ure. That is a  real danger to us. Through the channel of fear, they can
follow us to the daily world, with disastrous results for us."
     "In what way, don Juan?"
     "Fear can settle down in our lives,  and we would have to be  mavericks
to deal  with  it. Inorganic beings can be worse  than a pest.  Through fear
they can easily drive us raving mad."
     "What do sorcerers do with inorganic beings?"
     "They  mingle  with  them.  They  turn  them  into  allies.  They  form
associations,  create   extraordinary   friendships.   I  call   them   vast
enterprises, where  perception  plays  the  uppermost  role. We  are  social
beings. We unavoidably seek the company of consciousness.
     "With inorganic beings, the secret is  not to fear  them. And this must
be done from the beginning. The intent one has to send out to them has to be
of power and abandon. In  that intent one must encode the  message `1  don't
fear you. Come to see me. If you do, I'll welcome you. If you don't want  to
come, I'll  miss you.' With a message like this, they'll get so curious that
they'll come for sure."
     "Why should they come to seek me, or why on earth should I seek them?"
     "Dreamers, whether  they  like  it  or  not,  in  their  dreaming  seek
associations  with other  beings.  This may  come  to you  as a  shock,  but
dreamers automatically seek groups of beings, nexuses of inorganic beings in
this case. Dreamers seek them avidly."
     "This is very strange to me, don Juan. Why would dreamers do that?"
     "The novelty  for us is the inorganic beings. And the novelty  for them
is  one  of our kind crossing the boundaries of their  realm.  The thing you
must bear  in mind  from  now  on is that inorganic beings with their superb
consciousness exert a tremendous pull over dreamers and can easily transport
them into worlds beyond description.
     "The sorcerers of antiquity used them, and they are the ones who coined
the name allies. Their allies taught  them  to move the assemblage point out
of the egg's  boundaries into the non-human universe. So when they transport
a sorcerer, they transport him to worlds beyond the human domain."
     As I  heard him talk, I was plagued by  strange fears  and  misgivings,
which he promptly realized.
     "You are a religious man to the  end." He laughed. "Now, you're feeling
the devil breathing  down your  neck. Think about  dreaming  in these terms:
dreaming  is  perceiving  more  than what  we  believe  it  is  possible  to
perceive."
     In my waking hours,  I worried  about  the  possibility  that inorganic
conscious beings really existed. When I was dreaming, however,  my conscious
worries did not have much effect. The jolts  of physical fear continued, but
whenever  they happened a strange calmness always trailed behind, a calmness
that took control of me and let me proceed as if I had no fear at all.
     It seemed  at that time that every breakthrough in dreaming happened to
me suddenly, without warning. The  presence of inorganic beings in my dreams
was no exception. It happened while I was dreaming about a  circus I knew in
my childhood. The setting looked like a  town in the mountains in Arizona. I
began  to  watch  people with the  vague  hope I always had that I would see
again  the people I had seen the first  time don Juan made me enter into the
second attention. As I watched them, I felt a sizable jolt of nervousness in
the pit of my stomach; it was  like a punch. The  jolt distracted me,  and I
lost sight of the people, the circus, and the  mountain  town in Arizona. In
their  place stood two strange-looking figures. They were thin,  less than a
foot wide, but long, perhaps  seven feet. They were looming over me like two
gigantic earthworms.
     I knew that it was a dream, but I also knew that I was seeing. Don Juan
had discussed seeing in my  normal awareness and in the  second attention as
well. Although  I was incapable  of experiencing it myself, I  thought I had
understood the idea of directly perceiving energy. In that dream, looking at
those  two strange apparitions,  I  realized that  I was seeing  the  energy
essence of something unbelievable.
     I remained very  calm. I did not move. The most  remarkable thing to me
was that  they  didn't  dissolve or  change into  something else.  They were
cohesive beings that retained their  candlelike shape. Something in them was
forcing  something in me to hold the view  of their shape. I knew it because
something was telling me that if I did not move, they would not move either.
     It all came to an end, at a given moment, when I woke up with a fright.
I was immediately besieged by fears. A deep preoccupation  took  hold of me.
It was not psychological worry but rather a bodily sense of anguish, sadness
with no apparent foundation.
     The two strange shapes appeared  to me from then on  in every one of my
dreaming sessions. Eventually, it was as if I dreamt only to encounter them.
They never  attempted to move toward me or to interfere with me in any  way.
They just  stood there, immobile, in front of  me, for as  long as my  dream
lasted. Not only did I never make any effort  to change my dreams but I even
forgot the original quest of my dreaming practices.
     When I finally discussed with don Juan what was happening to  me, I had
spent months solely viewing the two shapes.
     "You  are  stuck at a dangerous crossroad," don  Juan  said.  "It isn't
right  to chase these  beings away, but it  isn't right  either to let  them
stay. For the time being, their presence is a hindrance to your dreaming."
     "What can I do, don Juan?"
     "Face them, right now,  in  the world of  daily life,  and tell them to
come back later, when you have more dreaming power."
     "How do I face them?"
     "It's not simple, but it  can be  done. It requires  only that you have
enough guts, which of course you do."
     Without waiting for me to tell him that I had no  guts at all, he  took
me to  the hills. He lived then in northern Mexico, and he had  given me the
total  impression he  was  a  solitary  sorcerer,  an old  man  forgotten by
everybody and completely outside the main  current of human affairs.  I  had
surmised, however,  that he  was  intelligent beyond measure. And because of
this  I   was  willing  to  comply  with  what  I  half-believed  were  mere
eccentricities.
     The  cunningness  of sorcerers, cultivated through  the ages,  was  don
Juan's  trademark.  He made sure that I understood  all I could in my normal
awareness and, at the same time, he made sure that I entered into the second
attention,  where  I   understood  or  at  least  passionately  listened  to
everything he taught me. In this fashion, he divided me in two. In my normal
consciousness, I could not understand  why or how I was more than willing to
take his  eccentricities  seriously. In  the  second attention,  it all made
sense to me.
     His contention was that the second attention is available to all of us,
but, by willfully holding on to our half-cocked rationality, some of us more
fiercely than  others, keep the second attention  at arm's length. His  idea
was that  dreaming brings down the barriers  that surround  and insulate the
second attention. The day  he took  me to the hills of the Sonoran desert to
meet the  inorganic  beings, I was  in my  normal  state  of  awareness. Yet
somehow  I  knew  I had  to  do  something  that was certainly  going  to be
unbelievable.
     It had rained lightly in the desert. The red dirt was still wet, and as
I walked it got clumped up in the rubber soles of my shoes. I had to step on
rocks to  remove  the  heavy  chunks  of  dirt.  We  walked in  an  easterly
direction, climbing toward the hills. When we got to a narrow  gully between
two hills, don Juan stopped.
     "This is for sure an ideal place to summon your friends," he said.
     "Why do you call them my friends?"
     "They have singled you out themselves. When they do that, it means that
they seek an association. I've mentioned to you that sorcerers form bonds of
friendship with  them. Your case seems to be an example. And you  don't even
have to solicit them."
     "What does such a friendship consist of, don Juan?"
     "It  consists of  a  mutual exchange  of  energy.  The inorganic beings
supply their high awareness, and sorcerers supply their heightened awareness
and high energy. The  positive result  is an even exchange. The negative one
is dependency on both parties.
     "The old sorcerers used to love their allies. In fact, they loved their
allies more  than they loved their  own kind. I can foresee terrible dangers
in that."
     "What do you recommend I do, don Juan?"
     "Summon them. Size them up, and then decide yourself what to do."
     "What should I do to summon them?"
