as long as I had known her, it had been a
running joke between don Juan and the rest of us that her only virtue was her
expertise at buying beautiful clothes and wearing them with grace and style.

I found her
question very odd and made a comment.

"Why
would you be insecure about your appearance? It has never bothered you before.
Are you trying to impress someone?"

"I'm
trying to impress you, of course," she said.

"But
this is not the time," I protested. "What's going on with the death
defier is the important matter, not your appearance."

"You'd
be surprised how important my appearance is." She laughed. "My appearance
is a matter of life or death for both of us."

"What
are you talking about? You remind me of the nagual setting up my meeting with
the death defier. He nearly drove me nuts with his mysterious talk."

"Was
his mysterious talk justified?" Carol asked with a deadly serious
expression. "It most certainly was," I admitted.

"So is
my appearance. Humor me. How do you find me? Appealing, unappealing,
attractive, average, disgusting, overpowering, bossy?"

I thought
for a moment and made my assessment. I found Carol very appealing. This was
quite strange to me. I had never consciously thought about her appeal.

"I
find you divinely beautiful," I said. "In fact, you're downright
stunning."

"Then
this must be the right appearance." She sighed.

I was
trying to figure out her meanings, when she spoke again. She asked, "What
was your time with the death defier like?"

I
succinctly told her about my experience, mainly about the first dream. I said
that I believed the death defier had made me
see
that town, but at
another time in the past.

"But
that's not possible," she blurted out. "There is no past or future in
the universe. There is only the moment."

"I
know that it was the past," I said. "It was the same church, but a
different town."

"Think
for a moment," she insisted. "In the universe there is only energy,
and energy has only a here and now, an endless and ever-present here and
now."

"So
what do you think happened to me, Carol?"

"With
the death defier's help, you crossed the fourth gate of
dreaming
,"
she said. "The woman in the church took you into her dream, into her
intent. She took you into her visualization of this town. Obviously, she
visualized it in the past, and that visualization is still intact in her. As
her present visualization of this town must be there too."

After a
long silence she asked me another question.

"What
else did the woman do with you?"

I told
Carol about the second dream. The dream of the town as it stands today.

"There
you are," she said. "Not only did the woman take you into her past
intent but she further helped you cross the fourth gate by making your energy
body journey to another place that exists today, only in her intent."

Carol
paused and asked me whether the woman in the church had explained to me what
intending in the second attention meant.

I did
remember her mentioning but not really explaining what it meant to intend in
the second attention. Carol was dealing with concepts don Juan had never spoken
about.

"Where
did you get all these novel ideas?" I asked, truly marveling at how lucid
she was.

In a
noncommittal tone, Carol assured me that the woman in the church had explained
to her a great deal about those intricacies.

"We
are intending in the second attention now," she continued. "The woman
in the church made us fall asleep; you here, and I in Tucson. And then we fell
asleep again in our dream. But you don't remember that part, while I do. The
secret of the twin positions. Remember what the woman told you; the second
dream is intending in the second attention: the only way to cross the fourth
gate of
dreaming
."

After a
long pause, during which I could not articulate one word, she said, "I
think the woman in the church really made you a gift, although you didn't want
to receive one. Her gift was to add her energy to ours in order to move
backward and forward on the here-and-now energy of the universe."

I got
extremely excited. Carol's words were precise, apropos. She had defined for me
something I considered undefinable, although I did not know what it was that
she had defined. If I could have moved, I would have leapt to hug her. She
smiled beatifically as I kept on ranting nervously about the sense her words
made to me. I commented rhetorically that don Juan had never told me anything
similar.

"Maybe
he doesn't know," Carol said, not offensively but conciliatorily.

I did not
argue with her. I remained quiet for a while, strangely void of thoughts. Then
my thoughts and words erupted out of me like a volcano. People went around the
plaza, staring at us every so often or stopping in front of us to watch us. And
we must have been a sight: Carol Tiggs kissing and caressing my face while I
ranted on and on about her lucidity and my encounter with the death defier.

When I was
able to walk, she guided me across the plaza to the only hotel in town. She
assured me that I did not yet have the energy to go to don Juan's house but
that everybody there knew our whereabouts.

"How
would they know our whereabouts?" I asked. "The nagual is a very
crafty old sorcerer," she replied, laughing. "He's the one who told
me that if I found you energetically mangled, I should put you in the hotel
rather than risk crossing the town with you in tow."