The Art of Dreaming (18 page)

"But
if I say that, I have to stay, right?" I asked.

"Naturally,"
the emissary said in a tone of ultimate conviction. "Everything you say
out loud in this world is for keeps."

I could not
help thinking that, if the emissary had wanted to trick me into staying, all it
had to do was lie to me. I would not have known the difference.

"I
cannot lie to you, because a lie doesn't exist," the emissary said,
intruding into my thoughts. "I can tell you only about what exists. In my
world, only intent exists; a lie has no intent behind it; therefore, it has no
existence."

I wanted to
argue that there is intent even behind lies, but before I could voice my
argument, the emissary said that behind lies there is intention but that
intention is not intent.

I could not
keep my
dreaming
attention focused on the argument the emissary was
posing. It went to the shadow beings. Suddenly, I noticed that they had the
appearance of a herd of strange, childlike animals. The emissary's voice warned
me to hold my emotions in check, for sudden bursts of feelings had the capacity
to make them disperse, like a flock of birds.

"What
do you want me to do?" I asked.

"Come
down to our side and try to push or pull us," the emissary's voice urged
me. "The quicker you learn to do that, the quicker you'll be able to move
things around in your world by merely looking at them."

My
merchant's mind went berserk with anticipation. I was instantly among them,
desperately trying to push them or pull them. After a while, I thoroughly
exhausted my energy. I had then the impression that I had been trying to do
something equivalent to lifting a house with the strength of my teeth.

Another
impression I had was that the more I exerted myself, the greater the number of
shadows. It was as if they were coming from every corner to watch me, or to
feed on me. The moment I had that thought, the shadows again scurried away.

"We
are not feeding on you," the emissary said. "We all come to feel your
energy, very much like what you do with sunlight on a cold day."

The
emissary urged me to open up to them by canceling out my suspicious thoughts. I
heard the voice, and, as I listened to what it was saying, I realized that I
was hearing, feeling, and thinking exactly as I do in my daily world. I slowly
turned to see around me. Taking the clarity of my perception as a gauge, I concluded
that I was in a real world. The emissary's voice sounded in my ears. It said
that for me the only difference between perceiving my world and perceiving
theirs was that perceiving their world started and ended in the blink of an
eye; perceiving mine did not, because my awareness — together with the
awareness of an immense number of beings like me, who held my world in place
with their intent — was fixed on my world. The emissary added that perceiving
my world started and ended the same way for the inorganic beings, in the blink
of an eye, but perceiving their world did not, because there were immense
numbers of them holding it in place with their intent.

At that
instant the scene started to dissolve. I was like a diver, and waking up from
that world was like swimming up to reach the surface.

In the
following session, the emissary began its dialogue with me by restating that a
totally coordinated and coactive relationship existed between mobile shadows
and stationary tunnels. It finished its statement saying, "We can't exist
without each other."

"I
understand what you mean," I said.

There was a
touch of scorn in the emissary's voice when it retorted that I could not
possibly understand what it means to be related in that fashion, which was
infinitely more than being dependent. I intended to ask the emissary to explain
what it meant by that, but the next instant I was inside of what I can only
describe as the very tissue of the tunnel. I saw some grotesquely merged,
glandlike protuberances that emitted an opaque light. The thought crossed my
mind that those were the same protuberances that had given me the impression of
being like Braille. Considering that they were energy blobs three to four feet
in diameter, I began to wonder about the actual size of those tunnels.

"Size
here is not like size in your world," the emissary said. "The energy
of this world is a different kind of energy; its features don't coincide with
the features of the energy of your world, yet this world is as real as your
own."

The emissary
went on to say that it had told me everything about the shadow beings when it
described and explained the protuberances on the tunnels' walls. I retorted
that I had heard the explanations but I had not paid attention to them because
I believed that they did not pertain directly to
dreaming
.

"Everything
here, in this realm, pertains directly to
dreaming
," the emissary
stated.

I wanted to
think about the reason for my misjudgment, but my mind became blank. My
dreaming
attention was waning. I was having trouble focusing it on the world around me.
I braced myself for waking up. The emissary started to speak again, and the
sound of its voice propped me up. My
dreaming
attention perked up
considerably.

"
dreaming
is the vehicle that brings dreamers to this world," the emissary said,
"and everything sorcerers know about
dreaming
was taught to them by
us. Our world is connected to yours by a door called dreams. We know how to go
through that door, but men don't. They have to learn it."

The
emissary's voice went on explaining what it had already explained to me before.

"The
protuberances on the tunnels' walls are shadow beings," it said. "I
am one of them. We move inside the tunnels, on their walls, charging ourselves
with the energy of the tunnels, which is our energy."

An idle
thought crossed my mind: I was really incapable of conceiving a symbiotic
relationship such as the one I was witnessing.

"If
you would stay among us, you would certainly learn to feel what it is like to
be connected as we are connected," the emissary said.

The
emissary seemed to be waiting for my reply. I had the feeling that what it
really wanted was for me to say that I had decided to stay.

"How
many shadow beings are in each tunnel?" I asked to change the mood and
immediately regretted it because the emissary began to give me a detailed
account of the numbers and functions of the shadow beings in each tunnel. It
said that each tunnel had a specific number of dependent entities, which
performed specific functions having to do with the needs and expectations of
the supporting tunnels.

I did not
want the emissary to go into more detail. I reasoned that the less I knew about
the tunnel and shadow beings the better off I was. The instant I formulated
that thought, the emissary stopped, and my energy body jerked as if it had been
pulled by a cable. The next moment, I was fully awake, in my bed.