     "Hold your  dream view of  them  in  your mind.  The  reason  they have
saturated you with their presence in your dreams is that they want to create
a memory  of their  shape in  your mind.  And this is the  time to  use that
memory."  Don  Juan forcefully  ordered me  to close  my eyes and keep  them
closed. Then he guided me to sit down on some rocks. I felt the hardness and
the coldness of the rocks. The rocks were slanted; it was  difficult to keep
my balance.
     "Sit here and visualize their shape until they are  just  like they are
in your dreams," don Juan said in my ear. "Let me know when you have them in
focus."
     It  took me very little  time  and  effort  to  have a  complete mental
picture of their shape, just  like in my dreams.  It did not surprise  me at
all  that I  could  do  it. What  shocked  me  was  that,  although I  tried
desperately to let don Juan know I had pictured them in my mind, I could not
voice  my words  or open  my  eyes.  I  was  definitely awake.  I could hear
everything.
     I  heard don Juan say, "You can open your eyes now." I opened them with
no difficulty.  I was sitting cross-legged on some rocks, which were not the
same ones I had felt under me when I sat down. Don  Juan was  just behind me
to my right.  I  tried to turn around to face him,  but he forced my head to
remain straight. And then I saw two dark figures, like two thin tree trunks,
right in front of me.
     I  stared at them openmouthed; they  were not as tall as in my  dreams.
They had shrunk to  half  their  size. Instead of  being  shapes  of  opaque
luminosity,  they  were now  two  condensed, dark,  almost  black,  menacing
sticks.
     "Get up and grab one of  them," don Juan ordered me, "and don't let go,
no matter how it shakes you."
     I definitely did not want to do anything of the  sort, but some unknown
drive made  me  stand up  against my  will.  I had at  that moment the clear
realization  that I would end up doing what he had ordered me to, although I
had no conscious intention of doing so.
     Mechanically,  I advanced toward the two  figures,  my  heart  pounding
nearly out of my chest. I  grabbed the one to my  right. What I felt  was an
electric discharge that almost made me drop the dark figure.
     Don  Juan's voice came to me as if he had been yelling from a  distance
away. "You drop it and you're done for," he said.
     I held on to the figure, which  twirled and shook.  Not  like a massive
animal would,  but like  something quite fluffy and light, although strongly
electrical. We  rolled and turned on the sand  of  the gully for quite  some
time.  It  gave me jolt after jolt of  some  sickening electric  current.  I
thought it  was  sickening because  I fancied  it to  be  different from the
energy I had always encountered in our daily world. When it  hit my body, it
tickled me and made me yell and growl like an animal, not  in anguish but in
a strange anger.
     It finally became a still, almost solid form under me.  It lay inert. I
asked don Juan if it was dead, but I did not hear my voice. I
     "Not  a  chance," said someone laughing, someone who was  not don Juan.
"You've just depleted  its energy  charge. But  don't get up yet.  Lie there
just a moment longer."
     I  looked at don Juan  with a question in my eyes. He  was examining me
with great  curiosity. Then he helped  me up. The I dark figure remained  on
the ground.  I wanted to ask  don Juan  if  the dark figure  was  all right.
Again, I could not  voice my question. Then I  did something extravagant.  I
took it all for real. Up to that moment something in my mind  was preserving
my rationality by taking what was happening as a dream, a I dream induced by
don Juan's machinations.
     I went to the figure on the ground and tried to lift it up. I could not
put my arms around it because it had no mass. I became disoriented. The same
voice, which was not don Juan's, told me to lie down on top of the inorganic
being. I did it, and both  of us got up in one  motion, the  inorganic being
like  a  dark  shadow  attached to  me.  It  gently  separated from  me  and
disappeared, leaving me with an extremely pleasant feeling of completeness.
     It took me more than twenty-four hours to regain  total control  of  my
faculties. I slept most of the time. Don Juan checked me  from time to  time
by asking me the same question, "Was the  inorganic being's energy like fire
or like water?"
     My throat seemed scorched. I could not tell him that the energy jolts I
had felt were  like jets  of electrified water. I  have never  felt jets  of
electrified  water  in  my life. I am  not sure if it is possible to produce
them or to feel them, but that was the  image playing in  my mind every time
don Juan asked his key question.
     Don Juan was  asleep  when  I  finally knew I was completely recovered.
Knowing that his question  was of  great importance, I  woke him up and told
him what I had felt.
     "You  are not going to have helping friends among the inorganic beings,
but relationships of annoying dependence," he stated. "Be extremely careful.
Watery  inorganic beings  are more given  to  excesses.  The  old  sorcerers
believed that  they  were more loving, more capable of imitating, or perhaps
even having  feelings. As opposed to the  fiery ones, who were thought to be
more serious, more contained than the others, but also more pompous."
     "What's the meaning of all this for me, don Juan?"
     "The meaning is too vast to discuss  at this time. My recommendation is
that  you  vanquish fear from your dreams and  from your  life,  in order to
safeguard  your unity. The inorganic  being you depleted of  energy and then
recharged again was thrilled out of its candlelike shape with it. It'll come
to you for more."
     "Why didn't you stop me, don Juan?"
     "You didn't give me time. Besides, you  didn't even hear me shouting at
you to leave the inorganic being on the ground."
     "You  should have lectured me, beforehand, the way you always do, about
all the possibilities."
     "I  didn't  know all the  possibilities.  In  matters  of the inorganic
beings, I  am  nearly  a novice.  I  refused  that  part  of  the sorcerers'
knowledge on the  ground that it is too cumbersome  and capricious.  I don't
want to be at the mercy of any entity, organic or inorganic."
     That was the end of our exchange. I should have been worried because of
his definitely negative reaction, but I was  not. I somehow was certain that
whatever I had done was all right.
     I continued  my  dreaming  practices without any interference  from the
inorganic beings.


        THE FIXATION OF THE ASSEMBLAGE POINT

     Since our agreement  had been  to discuss  dreaming only when don  Juan
considered it necessary, I rarely asked him about it and  never  insisted on
continuing my  questions  beyond a certain  point.  I was  more than  eager,
therefore, to listen to him whenever  he decided to take up the subject. His
comments  or  discussions  on  dreaming were  invariably  cushioned in other
topics of his teachings,  and they were always suddenly and abruptly brought
in.
     We  were  engaged in  some  unrelated conversation once,  while  I  was
visiting with him in his house, when without any preamble  he said  that, by
means of their dreaming contacts  with inorganic  beings, the old  sorcerers
became  immensely well-versed in the manipulation of the assemblage point, a
vast and ominous subject.
     I immediately  grabbed  the opportunity  and  asked  don  Juan  for  an
estimate  of the time when the  old  sorcerers  might have lived. At various
opportunities before, I had  asked the same question, but he never gave me a
satisfactory answer. I was confident,  however,  that at the moment, perhaps
because he had brought up the subject himself, he might be willing to oblige
me.
     "A most trying subject," he said. The way he said it made me believe he
was discarding my question. I was quite surprised when he continued talking.
"It'll tax your rationality as much '  as the topic of inorganic beings.  By
the way, what do you think ' about them now?"
     "I have let my opinions rest," I said. "I can't afford to think one way
or another."
     My answer  delighted him. He laughed and commented on his  own fears of
and aversions to the inorganic beings.
     "They have  never been  my  cup of tea," he said. "Of course,  the main
reason was my fear of them. I was unable to get over it  when I  had to, and
then it became fixed."
     "Do you fear them now, don Juan?"
     "It's  not quite fear  I feel but revulsion. I  don't  want any part of
them."
     "Is there any particular reason for this revulsion?"
     "The best reason in the world: we  are antithetical. They love slavery,
and I love freedom. They love to buy, and I don't sell."
     I became inexplicably agitated and brusquely  told him that the subject
was so farfetched for me that I could not take it seriously.
