The Art of Dreaming (22 page)

Don Juan's
statement that each gate is an obstacle could not have been more truthful. I
labored to fulfill the drill of the third gate of
dreaming
more
intensely than I had on the other two tasks combined. Don Juan put tremendous
pressure on me. Besides, something else had been added to my life: a true sense
of fear. I had been normally and even excessively afraid of one thing or
another throughout my life, but there had been nothing in my experience
comparable to the fear I felt after my bout with the inorganic beings. Yet all
this wealth of experience was inaccessible to my normal memory. Only in the
presence of don Juan were those memories at my disposal.

I asked him
about this strange situation once when we were at the National Museum of
Anthropology and History in Mexico City. What had prompted my question was
that, at the moment, I had the odd ability to remember everything that had
happened to me in the course of my association with don Juan. And that made me
feel so free, so daring and light-footed that I was practically dancing around.

"It
just happens that the presence of the nagual induces a shift of the assemblage
point," he said.

He guided
me then into one of the display rooms of the museum and said that my question
was apropos to what he had been planning to tell me.

"My
intention was to explain to you that the position of the assemblage point is
like a vault where sorcerers keep their records," he said. "I was
tickled pink when your energy body felt my intent and you asked me about it.
The energy body knows immensities. Let me show you how much it knows."

He
instructed me to enter into total silence. He reminded me that I was already in
a special state of awareness, because my assemblage point had been made to
shift by his presence. He assured me that entering into total silence was going
to allow the sculptures in that room to make me see and hear inconceivable
things. He added, apparently to increase my confusion, that some of the
archaeological pieces in that room had the capacity to produce, by themselves,
a shift of the assemblage point, and that if I reached a state of total silence
I would be actually witnessing scenes pertaining to the lives of the people who
made those pieces.

He then
began the strangest tour of a museum I have ever taken. He went around the room,
describing and interpreting astounding details of every one of the large
pieces. According to him, every archaeological piece in that room was a
purposeful record left by the people of antiquity, a record that don Juan as a
sorcerer was reading to me as one would read a book.

"Every
piece here is designed to make the assemblage point shift," he went on.
"Fix your gaze on any of them, silence your mind, and find out whether or
not your assemblage point can be made to shift."

"How
would I know that it has shifted?"

"Because
you would see and feel things that are beyond your normal reach."

I gazed at
the sculptures and saw and heard things that I would be at a loss to explain.
In the past, I had examined all those pieces with the bias of anthropology,
always bearing in mind the descriptions of scholars in the field. Their
descriptions of the functions of those pieces, rooted in modern man's cognition
of the world, appeared to me, for the first time, to be utterly prejudiced if
not asinine. What don Juan said about those pieces and what I heard and saw
myself, gazing at them, was the farthest thing from what I had always read
about them.

My
discomfort was so great that I felt obliged to apologize to don Juan for what I
thought was my suggestibility. He did not laugh or make fun of me. He patiently
explained that sorcerers were capable of leaving accurate records of their
findings in the position of the assemblage point. He maintained that when it
comes to getting to the essence of a written account, we have to use our sense
of sympathetic or imaginative participation to go beyond the mere page into the
experience itself. However, in the sorcerers' world, since there are no written
pages, total records, which can be relived instead of read, are left in the
position of the assemblage point.

To
illustrate his argument, don Juan talked about the sorcerers' teachings for the
second attention. He said that they are given when the apprentice's assemblage
point is on a place other than the normal one. The position of the assemblage
point becomes, in this manner, the record of the lesson. In order to play the
lesson back, the apprentice has to return his assemblage point to the position
it occupied when the lesson was given. Don Juan concluded his remarks by
reiterating that to return the assemblage point to all the positions it
occupied when the lessons were given is an accomplishment of the highest
magnitude.

For nearly
a year, don Juan did not ask me anything about my third
dreaming
task.
Then one day, quite abruptly, he wanted me to describe to him all the nuances
of my
dreaming
practices.

The first
thing I mentioned was a baffling recurrence. For a period of months, I had
dreams in which I found myself staring at me, sleeping in my bed. The odd part
was the regularity of those dreams; they happened every four days, like
clockwork. During the other three days, my
dreaming
was what it always
had been so far: I examined every possible item in my dreams, I changed dreams,
and occasionally, driven by a suicidal curiosity, I followed the foreign energy
scouts, although I felt extremely guilty doing this. I fancied it to be like
having a secret drug addiction. The realness of that world was irresistible to
me.

Secretly, I
felt somehow exonerated from total responsibility, because don Juan himself had
suggested that I ask the
dreaming
emissary about what to do to free the
blue scout trapped among us. He meant for me to pose the question in my
everyday practice, but I construed his statement to imply that I had to ask the
emissary while I was in its world. The question I really wanted to ask the
emissary was whether the inorganic beings had set a trap for me. The emissary
not only told me that everything don Juan had said was true but also gave me
instructions on what Carol Tiggs and I had to do to liberate the scout.

"The
regularity of your dreams is something that I rather expected," don Juan
remarked, after listening to me.

"Why
did you expect something like that, don Juan?"

"Because
of your relationship with the inorganic beings."

"That's
over and forgotten, don Juan," I lied, hoping he would not pursue the
subject any further.