From then
on, I had no more fears that could have interrupted my practices. Another idea
had begun to rule me: the idea that I had found unparalleled excitation. I
could hardly wait every day to start
dreaming
and have the scout take me
to the shadows' world. The added attraction was that my visions of the shadows'
world became even more true to life than before. Judged by the subjective
standards of orderly thoughts, orderly visual and auditory sensory input,
orderly responses on my part, my experiences, for as long as they lasted, were
as real as any situation in our daily world. Never had I had perceptual
experiences in which the only difference between my visions and my everyday
world was the speed with which my visions ended. One instant I was in a
strange, real world, and the next instant I was in my bed.

I craved
don Juan's commentaries and explanations, but I was still marooned in Los Angeles. The more I considered my situation, the greater my anxiety; I even began to
sense that something in the inorganic beings' realm was brewing at tremendous
speed.

As my
anxiety grew, my body entered into a state of profound fright, although my mind
was ecstatic in the contemplation of the shadows' world. To make things worse,
the
dreaming
emissary's voice lapsed into my daily consciousness. One
day while I was attending a class at the university, I heard the voice say,
over and over, that any attempt on my part to end my
dreaming
practices
would be deleterious to my total aims. It argued that warriors do not shy away
from a challenge and that I had no valid rationale for discontinuing my
practices. I agreed with the emissary. I had no intention of stopping anything,
and the voice was merely reaffirming what I felt.

Not only
did the emissary change but a new scout appeared on the scene. On one occasion,
before I had begun to examine the items of my dream, a scout literally jumped
in front of me and aggressively captured my
dreaming
attention. The
notable feature of this scout was that it did not need to go through any
energetic metamorphosis; it was a blob of energy from the start. In the blink
of an eye, the scout transported me, without my having to voice my intent to go
with it, to another part of the inorganic beings' realm: the world of the
saber-toothed tigers.

I have
described in my other works glimpses of those visions. I say glimpses because I
did not have sufficient energy then to render these perceived worlds comprehensible
to my linear mind.

My nightly
visions of the saber-toothed tigers occurred regularly for a long time, until
one night when the aggressive scout that had taken me for the first time to
that realm suddenly appeared again. Without waiting for my consent, it took me
to the tunnels.

I heard the
emissary's voice. It immediately went into the longest and most poignant sales
pitch I had heard so far. It told me about the extraordinary advantages of the
inorganic beings' world. It spoke of acquiring knowledge that would definitely
stagger the mind and about acquiring it by the simplest act, of staying in
those marvelous tunnels. It spoke of incredible mobility, of endless time to
find things, and, above all, of being pampered by cosmic servants that would
cater to my slightest whims.

"Aware
beings from the most unbelievable corners of the cosmos stay with us," the
emissary said, ending its talk. "And they love their stay with us. In
fact, no one wants to leave."

The thought
that crossed my mind at that moment was that servitude was definitely
antithetical to me. I had never been at ease with servants or with being
served.

The scout
took over and made me glide through many tunnels. It came to a halt in a tunnel
that seemed somehow larger than the others. My
dreaming
attention became
riveted on die size and configuration of that tunnel, and it would have stayed
glued there had I not been made to turn around. My
dreaming
attention
focused then on a blob of energy a bit bigger than the shadow entities. It was
blue, like the blue in the center of a candle's flame. I knew that this energy configuration
was not a shadow entity and that it did not belong there.

I became
absorbed in sensing it. The scout signaled me to leave, but something was
making me impervious to its cues. I remained, uneasily, where I was. However,
the scout's signaling broke my concentration, and I lost sight of the blue
shape.

Suddenly, a
considerable force made me spin around and put me squarely in front of the blue
shape. As I gazed at it, it turned into the figure of a person: very small,
slender, delicate, almost transparent. I desperately attempted to determine
whether it was a man or a woman, but, hard as I tried, I could not.

My attempts
to ask the emissary failed. It flew away quite abruptly, leaving me suspended
in that tunnel, facing now an unknown person. I tried to talk to that person
the way I talked to the emissary. I got no response. I felt a wave of
frustration at not being able to break the barrier that separated us. Then I
was besieged by the fear of being alone with someone who might have been an
enemy.

I had a
variety of reactions triggered by the presence of that stranger. I even felt
elation, because I knew that the scout had finally shown me another human being
caught in that world. I only despaired at the possibility that we were not able
to communicate perhaps because that stranger was one of the sorcerers of
antiquity and belonged to a time different from mine.

The more
intense my elation and curiosity, the heavier I became, until a moment in which
I was so massive that I was back in my body, and back in the world. I found
myself in Los Angeles, in a park by the University of California. I was
standing on the grass, right in the line of people playing golf.

The person
in front of me had solidified at the same rate. We stared at each other for a
fleeting instant. It was a girl, perhaps six or seven years old. I thought I
knew her. On seeing her, my elation and curiosity grew so out of proportion
that they triggered a reversal. I lost mass so fast that in another instant I
was again a blob of energy in the inorganic beings' realm. The scout came back
for me and hurriedly pulled me away.

I woke up
with a jolt of fright. In the process of surfacing into the daily world,
something had let a message slip through. My mind went into a frenzy trying to
put together what I knew or thought I knew. I spent more than forty-eight
continuous hours attempting to get at a hidden feeling or a hidden knowledge
that had gotten stuck to me. The only success I had was to sense a force — I
fancied it to be outside my mind or my body — that told me not to trust my
dreaming
anymore.