     He  stared at  me,  smiling, and  said,  "The  best thing  to  do  with
inorganic  beings is what you do: deny their existence but  visit with  them
regularly and maintain that you  are dreaming  and  in dreaming anything  is
possible. This way you don't commit yourself."
     I felt  strangely guilty,  although  I could not figure out why. I felt
compelled to ask, "What are you referring to, don Juan?"
     "To your visits with the inorganic  beings," he replied dryly. "Are you
kidding? What visits?"
     "I didn't want to discuss this,  but I think it's time I  tell you that
the nagging voice you heard, reminding you to fix your dreaming attention on
the items of your dreams, was the voice of an inorganic being."
     I thought  don  Juan was completely  irrational.  I became so irritated
that I even  yelled at him.  He laughed at me and asked me to tell him about
my  irregular  dreaming  sessions.  That request surprised  me. I  had never
mentioned to anyone that  every  so  often I  used to  zoom out  of a dream,
pulled by a given item, but instead of my changing dreams, as I should have,
the total  mood of the dream changed and  I would find myself in a dimension
unknown to me. I soared in it, directed  by some invisible guide, which made
me twirl around and around. I  always  awoke from one  of these dreams still
twirling, and I continued tossing and turning for a long time before I fully
woke up.
     "Those are bona fide meetings  you are having with your inorganic being
friends," don Juan said.
     I did not want to argue with him,  but  neither did I want to  agree. I
remained silent.  I had forgotten my  question about the  old sorcerers, but
don Juan picked up the subject again.
     "My understanding is that the old sorcerers existed perhaps as far back
as ten thousand years ago," he said, smiling and watching my reaction.
     Basing my response on current archaeological data on the  migration  of
Asiatic nomadic tribes to the Americas, I said that I believed his  date was
incorrect. Ten thousand years was too far back.
     "You have your  knowledge and  I have mine," he said. "My knowledge  is
that the old sorcerers ruled for four thousand years, from seven thousand to
three thousand years  ago. Three thousand years  ago, they  went to nothing.
And from  then on,  sorcerers have  been regrouping, restructuring what  was
left of the old ones."
     "How can you be so sure about your dates?" I asked.
     "How can you be so sure about yours?" he retorted.
     I told him that archaeologists have foolproof methods to  establish the
date  of past cultures.  Again  he  retorted that sorcerers  have  foolproof
methods of their own.
     "I'm  not trying to be contrary or  argue you down," he continued, "but
someday soon you may be able to ask someone who knows for sure."
     "No one can know this for sure, don Juan."
     "This is another of those impossible things to  believe, but  there  is
somebody who can verify all this. You'll meet that person someday."
     "Come on,  don  Juan,  you've got  to be  joking. Who can  verify, what
happened seven thousand years ago?"
     "Very simple,  one of  the old sorcerers we've been  talking about. The
one  I met. He's the one who told me all about the old sorcerers. I hope you
remember what I am going  to  tell you about that particular  man. He is the
key to many of our endeavors, and he's also the one you have to meet."
     "I told don  Juan  that I  was  hanging on every  word  he said, I even
though  I did not understand what  he was  saying. He accused me of humoring
him and not believing a word about the old  sorcerers. I admitted that in my
state of daily consciousness, of course, I had not believed those farfetched
stories. But neither had I in the second attention,  although there I should
have had a different reaction.
     "Only when you ponder what  I said does  it become a farfetched story,"
he  remarked. "If you don't  involve  your common sense, it remains purely a
matter of energy."
     "Why did you say, don Juan, that I am  going  to meet  one of  the  old
sorcerers?"
     "Because you are. It  is vital that the  two of you meet, someday. But,
for the  moment, just let me tell you another farfetched story about  one of
the naguals of my line, the nagual Sebastian."
     Don Juan told me then that the nagual Sebastian had been a  sexton in a
church in southern Mexico around the beginning of the eighteenth century. In
his account, don Juan stressed how sorcerers, past or present, seek and find
refuge in established institutions, such as the Church. It was his idea that
because of their superior  discipline, sorcerers are  trustworthy  employees
and that they are avidly sought by institutions that are always in dire need
of such persons. Don Juan maintained that  as long as no one is aware of the
sorcerers' doings, their lack of ideological sympathies makes them appear as
model workers.
     Don Juan continued his story and said that one day, while Sebastian was
performing his duties as a  sexton, a strange man came to the church, an old
Indian  who  seemed  to be ill. In a  weak voice he  told Sebastian  that he
needed help. The nagual thought that the Indian  wanted  the  parish priest,
but the man, making a  great effort, addressed  the nagual.  In a  harsh and
direct tone, he told him that he knew that Sebastian was not only a sorcerer
but a nagual.
     Sebastian,  quite  alarmed  by this  sudden turn of events, pulled  the
Indian aside and  demanded an apology. The man replied that he was not there
to apologize but to get specialized help. He needed, he said, to receive the
nagual's energy in order to maintain his life, which, he  assured Sebastian,
had spanned thousands of years but at the moment was ebbing away.
     Sebastian, who was a very  intelligent man, unwilling  to pay attention
to  such nonsense, urged the Indian  to stop  clowning around.  The old  man
became angry and threatened Sebastian with exposing him and his group to the
ecclesiastical authorities if he did not comply with his request.
     Don  Juan reminded me that those were the times when the ecclesiastical
authorities were brutally and systematically eradicating heretical practices
among the Indians of the New Worlds The man's threat was not something to be
taken  lightly;  the  nagual  and  his group were  indeed in  mortal danger.
Sebastian asked the Indian  how he could  give him energy. The man explained
that naguals, by means of their discipline, gain a peculiar energy that they
store in their  bodies and that he would get it painlessly  from Sebastian's
energy center on  his navel. In return for it, Sebastian would get not  only
the  opportunity  to continue his activities  unscathed but also a  gift  of
power.
     The knowledge that he was  being manipulated  by the old Indian did not
sit  right  with the nagual, but  the man was  inflexible and  left  him  no
alternative but to comply with his request.
     Don  Juan assured me that the old Indian was not exaggerating about his
claims at all. He turned out  to be  one of the sorcerers  of ancient times,
one of  those known as the <i>death defiers</i>. He had apparently  survived to the
present  by manipulating  his assemblage  point in  ways that  only he  knew
about.
     Don Juan said that what transpired between Sebastian and that man later
became  the  ground for  an  agreement that  had bound all  six  naguals who
followed Sebastian. The death defier, kept his word; in exchange  for energy
from every  one of  those men, he made  a  donation to the giver, a  gift of
power.  Sebastian had  to accept  such a  gift, although reluctantly; he had
been  cornered and had no  other choice. All the other  naguals who followed
him, however, gladly and proudly accepted their gifts.
     Don Juan  concluded  his story, saying that over time the death  defier
came to be known as the tenant. And  for over two hundred years, the naguals
of don  Juan's  line honored  that binding  agreement,  creating a symbiotic
relationship that changed the course and final goal of their lineage.
     Don Juan did not care  to explain the story any further, and I was left
with a strange  sensation of truthfulness, which was more  bothersome to  me
than I could have imagined.
     "How did he get to live that long?" I asked.
     "No  one knows,"  don  Juan replied. "All we've  known about  him,  for
generations, is what he tells us. The death defier is the one  I asked about
the old sorcerers,  and  he  told  me  that they were  at  their peak  three
thousand years ago."
     "How do you know he was telling you the truth?" I asked.
     Don Juan  shook  his head  in amazement, if not revulsion. "When you're
facing that inconceivable unknown out there," he  said,  pointing all around
him, "you don't fool around with petty  lies. Petty lies are only for people
who have never witnessed what's out there, waiting for them."
     "What's waiting for us out there, don Juan?"
     His answer,  a seemingly  innocuous  phrase,  was more terrifying to me
than if he had described the most horrendous thing.
