The Art of Dreaming (37 page)

Her words
and especially her smile made me feel so relieved that I kept on walking in a
state of bliss. We went around the corner to the hotel's entrance, half a block
down the street, right in front of the church. We went through the bleak lobby,
up the cement stairway to the second floor, directly to an unfriendly room I
had never seen before. Carol said that I had been there; however, I had no
recollection of the hotel or the room. I was so tired, though, that I could not
think about it. I just sank into the bed, face down. All I wanted to do was
sleep, yet I was too keyed up. There were too many loose ends, although everything
seemed so orderly. I had a sudden surge of nervous excitation and sat up.

"I
never told you that I hadn't accepted the death defier's gift," I said,
facing Carol. "How did you know I didn't?"

"Oh,
but you told me that yourself," she protested as she sat down next to me.
"You were so proud of it. That was the first thing you blurted out when I
found you."

This was
the only answer, so far, that did not quite satisfy me. What she was reporting
did not sound like my statement.

"I
think you read me wrong," I said. "I just didn't want to get anything
that would deviate me from my goal."

"Do
you mean you didn't feel proud of refusing?"

"No. I
didn't feel anything. I am no longer capable of feeling anything, except
fear."

I stretched
my legs and put my head on the pillow. I felt that if I closed my eyes or did
not keep on talking I would be asleep in an instant. I told Carol how I had
argued with don Juan, at the beginning of my association with him, about his
confessed motive for staying on the warrior's path. He had said that fear kept
him going in a straight line, and that what he feared the most was to lose the
nagual, the abstract, the spirit.

"Compared
with losing the nagual, death is nothing," he had said with a note of true
passion in his voice. "My fear of losing the nagual is the only real thing
I have, because without it I would be worse than dead."

I said to
Carol that I had immediately contradicted don Juan and bragged that since I was
impervious to fear, if I had to stay within the confines of one path, the
moving force for me had to be love.

Don Juan
had retorted that when the real pull comes, fear is the only worthwhile
condition for a warrior. I secretly resented him for what I thought was his
covert narrow-mindedness.

"The
wheel has done a full turn," I said to Carol, "and look at me now. I
can swear to you that the only thing that keeps me going is the fear of losing
the nagual."

Carol
stared at me with a strange look I had never seen in her.

"I
dare to disagree," she said softly. "Fear is nothing compared with
affection. Fear makes you run wildly; love makes you move intelligently."

"What
are you saying, Carol Tiggs? Are sorcerers people in love now?"

She did not
answer. She lay next to me and put her head on my shoulder. We stayed there, in
that strange, unfriendly room, for a long time, in total silence.

"I
feel what you feel," Carol said abruptly. "Now, try to feel what I
feel. You can do it. But let's do it in the dark."

Carol
stretched her arm up and turned off the light above the bed. I sat up straight
in one single motion. A jolt of fright had gone through me like electricity. As
soon as Carol turned off the light, it was nighttime inside that room. In the
middle of great agitation, I asked Carol about it.

"You're
not all together yet," she said reassuringly. "You had a bout of
monumental proportions. Going so deeply into the second attention has left you
a little mangled, so to speak. Of course, it's daytime, but your eyes can't yet
adjust properly to the dim light inside this room."

More or
less convinced, I lay down again. Carol kept on talking, but I was not
listening. I felt the sheets. They were real sheets. I ran my hands on the bed.
It was a bed! I leaned over and ran the palms of my hands on the cold tiles of
the floor. I got out of bed and checked every item in the room and in the
bathroom. Everything was perfectly normal, perfectly real. I told Carol that
when she turned off the light, I had the clear sensation I was
dreaming
.

"Give
yourself a break," she said. "Cut this investigatory nonsense and
come to bed and rest."

I opened
the curtains of the window to the street. It was day-time outside, but the
moment I closed them it was nighttime inside. Carol begged me to come back to
bed. She feared that I might run away and end up in the street, as I had done
before. She made sense. I went back to bed without noticing that not even for a
second had it entered my mind to point at things. It was as if that knowledge
had been erased from my memory.

The
darkness in that hotel room was most extraordinary. It brought me a delicious
sense of peace and harmony. It brought me also a profound sadness, a longing
for human warmth, for companionship. I felt more than bewildered. Never had
anything like this happened to me. I lay in bed, trying to remember if that
longing was something I knew. It was not. The longings I knew were not for
human companionship; they were abstract; they were rather a sort of sadness for
not reaching something undefined.

"I am
coming apart," I said to Carol. "I am about to weep for people."

I thought
she would understand my statement as being funny. I intended it as a joke. But
she did not say anything; she seemed to agree with me. She sighed. Being in an
unstable state of mind, I became instantly swayed toward emotionality. I faced
her in the darkness and muttered something that in a more lucid moment would
have been quite irrational to me.

"I
absolutely adore you," I said.

Talk like
that among the sorcerers of don Juan's line was unthinkable. Carol Tiggs was
the nagual woman. Between the two of us, there was no need for demonstrations
of affection. In fact, we did not even know what we felt for each other. We had
been taught by don Juan that among sorcerers there was no need or time for such
feelings.

Carol
smiled at me and embraced me. And I was filled with such a consuming affection
for her that I began to weep involuntarily.

"Your
energy body is moving forward on the universe's luminous filaments of
energy," she whispered in my ear. "We are being carried by the death
defier's gift of intent."

I had
enough energy to understand what she was saying. I even questioned her about
whether she, herself, understood what it all meant. She hushed me and whispered
in my ear.

"I do
understand; the death defier's gift to you was the wings of intent. And with
them, you and I are
dreaming
ourselves in another time. In a time yet to
come."