"You
are saying that for my benefit, aren't you? You don't need to; I know the true
story. Believe me, once you get to play with them, you are hooked. They'll
always be after you. Or, what's worse yet, you'll always be after them."

He stared
at me, and my guilt must have been so obvious that it made him laugh.

"The
only possible explanation for such regularity is that the inorganic beings are
catering to you again," don Juan said in a serious tone.

I hurried
to change the subject and told him that another nuance of my
dreaming
practices worth mentioning was my reaction to the sight of myself lying sound
asleep. That view was always so startling that it either glued me to the spot
until the dream changed or frightened me so profoundly that it made me wake up,
screaming at the top of my voice. I had gotten to the point where I was afraid
to go to sleep on the days I knew I was going to have that dream.

"You
are not yet ready for a true merging of your
dreaming
reality and your
daily reality," he concluded. "You must recapitulate your life
further."

"But
I've done all the recapitulating possible," I protested. "I've been
recapitulating for years. There is nothing more I can remember about my
life."

"There
must be much more," he said adamantly, "otherwise, you wouldn't wake
up screaming."

I did not
like the idea of having to recapitulate again. I had done it, and I believed I
had done it so well that I did not need to touch the subject ever again.

"The
recapitulation of our lives never ends, no matter how well we've done it
once," don Juan said. "The reason average people lack volition in
their dreams is that they have never recapitulated and their lives are filled to
capacity with heavily loaded emotions like memories, hopes, fears, et cetera,
et cetera.

"Sorcerers,
in contrast, are relatively free from heavy, binding emotions, because of their
recapitulation. And if something stops them, as it has stopped you at this
moment, the assumption is that there still is something in them that is not
quite clear."

"To
recapitulate is too involving, don Juan. Maybe there is something else I can do
instead." "No. There isn't. Recapitulating and
dreaming
go
hand in hand. As we regurgitate our lives, we get more and more airborne."

Don Juan
had given me very detailed and explicit instructions about the recapitulation.
It consisted of reliving the totality of one's life experiences by remembering
every possible minute detail of them. He saw the recapitulation as the
essential factor in a dreamer's redefinition and redeployment of energy.

"The
recapitulation sets free energy imprisoned within us, and without this
liberated energy
dreaming
is not possible." That was his statement.

Years
before, don Juan had coached me to make a list of all the people I had met in
my life, starting at the present. He helped me to arrange my list in an orderly
fashion, breaking it down into areas of activity, such as jobs I had had,
schools I had attended. Then he guided me to go, without deviation, from the
first person on my list to the last one, reliving every one of my interactions
with them.

He
explained that recapitulating an event starts with one's mind arranging
everything pertinent to what is being recapitulated. Arranging means
reconstructing the event, piece by piece, starting by recollecting the physical
details of the surroundings, then going to the person with whom one shared the
interaction, and then going to oneself, to the examination of one's feelings.
Don Juan taught me that the recapitulation is coupled with a natural,
rhythmical breathing. Long exhalations are performed as the head moves gently
and slowly from right to left; and long inhalations are taken as the head moves
back from left to right. He called this act of moving the head from side to
side "fanning the event." The mind examines the event from beginning
to end while the body fans, on and on, everything the mind focuses on.

Don Juan
said that the sorcerers of antiquity, the inventors of the recapitulation,
viewed breathing as a magical, life-giving act and used it, accordingly, as a
magical vehicle; the exhalation, to eject the foreign energy left in them
during the interaction being recapitulated and the inhalation to pull back the
energy that they themselves left behind during the interaction.

Because of
my academic training, I took the recapitulation to be the process of analyzing
one's life. But don Juan insisted that it was more involved than an
intellectual psychoanalysis. He postulated the recapitulation as a sorcerer's
ploy to induce a minute but steady displacement of the assemblage point. He
said that the assemblage point, under the impact of reviewing past actions and
feelings, goes back and forth between its present site and the site it occupied
when the event being recapitulated took place.

Don Juan
stated that the old sorcerers' rationale behind the recapitulation was their
conviction that there is an inconceivable dissolving force in the universe,
which makes organisms live by lending them awareness. That force also makes
organisms die, in order to extract the same lent awareness, which organisms
have enhanced through their life experiences. Don Juan explained the old
sorcerers' reasoning. They believed that since it is our life experience this
force is after, it is of supreme importance that it can be satisfied with a
facsimile of our life experience: the recapitulation. Having had what it seeks,
the dissolving force then lets sorcerers go, free to expand their capacity to
perceive and reach with it the confines of time and space.

When I
started again to recapitulate, it was a great surprise to me that my
dreaming
practices were automatically suspended the moment my recapitulation began. I
asked don Juan about this unwanted recess.

"
dreaming
requires every bit of our available energy," he replied. "If there is
a deep preoccupation in our life, there is no possibility of
dreaming
."

"But I
have been deeply preoccupied before," I said, "and my practices were
never interrupted."

"It
must be then that every time you thought you were preoccupied, you were only
egomaniacally disturbed," he said, laughing. "To be preoccupied, for
sorcerers, means that all your energy sources are taken on. This is the first
time you've engaged your energy sources in their totality. The rest of the
time, even when you recapitulated before, you were not completely
absorbed."

Don Juan
gave me this time a new recapitulation pattern. I was supposed to construct a
jigsaw puzzle by recapitulating, without any apparent order, different events
of my life.