     "Something utterly  impersonal,"  he said. He must have  noticed that I
was coming apart.  He  made me change levels of awareness  to make my fright
vanish.
     A  few months later, my dreaming practices took a strange turn. I began
to get, in my dreams, replies to questions I was planning  to ask  don Juan.
The most  impressive part of this  oddity was that it quickly lapsed into my
waking hours. And one day,  while I was sitting at my desk, I got a reply to
an  unvoiced  question  about the  realness  of inorganic beings. I had <i>seen</i>
inorganic beings in dreams so many times I  had  begun  to think of  them as
real. I reminded  myself I  had even  touched one, in a state of  seminormal
consciousness in  the  Sonoran desert. And my dreams  had been  periodically
deviated to views of worlds I seriously doubted could  have been products of
my  mentality. I wished to give don Juan my best shot, in terms of a concise
query, so I molded a question in my mind: if one is to accept that inorganic
beings are as real as  people, where, in the physicality of the universe, is
the realm in which they exist?
     After formulating the question  to myself, I  heard a strange laughter,
just as  I had the day  I wrestled with  the inorganic  being. Then  a man's
voice  answered me. "That  realm exists  in a  particular  position  of  the
assemblage point," it said. "Just like  your world  exists  in  the habitual
position of the assemblage point."
     The last thing I wanted was to enter into a dialogue with a disembodied
voice, so I stood  up and ran out of  my house. The  thought occurred to  me
that I was losing my mind. Another worry to add to my collection of worries.
     The  voice  had  been  so  clear  and authoritative  that  it  not only
intrigued me but  terrified me. I waited with great trepidation for oncoming
barrages  of that  voice,  but the  event was never  repeated. At the  first
opportunity I had, I consulted with don Juan.
     He was not impressed  in the  least. "You must understand, once and for
all, that things like  this are very normal in the  life of a sorcerer,"  he
said.  "You  are  not  going mad;  you  are simply hearing the  voice of the
dreaming  emissary.  Upon  crossing  the first or  second gate  of dreaming,
dreamers reach  a  threshold  of  energy and  begin to see things or to hear
voices. Not  really plural voices, but  a  singular voice. Sorcerers call it
the voice of the dreaming emissary."
     "What is the dreaming emissary?"
     "Alien  energy  that has conciseness. Alien energy that purports to aid
dreamers by telling them things. The problem  with  the dreaming emissary is
that it can  tell only what the sorcerers already know or  should know, were
they worth their salt."
     "To say that  it's alien energy that has conciseness doesn't help me at
all, don Juan. What kind of energy - benign, malignant, right, wrong, what?"
     "It's just what I said, alien  energy. An impersonal force that we turn
into a  very personal one because it  has voice. Some sorcerers swear by it.
They even  see  it. Or, as you yourself have done,  they simply hear it as a
man's or  a  woman's voice. And the  voice  can tell them about the state of
things, which most of the time they take as sacred advice."
     "Why do some of us hear it as a voice?"
     "We see it or hear it because we maintain  our assemblage points  fixed
on a specific new position; the more intense this fixation, the more intense
our experience of the  emissary. Watch out! You may  see it and feel it as a
naked woman."
     Don Juan laughed at his own remark, but I was too scared for levity.
     "Is this force capable of materializing itself?" I asked.
     "Certainly,"  he  replied.  "And  it  all  depends  on  how  fixed  the
assemblage point is. But, rest  assured, if you are capable of maintaining a
degree of detachment, nothing happens. The  emissary  remains what it is: an
impersonal force that acts on  us because of the fixation of our  assemblage
points."
     "Is its advice safe and sound?"
     "It  cannot be advice. It only tells us  what's what, and  then we draw
the inferences ourselves."
     I told don Juan then about what the voice had said to me.
     "It's  just like I said," don Juan  remarked. "The emissary didn't tell
you anything new.  Its statements were correct,  but  it  only seemed  to be
revealing things to you. What  the  emissary did was merely  repeat what you
already knew."
     "I'm afraid I can't claim that I knew all that, don Juan."
     "Yes, you can.  You know now infinitely  more  about the mystery of the
universe than what you rationally suspect. But that's our  human  malady, to
know more about the mystery of the universe than we suspect."
     Having  experienced  this incredible phenomenon all by  myself, without
don  Juan's coaching, made  me feel elated.  I wanted more information about
the emissary. I began to  ask don Juan whether he also heard  the emissary's
voice.
     He  interrupted me and with a broad smile said, "Yes, yes. The emissary
also talks to me. In my youth I used to see it as a friar with a black cowl.
A talking friar who used to scare the daylights out of me, every time. Then,
when my fear was more manageable, it became a disembodied voice, which tells
me things to this day."
     "What kinds of things, don Juan?"
     "Anything I focus my intent on, things I don't want to take the trouble
of following up  myself. Like, for example, details about the behavior of my
apprentices. What they do when  I  am not  around. It tells  me things about
you, in particular. The emissary tells me everything you do."
     At that point, I really did not care for the direction our conversation
had taken.  I frantically searched  my mind for questions about other topics
while he roared with laughter.
     "Is the dreaming emissary an inorganic being?" I asked.
     "Let's  say  that the dreaming emissary is a force that comes from  the
realm of inorganic beings. This is the reason dreamers always encounter it."
     "Do you mean, don Juan, that every dreamer hears or sees the emissary?"
     "Everyone hears the emissary; very few see it or feel it."
     "Do you have any explanation for this?"
     "No.  Besides, I really don't care about the emissary. At  one point in
my life,  I had  to make a decision whether to concentrate on  the inorganic
beings and follow in the footsteps of the old sorcerers or to refuse it all.
My teacher, the nagual Julian, helped me make up my  mind to refuse it. I've
never regretted that decision."
     "Do you think I should refuse the inorganic beings myself, don Juan?"
     He did  not answer  me; instead,  he explained that  the whole realm of
inorganic beings is always poised to teach. Perhaps because inorganic beings
have a deeper consciousness than ours, they feel compelled to  take us under
their wings.
     "I  didn't  see any  point in  becoming their pupil," he added.  "Their
price is too high."
     "What is their price?"
     "Our  lives,  our energy, our devotion  to  them.  In other  words, our
freedom."
     "But what do they teach?"
     "Things pertinent to their world. The same way we ourselves would teach
them,  if we were capable  of teaching them,  things pertinent to our world.
Their method, however, is to take our basic self as a gauge of what we  need
and then teach us accordingly. A most dangerous affair!"
     "I don't see why it would be dangerous."
     "If someone was going to take your basic self as a gauge, with all your
fears and greed and  envy, et cetera, et cetera, and teach you what fulfills
that horrible state of being, what do you think the result would be?"
     I had no comeback.  I thought I  understood perfectly  well the reasons
for his rejection.
     "The problem with  the old sorcerers was  that  they  learned wonderful
things, but on the basis of their unadulterated lower selves," don Juan went
on. "The inorganic beings became their allies, and,  by means of  deliberate
examples, they taught the old sorcerers marvels. Their allies performed  the
actions, and  the  old  sorcerers  were  guided step by  step  to copy those
actions, without changing anything about their basic nature."
     "Do these relationships with inorganic beings exist today?"
     "I can't answer that truthfully. All I can say is that I can't conceive
of having a  relationship like  that  myself.  Involvements of  this  nature
curtail our search  for freedom by consuming  all  our available energy.  In
order to really follow their allies' example, the old sorcerers had to spend
their  lives  in  the realm of  the  inorganic  beings. The amount of energy
needed to accomplish such a sustained journey is staggering."
     "Do you mean, don Juan, that the  old sorcerers  were  able to exist in
those realms like we exist here?"