I pushed
her away and sat up. The way Carol was voicing those complex sorcerers'
thoughts was unsettling to me. She was not given to take conceptual thinking
seriously. We had always joked among ourselves that she did not have a
philosopher's mind.

"What's
the matter with you?" I asked. "Yours is a new development for me:
Carol the sorceress-philosopher. You are talking like don Juan."

"Not
yet." She laughed. "But it's coming. It's rolling, and when it
finally hits me, it'll be the easiest thing in the world for me to be a
sorceress-philosopher. You'll see. And no one will be able to explain it
because it will just happen."

An alarm
bell rang in my mind.

"You're
not Carol!" I shouted. "You're the death defier masquerading as
Carol. I knew it." Carol laughed, undisturbed by my accusation.

"Don't
be absurd," she said. "You're going to miss the lesson. I knew that,
sooner or later, you were going to give in to your indulging. Believe me, I am
Carol. But we're doing something we've never done: we are intending in the
second attention, as the sorcerers of antiquity used to do."

I was not
convinced, but I had no more energy to pursue my argument, for something like the
great vortexes of my
dreaming
was beginning to pull me in. I heard
Carol's voice faintly, saying in my ear, "We are
dreaming
ourselves. Dream your intent of me. Intend me forward! Intend me forward!"

With great
effort, I voiced my innermost thought. "Stay here with me forever," I
said with the slowness of a tape recorder on the blink. She responded with
something incomprehensible. I wanted to laugh at my voice, but then the vortex
swallowed me.

When I woke
up, I was alone in the hotel room. I had no idea how long I had slept. I felt
extremely disappointed at not finding Carol by my side. I hurriedly dressed and
went down to the lobby to look for her. Besides, I wanted to shake off some
strange sleepiness that had clung to me.

At the
desk, the manager told me that the American woman who had rented the room had
just left a moment ago. I ran out to the street, hoping to catch her, but there
was no sign of her. It was midday; the sun was shining in a cloudless sky. It
was a bit warm.

I walked to
the church. My surprise was genuine but dull at finding out that I had indeed
seen the detail of its architectural structure in that dream. Uninterestedly, I
played my own devil's advocate and gave myself the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps don Juan and I had examined the back of the church and I did not
remember it. I thought about it. It did not matter. My validation scheme had no
meaning for me anyway. I was too sleepy to care. From there I slowly walked to
don Juan's house, still looking for Carol. I was sure I was going to find her
there, waiting for me. Don Juan received me as if I had come back from the
dead.

He and his
companions were in the throes of agitation as they examined me with undisguised
curiosity.

"Where
have you been?" don Juan demanded. I could not comprehend the reason for
all the fuss. I told him that I had spent the night with Carol in the hotel by
the plaza, because I had no energy to walk back from the church to their house,
but that they already knew this.

"We
knew nothing of the sort," he snapped.

"Didn't
Carol tell you she was with me?" I asked in the midst of a dull suspicion,
which, if I had not been so exhausted, would have been alarming.

No one
answered. They looked at one another, searchingly. I faced don Juan and told
him I was under the impression he had sent Carol to find me. Don Juan paced the
room up and down without saying a word.

"Carol
Tiggs hasn't been with us at all," he said. "And you've been gone for
nine days."

My fatigue
prevented me from being blasted by those statements. His tone of voice and the
concern the others showed were ample proof that they were serious. But I was so
numb that there was nothing for me to say.

Don Juan
asked me to tell them, in all possible detail, what had transpired between the
death defier and me. I was shocked at being able to remember so much, and at
being able to convey all of it in spite of my fatigue. A moment of levity broke
the tension when I told them how hard the woman had laughed at my inane yelling
in her dream, my intent to
see
.

"Pointing
the little finger works better," I said to don Juan, but without any
feeling of recrimination.

Don Juan
asked if the woman had any other reaction to my yelling besides laughing. I had
no memory of one, except her mirth and the fact that she had commented how
intensely he disliked her.

"I
don't dislike her," don Juan protested. "I just don't like the old
sorcerers' coerciveness."

Addressing
everybody, I said that I personally had liked that woman immensely and
unbiasedly. And that I had loved Carol Tiggs as I never thought I could love
anyone. They did not seem to appreciate what I was saying. They looked at one
another as if I had suddenly gone crazy. I wanted to say more, to explain
myself. But don Juan, I believed just to stop me from babbling idiocies, practically
dragged me out of the house and back to the hotel.

The same
manager I had spoken to earlier obligingly listened to our description of Carol
Tiggs, but he flatly denied ever having seen her or me before. He even called
the hotel maids; they corroborated his statements.

"What
can the meaning of all this be?" don Juan asked out loud. It seemed to be
a question addressed to himself. He gently ushered me out of the hotel.
"Let's get out of this confounded place," he said.

When we
were outside, he ordered me not to turn around to look at the hotel or at the
church across the street, but to keep my head down. I looked at my shoes and
instantly realized I was no longer wearing Carol's clothes but my own. I could
not remember, however, no matter how hard I tried, when I had changed clothes.
I figured that it must have been when I woke up in the hotel room. I must have
put on my own clothes then, although my memory was blank.

By then we
had reached the plaza. Before we crossed it to head off to don Juan's house, I explained
to him about my clothes. He shook his head rhythmically, listening to every
word. Then he sat down on a bench, and, in a voice that conveyed genuine
concern, he warned me that, at the moment, I had no way of knowing what had
transpired in the second attention between the woman in the church and my
energy body. My interaction with the Carol Tiggs of the hotel had been just the
tip of the iceberg.