     "Not  quite like we exist here, but certainly they lived: they retained
their awareness, their individuality. The dreaming emissary became  the most
vital  entity for those sorcerers. If a sorcerer  wants to live in the realm
of the inorganic beings, the emissary is the perfect  bridge; it speaks, and
its bent is to teach, to guide."
     "Have you ever been in that realm, don Juan?"
     "Countless times.  And so have  you. But there is  no point in  talking
about  it  now. You  haven't cleared  all  the  debris  from  your  dreaming
attention yet. We'll talk about that realm some day."
     "Do  I  gather,  don  Juan,  that  you don't  approve of  or  like  the
emissary?"
     "I neither  approve of it nor like it. It belongs to another mood,  the
old sorcerers' mood. Besides,  its  teachings  and guidance in our world are
nonsense. And for that nonsense the emissary  charges us enormities in terms
of energy. One day you will agree with me. You'll see."
     In  the tone of don Juan's words, I caught a veiled  implication of his
belief that I disagreed with him about the emissary. I was about to confront
him with it when I heard the emissary's  voice in my ears. "He's right," the
voice said. "You like  me because  you find nothing wrong with exploring all
possibilities.  You want knowledge;  knowledge  is  power. You don't want to
remain safe in the routines and beliefs of your daily world."
     The  emissary said  all  that in English  with  a marked Pacific  Coast
intonation. Then it shifted into Spanish. I heard a slight Argentine accent.
I had never heard the  emissary speaking like this before. It fascinated me.
The emissary  told me about fulfillment, knowledge; about how far away I was
from  my  birthplace; about  my craving for adventure and my  near obsession
with new things, new horizons. The  voice even  talked  to me in Portuguese,
with a definite inflection from the southern pampas.
     To hear that voice pouring out all this flattery not only scared me but
nauseated me.  I told don Juan, right on  the spot, that I  had to  stop  my
dreaming  training.  He looked  up at me,  caught  by surprise.  But when  I
repeated what I had heard, he agreed I should stop, although I sensed he was
doing it only  to appease me. A few  weeks  later, I found my reaction a bit
hysterical  and my decision to withdraw unsound.  I went back to my dreaming
practices. I was  sure  don Juan  was  aware  that  I  had canceled  out  my
withdrawal.
     On  one  of my visits to  him,  quite abruptly, he spoke about  dreams.
"Just because we haven't been taught to emphasize dreams as a  genuine field
for  exploration  doesn't  mean  they are  not one," he began.  "Dreams  are
analyzed  for  their meaning or are  taken as portents,  but  never are they
taken as a realm of real events."
     "To my  knowledge, only the old sorcerers  did that," don Juan went on,
"but at the end they flubbed it. They  got greedy, and  when they came to  a
crucial crossroads, they took the wrong fork. They put all their eggs in one
basket: the fixation  of the assemblage point on  the thousands of positions
it can adopt."
     Don Juan expressed  his  bewilderment at the fact that out of  all  the
marvelous  things  the old sorcerers  learned exploring  those  thousands of
positions,  only  the art of dreaming and the  art of  stalking  remain.  He
reiterated that the  art  of dreaming is concerned with  the displacement of
the assemblage point.  Then he defined  stalking as the art that deals  with
the  fixation of  the  assemblage  point on any  location  to  which  it  is
displaced.
     "To  fixate  the  assemblage point  on any new  spot  means  to acquire
cohesion,"  he said.  "You  have  been  doing  just that  in  your  dreaming
practices."
     "I thought I was perfecting my energy body," I said,  somehow surprised
at his statement.
     "You are doing  that and much more, you  are learning to have cohesion.
Dreaming  does it by forcing dreamers  to fixate the  assemblage  point. The
dreaming attention, the energy body, the second  attention, the relationship
with  inorganic  beings,  the  dreaming  emissary  are  but  by-products  of
acquiring cohesion; in other words, they are all by-products of fixating the
assemblage point on a number of dreaming positions."
     "What is a dreaming position, don Juan?"
     "Any  new  position  to which  the assemblage  point has been displaced
during sleep."
     "How do we fixate the assemblage point on a dreaming position?"
     "By sustaining  the view  of any item in  your  dreams, or by  changing
dreams at  will. Through your dreaming practices, you are  really exercising
your capacity  to  be  cohesive;  that is  to say, you  are  exercising your
capacity  to  maintain a new  energy shape by  holding the assemblage  point
fixed on the position of any particular dream you are having."
     "Do I really maintain a new energy shape?"
     "Not exactly,  and not because  you  can't  but  only  because  you are
shifting the assemblage point instead of moving it. Shifts of the assemblage
point  give rise to minute changes, which are practically unnoticeable.  The
challenge  of  shifts  is that they  are  so small and so  numerous that  to
maintain cohesiveness in all of them is a triumph."
     "How do we know we are maintaining cohesion?"
     "We know it by the clarity of our  perception. The clearer the view  of
our dreams, the greater our cohesion."
     He said then that it was time for me to have a practical application of
what I had  learned in dreaming. Without giving me a chance to ask anything,
he urged me to focus my attention, as if I were  in a  dream, on the foliage
of a desert tree growing nearby:  a mesquite tree. "Do you  want  me to just
gaze at it?" I asked. "I don't want you to just gaze at it; I want you to do
something very special with that foliage," he said.  "Remember that, in your
dreams, once you  are able  to  hold the  view of any  item, you are  really
holding the  dreaming position of your assemblage point.  Now, gaze at those
leaves as  if you were  in  a dream, but with a  slight yet most  meaningful
variation: you are going to hold  your  dreaming attention on the  leaves of
the mesquite tree in the awareness  of our daily world." My nervousness made
it  impossible  for me to follow his line of thought. He patiently explained
that by staring at the foliage, I would accomplish a minute  displacement of
my  assemblage  point.  Then,  by  summoning my dreaming  attention  through
staring   at  individual  leaves,  I   would  actually  fixate  that  minute
displacement, and my cohesion would make me perceive  in terms of the second
attention. He added, with a  chuckle, that the process  was so simple it was
ridiculous.
     Don Juan was right.  All  I needed was to focus my sight on the leaves,
maintain it, and  in one  instant I was drawn into a  vortex-like sensation,
extremely like  the vortexes in my dreams. The foliage  of the mesquite tree
became a universe of sensory  data. It was  as  if the foliage had swallowed
me,  but it was not only my sight that was engaged; if I touched the leaves,
I  actually felt them. I could  also smell them.  My dreaming attention  was
multisensorial instead of solely visual, as in my regular dreaming.
     What had begun as gazing at the foliage of the mesquite tree had turned
into a dream.  I believed I was in a dreamt  tree, as I had been in trees of
countless dreams. And, naturally, I behaved  in  this dreamt tree  as I  had
learned to behave  in  my dreams; I moved from item to  item, pulled  by the
force of a vortex that took  shape on whatever part of the tree I focused my
multisensorial dreaming attention. Vortexes were formed not only  on  gazing
but also on touching anything with any part of my body.
     In the midst  of  this  vision  or  dream, I  had an attack of rational
doubts. I began to wonder if I had really climbed the tree in a daze and was
actually hugging the leaves, lost in the foliage, without knowing what I was
doing. Or perhaps I had fallen asleep, possibly mesmerized by the fluttering
of leaves in the wind, and was having a dream. But  just like in dreaming, I
didn't have enough energy to ponder for too long. My thoughts were fleeting.
They lasted an instant; then  the force of direct  experience blanketed them
out completely. A  sudden motion  around me shook  everything and  virtually
made  me  emerge  from a clump of leaves, as  if I  had broken away from the
tree's  magnetic pull.  I  was  facing then, from an  elevation,  an immense
horizon. Dark mountains and green vegetation surrounded  me. Another jolt of
energy made me shake from my bones out; then I was somewhere else.  Enormous
trees loomed everywhere.  They  were bigger than the  Douglas firs of Oregon
and Washington State.  Never had I  seen a forest like that. The scenery was
such  a contrast to the aridness of the Sonoran desert that it left  me with
no doubt that I was having a dream.
     I held on to that extraordinary view, afraid to let go, knowing that it
was  indeed  a dream  and would disappear  once  I had  run out of  dreaming
attention. But the images lasted, even when I thought I should have  run out
of dreaming attention. A horrifying thought crossed  my  mind then:  what if
this was neither a dream nor the daily world?
     Frightened, as  an  animal must  experience fright, I recoiled into the
clump of leaves I had emerged from. The momentum of my backward  motion kept
me going through the tree foliage and around the hard branches. It pulled me
away from the tree, and in one split second I was standing next to don Juan,
at the door of his house, in the desert in Sonora.
     I instantly realized  I had entered again into a state in which I could
think  coherently,  but I could not talk. Don Juan told  me not to worry. He
said that our speech faculty is extremely flimsy and attacks of muteness are
common among sorcerers who venture beyond the limits of normal perception.
     My  gut feeling was that don Juan had taken pity on me  and had decided
to  give  me a pep  talk.  But the voice  of the dreaming emissary,  which I
clearly heard at that instant, said that in a  few hours and after some rest
I was going to be perfectly well.
     Upon awakening  I gave don Juan, at his request, a complete description
of what I had  seen and done. He warned me  that it was not possible to rely
on  my rationality to  understand  my experience, not because my rationality
was in any way impaired but because  what  had taken place was a  phenomenon
outside the parameters of reason.
     I, naturally, argued that nothing can be outside the limits  of reason;
things can be obscure, but sooner or later reason always finds a way to shed
light on anything. And I really believed this.
     Don Juan,  with  extreme patience, pointed out  that  reason  is only a
by-product  of the habitual  position  of  the assemblage  point; therefore,
knowing what is going on, being of sound mind, having our feet on the ground
- sources of great pride to  us and assumed to  be a  natural consequence of
our worth - are merely the result of the fixation of the assemblage point on
its  habitual  place. The more rigid  and stationary it is,  the greater our
confidence  in ourselves, the greater our  feeling of knowing  the world, of
being able to predict.
     He added  that what dreaming does is give us the fluidity to enter into
other  worlds  by destroying  our  sense of  knowing this  world. He  called
dreaming a  journey of unthinkable dimensions,  a journey that, after making
us  perceive everything we can humanly perceive, makes  the assemblage point
jump outside the human domain and perceive the inconceivable.
     "We  are  back again, harping  on  the  most  important  topic  of  the
sorcerers' world,"  he went on,  "the  position of the assemblage point. The
old sorcerers' curse, as well as mankind's thorn in the side."
     "Why do you say that, don Juan?"
     "Because  both, mankind in general and the  old sorcerers, fell prey to
the position of the assemblage point: mankind,  because  by not knowing that
the  assemblage point exists we  are obliged to take  the by-product of  its
habitual position as something final and indisputable. And the old sorcerers
because, although they knew all  about  the assemblage  point, they fell for
its facility to be manipulated.
     "You  must  avoid  falling  into  those traps," he  continued. "It'd be
really disgusting if you sided with mankind, as if you didn't know about the
existence of  the assemblage point. But  it'd be  even more insidious if you
sided with the old sorcerers  and cynically manipulate the assemblage  point
for gain."
     "I still don't understand. What is the connection of all this with what
I experienced yesterday?"
     "Yesterday, you were in a different world. But if you ask me where that
world is, and I tell you that it is in the position of the assemblage point,
my answer won't make any sense to you."
     Don Juan's argument was  that  I had  two  choices.  One was  to follow
mankind's rationales  and  be faced with a predicament: my  experience would
tell me that other worlds exist, but my reason would say that such worlds do
not  and cannot exist. The  other  choice  was  to follow the old sorcerers'
rationales,  in  which case I  would automatically  accept the  existence of
other worlds,  and my greed  alone would make my assemblage point hold on to
the position that creates  those worlds. The result would be another kind of
predicament: that of  having  to  move  physically  into  visionlike realms,
driven by expectations of power and gain.
     I  was too numb to follow his argument,  but then I  realized I did not
have to  follow  it  because I agreed with him completely, despite  the fact
that  I did not have a total  picture of what I was agreeing about. Agreeing
with him was rather a feeling that came from far away,  an ancient certainty
I had lost, which was now slowly finding its way back to me.
     The return  to  my dreaming  practices  eliminated  these turmoils, but
created  new ones. For example,  after months of hearing it daily, I stopped
finding the dreaming emissary's voice an annoyance  or a wonder. It became a
matter of course for me. And I made so  many mistakes influenced by  what it
said that I almost understood don Juan's reluctance  to take it seriously. A
psychoanalyst would have had a field day interpreting the emissary according
to all the possible permutations of my intrapersonal dynamics.
     Don Juan maintained a  steadfast view  on  it: it is  an impersonal but
constant  force  from the realm of  inorganic  beings;  thus,  every dreamer
experiences it, in more or less the same terms. And if we choose to take its
words as advice, we are incurable fools.
     I was  definitely  one of  them. There was no way I could have remained
impassive being in direct contact with  such an extraordinary event: a voice
that  clearly and concisely told me in  three  languages hidden things about
anything or anyone I focused  my attention on. Its  only drawback, which was
of  no consequence to  me,  was that we were  not synchronized. The emissary
used to tell  me things about people or events when I had honestly forgotten
I had been interested in them.
     I asked don Juan about this  oddity, and he said that it had to do with
the rigidity  of my assemblage point. He explained that I had been reared by
old adults and that they had imbued me with old people's views; therefore, I
was dangerously righteous.  His  urge to give  me potions of  hallucinogenic
plants was but an effort, he said, to shake my assemblage point and allow it
to have a minimal margin of fluidity.
     "If  you don't  develop this margin," he went on, "either you'll become
more  righteous  or you'll  become  a hysterical  sorcerer.  My interest  in
telling you about the old sorcerers is not to bad-mouth them but to pit them
against you. Sooner or later, your assemblage point will  be more fluid, but
not  fluid  enough to offset your  facility to be  like them: righteous  and
hysterical."
     "How can I avoid all that, don Juan?"
     "There is only  one way. Sorcerers call it sheer understanding. I  call
it a  romance  with knowledge. It's  the  drive  sorcerers  use  to know, to
discover, to be bewildered."
     Don Juan changed the subject and continued to  explain  the fixation of
the  assemblage  point.  He  said that seeing children's  assemblage  points
constantly  fluttering, as if  moved  by tremors,  changing their place with
ease, the old sorcerers came to the  conclusion that  the assemblage point's
habitual  location is  not innate  but brought about  by habituation. Seeing
also that only in adults  is it  fixed on one spot, they  surmised  that the
specific location  of  the  assemblage  point  fetters  a  specific  way  of
perceiving. Through usage, this specific way of perceiving becomes  a system
of interpreting sensory data.
     Don Juan  pointed  out that, since we are  drafted into that system  by
being born into it, from the moment of our  birth  we imperatively strive to
adjust  our  perceiving to conform  to the demands of  this system, a system
that rules  us  for life.  Consequently,  the old sorcerers were  thoroughly
right  in believing that the act of countermanding it  and perceiving energy
directly is what transforms a person into a sorcerer.
     Don Juan expressed wonder at what he called the greatest accomplishment
of  our  human  upbringing: to  lock  our  assemblage point on  its habitual
position. For, once it  is immobilized there, our perception  can be coached
and  guided to interpret what we perceive. In  other words,  we can then  be
guided to perceive more in terms of our system than  in terms of our senses.
He assured me that human perception  is universally homogeneous, because the
assemblage points of the whole human race are fixed on the same spot.
     He went on to say that sorcerers prove all this to themselves when they
<i>see</i>  that at  the moment the assemblage  point is displaced beyond a certain
threshold, and  new  universal  filaments  of energy begin to be  perceived,
there is  no  sense to  what we  perceive.  The immediate cause is that  new
sensory data  has rendered our system inoperative;  it can no longer be used
to interpret what we are perceiving.
     "Perceiving  without  our  system  is, of course,  chaotic,"  don  Juan
continued. "But  strangely enough,  when  we  think we have  truly  lost our
bearings, our old system rallies; it comes to  our rescue and transforms our
new incomprehensible  perception into a thoroughly comprehensible new world.
Just like what happened to  you when you gazed at the leaves of the mesquite
tree."
     "What exactly happened to me, don Juan?"
     "Your perception was  chaotic  for a while;  everything came  to you at
once, and your system for interpreting the world didn't  function. Then, the
chaos cleared up, and there you were in front of a new world."
     "We are  again,  don Juan, at the same place we were before. Does  that
world exist, or is it merely my mind that concocted it?"
     "We certainly are back, and the answer is still the same. It  exists in
the precise position your  assemblage  point was at that moment. In order to
perceive it,  you  needed cohesion,  that  is, you needed  to  maintain your
assemblage point fixed on that position, which you did. The  result was that
you totally perceived a new world for a while."
     "But would others perceive that same world?"
     "If  they  had  uniformity  and cohesion, they would. Uniformity  is to
hold,  in  unison,  the  same position  of  the  assemblage  point.  The old
sorcerers called the entire act of acquiring uniformity and cohesion outside
the normal world stalking perception.
     "The art  of stalking,"  he continued,  "as I have  already said, deals
with the  fixation  of the  assemblage point.  The old sorcerers discovered,
through practice, that important as it is to  displace the assemblage point,
it  is even  more  important to  make  it stay  fixed on its  new  position,
wherever that new position might be."
     He explained that if the assemblage point  does not  become stationary,
there is  no way that we can perceive coherently. We would experience then a
kaleidoscope of disassociated images. This is the  reason the  old sorcerers
put  as  much  emphasis on dreaming as they did on stalking.  One art cannot
exist without the other, especially for the kinds of activities in which the
old sorcerers were involved.
     "What were those activities, don Juan?"
     "The old sorcerers called  them the intricacies of the second attention
or the grand adventure of the unknown."
     Don Juan  said that these activities stem from the displacements of the
assemblage  point. Not only had the old sorcerers learned to  displace their
assemblage points  to thousands of positions on the surface or on the inside
of their energy masses but they had  also learned to fixate their assemblage
points on those positions, and thus retain their cohesiveness, indefinitely.
     "What was the benefit of that, don Juan?"
     "We can't talk about benefits. We can talk only about end results."
     He explained that the cohesiveness  of the old  sorcerers was such that
it  allowed  them  to  become  perceptually  and  physically everything  the
specific position of their assemblage  points dictated. They could transform
themselves  into  anything  for which  they had  a  specific  inventory.  An
inventory is, he said, all the details of perception  involved  in becoming,
for example, a jaguar, a bird, an insect, et cetera, et cetera.
     "It's very  hard for  me to  believe that  this  transformation can  be
possible," I said.
     "It is possible,"  he assured me. "Not  so much for you and me, but for
them. For them, it was nothing."
     He said that the old sorcerers had superb fluidity. All they needed was
the slightest shift of their assemblage points, the slightest perceptual cue
from their dreaming,  and they would instantaneously stalk their perception,
rearrange their cohesiveness to fit their new state of  awareness, and be an
animal, another person, a bird, or anything.
     "But isn't that  what mentally ill people do? Make up their own reality
as they go along?" I said.
     "No,  it  isn't the same. Insane people imagine a reality of their  own
because they don't have any preconceived purpose at all. Insane people bring
chaos into the chaos. Sorcerers, on the contrary, bring order  to the chaos.
Their  preconceived,  transcendental purpose  is to free  their  perception.
Sorcerers don't make lip the world they are perceiving; they perceive energy
directly, and then they discover that what they are perceiving is an unknown
new world, which can swallow them whole,  because it is as  real as anything
we know to be real."
     Don Juan  then  gave  me a new version of what had happened  to me as I
gazed at the mesquite tree. He said that I began by perceiving the energy of
the  tree. On  the subjective  level,  however,  I  believed I was  dreaming
because I employed dreaming techniques to  perceive energy. He asserted that
to use  dreaming techniques in the world of everyday life was one of the old
sorcerers'  most  effective  devices. It  made  perceiving  energy  directly
dreamlike,  instead  of  totally  chaotic,  until  a  moment when  something
rearranged perception  and  the  sorcerer found himself facing a new world -
the very thing that had happened to me.
     I told him  about the  thought I'd had, which I  had  barely  dared  to
think: that the scenery I was viewing was not a dream, nor was  it our daily
world.
     "It wasn't," he said. "I've been  saying this to you over and over, and
you think that I am merely  repeating myself. I know how difficult it is for
the mind to allow mindless  possibilities  to  become real.  But  new worlds
exist! They are wrapped  one  around  the other, like the skins of an onion.
The world we exist in is but one of those skins."
     "Do you mean, don Juan, that the goal of your teaching is to prepare me
to go into those worlds?"
     "No.  I don't mean  that. We go into those worlds only as  an exercise.
Those journeys are the antecedents of the sorcerers of today. We do the same
dreaming  that the  old  sorcerers used  to do, but at one moment we deviate
into new ground.  The old  sorcerers  preferred the shifts of the assemblage
point, so they  were always on more or  less known, predictable  ground.  We
prefer the  movements of the assemblage point. The old  sorcerers were after
the human unknown. We are after the nonhuman unknown."
     "I haven't gotten to that yet, have I?"
     "No.  You are only  beginning. And at the beginning everyone has to  go
through the old sorcerers' steps. After all, they were the ones who invented
dreaming."
     "At what point will I  then begin to learn the new sorcerers'  brand of
dreaming?"
     "You  have enormous  ground  yet  to  cover. Years  from  now  perhaps.
Besides, in your  case, I  have to be extraordinarily careful. In character,
you are  definitely  linked to the  old sorcerers.  I've  said  this to  you
before, but you always manage  to avoid  my probes. Sometimes I  even  think
that some alien energy is advising you, but then I discard the idea. You are
not devious."
     "What are you talking about, don Juan?"
     "You've done, unwittingly,  two things  that  worry the hell out of me.
You traveled  with  your energy body to a place outside this world the first
time  you dreamt. And  you  walked there! And  then  you traveled  with your
energy  body to  another place  outside  this world,  but parting  from  the
awareness of the daily world."
     "Why would that  worry you, don  Juan?" '"Dreaming is too easy for you.
And that is a damnation if we don't watch it. It leads to the human unknown.
As I  said  to  you, modern-day  sorcerers  strive to  get  to  the nonhuman
unknown."
     "What can the nonhuman unknown be?"
     "Freedom from  being human. Inconceivable  worlds that are outside  the
band of man but that  we  still can perceive. This is where modern sorcerers
take the side road. Their predilection  is what's outside  the human domain.
And what are  outside that  domain are all-inclusive worlds, not merely  the
realm  of birds or the realm of animals  or the realm  of man, even if it be
the unknown man. What I am talking  about are worlds, like  the one where we
live; total worlds with endless realms."
     "Where are  those  worlds,  don Juan?  In different  positions  of  the
assemblage point?"
     "Right. In different positions of the assemblage  point, but  positions
sorcerers arrive  at with a movement  of the assemblage point, not a  shift.
Entering into those worlds is  the type of dreaming only  sorcerers of today
do. The old sorcerers  stayed away from it, because it requires a great deal
of detachment  and no  self-importance  whatsoever.  A  price they  couldn't
afford to pay.
     "For the  sorcerers who practice dreaming today, dreaming is freedom to
perceive worlds beyond the imagination."
     "But, what's the point of perceiving all that?"
     "You already asked  me, today, the same question. You speak like a true
merchant.  What's the risk?  you  ask.  What's  the percentage  gain  to  my
investment? Is it going to better me?"
     "There is  no way to answer  that. The merchant mind does commerce. But
freedom  cannot  be an investment. Freedom is  an adventure with no end,  in
which we risk our lives  and much more for a few moments of something beyond
words, beyond thoughts or feelings."
     "I didn't  ask that question  in that spirit,  don Juan. What I want to
know is  what  can be the driving force to  do all this for a lazy  bum like
myself?"
     "To seek freedom is the only  driving force  I know. Freedom to fly off
into that infinity out there. Freedom to dissolve;  to lift  off; to be like
the flame of a candle, which, in spite of  being up against  the  light of a
billion stars, remains intact,  because  it never pretended to be  more than
what it is: a mere candle."


        5. THE WORLD OF INORGANIC BEINGS

     Faithful to my  agreement to wait for don Juan to initiate any  comment
on  dreaming,  only  in  cases  of  necessity  did  I  ask him  for  advice.
Ordinarily,  though, he not only  seemed reluctant to  touch the subject but
was somehow displeased with me about it. In my estimation, a confirmation of
his  disapproval was  the fact that  whenever  we talked  about my  dreaming
activities, he always minimized the import of anything I had accomplished.
     For  me, at that  time, the animate existence  of  inorganic beings had
become the most crucial aspect  of my dreaming practices. After encountering
them in  my  dreams, and  especially after my bout with  them  in the desert
around  don Juan's  house,  I  should  have been more willing to  take their
existence as a serious affair.  But all these events had quite the  opposite
effect on me. I became adamant and doggedly denied the possibility that they
existed.
     Then I  had  a  change of heart  and  decided to conduct  an  objective
inquiry about them. The method of this inquiry required that I first compile
a  record of everything that transpired in my  dreaming  sessions, then  use
that  record as  a matrix  to find  out if my dreaming proved  or  disproved
anything about the inorganic beings. I actually wrote down hundreds of pages
of meticulous but meaningless details, when it should  have been clear to me
that the evidence of their existence had been gathered almost as soon  as  I
had started my inquiry.
     It took but a few sessions for me to discover that what I thought to be
don Juan's casual recommendation - to suspend judgment and let the inorganic
beings come to me - was, in fact,  the  very procedure used by the sorcerers
of  antiquity to attract them. By leaving me to find it out for myself,  don
Juan was simply  following his  sorcery  training. He had remarked  time and
time  again  that  it is  very  difficult  to  make  the  self  give  up its
strongholds  except through practice. One of  the  self's strongest lines of
defense is indeed  our rationality, and this  is not only  the  most durable
line  of defense when it comes to sorcery actions and explanations but  also
the  most threatened.  Don  Juan believed that  the existence  of  inorganic
beings is a foremost assailant of our rationality.
     In my dreaming practices, I had an established course, which I followed
every single  day  without  deviation.  I aimed  first  at  observing  every
conceivable  item of  my  dreams, then  at  changing dreams. I  can  say  in
sincerity  that I  observed  universes of detail in dreams upon dreams. As a
matter of course, at one  given moment my  dreaming attention began to wane,
and  my  dreaming sessions  ended  either  in my  falling asleep and  having
regular dreams, in which I  had  no dreaming attention whatsoever,  or in my
waking up and not being able to sleep at all.
     From time to time, however, as don Juan  had described it, a current of
foreign energy, a scout, as he called it, was injected into my dreams. Being
forewarned helped  me to adjust  my  dreaming attention and be on the alert.
The first time I noticed foreign  energy, I was dreaming about shopping in a
department store. I was going from counter to  counter looking for antiques.
I  finally  found  one.  The  incongruence  of  looking  for  antiques in  a
department store was  so  obvious that it made me chuckle, but  since  I had
found one, I forgot about that incongruence. The antique was the handle of a
walking stick. The  salesman told  me that it was  made of iridium, which he
called one of the  hardest substances in the world. It was  a  carved piece:
the head and shoulders of a monkey. It looked like jade  to me. The salesman
was insulted when I insinuated that it might be jade, and to prove his point
he hurled the object, with  all  his  strength, against the cement floor. It
did  not break but bounced like a ball and then sailed away, spinning like a
Frisbee. I followed it. It  disappeared behind some trees. I ran to look for
it, and I found it,  stuck on  the ground. It had  been  transformed into an
extraordinarily beautiful, deep green and black, full-length walking stick.
     I coveted  it. I grabbed it and struggled to pull it out of  the ground
before anyone  else came  along. But,  hard as  I tried, I could not make it
budge.  I  was afraid I  would break it  if I  attempted  to pry it loose by
shaking  it back and  forth. So I began to dig around it with my bare hands.
As I kept on digging, it kept on melting, until only a puddle of green water
was left in its place. I stared at the water; it suddenly seemed to explode.
It turned into a white bubble, and then it was gone. My dream continued into
other  images  and details,  which  were not outstanding, although they were
crystal clear.
     When I told don  Juan about this dream, he said, "You isolated a scout.
Scouts are more  numerous  when our  dreams are average,  normal  ones.  The
dreams of dreamers are strangely  free from scouts. When they  appear,  they
are identifiable by the strangeness and incongruity surrounding them."
     "Incongruity, in what manner, don Juan?"
     "Their presence doesn't make any sense."
     "Very few things make sense in a dream."
     "Only  in average dreams are things nonsensical. I would say  that this
is  so because more  scouts are injected then,  because average  people  are
subject to a greater barrage from the unknown."
     "Do you know why is that so, don Juan?"
     "In my opinion, what takes place is a balance of forces. Average people
have  stupendously  strong barriers  to  protect  themselves  against  those
onslaughts. Barriers  such  as worries  about the  self.  The  stronger  the
barrier, the greater the attack.
     "Dreamers, by  contrast,  have fewer barriers and fewer scouts in their
dreams.  It seems that in dreamers'  dreams  nonsensical  things  disappear,
perhaps to ensure that dreamers catch the presence of scouts."
     Don Juan advised me to  pay  close attention and remember every  single
possible detail  of  the dream  I had had. He even made me repeat what I had
told him.
     "You  baffle me," I  said. "You don't want to hear  anything  about  my
dreaming,  and  then  you  do. Is  there  any order  to  your  refusals  and
acceptances?"
     "You bet there is order behind all this," he said. "Chances are, you'll
do the same  someday to another dreamer. Some items are  of  key  importance
because they are associated with the spirit. Others are entirely unimportant
by reason of being associated with our indulging personality."
     "The first scout you isolate will always  be present, in any form, even
iridium. By the way, what's iridium?"
     "I don't really know," I said in total sincerity.
     "There you are! And what will you say if it turns out to be one  of the
strongest substances in the world?"
     Don  Juan's  eyes shone with delight, while I nervously laughed at that
absurd possibility, which, I learned later, is true.
     I began to notice from then  on the presence of incongruous items in my
dreams.  Once I  had accepted don Juan's categorization of foreign energy in
dreams,  I  totally agreed with  him  that incongruous  items  were  foreign
invaders  of  my dreams. Upon  isolating them, my  dreaming attention always
focused on  them with  an  intensity  that  did not  occur  under any  other
circumstances.
     Another thing I  noticed was that every time  foreign energy invaded my
dreams,  my  dreaming attention had to work  hard to turn  it  into  a known
object.  The  handicap  of  my  dreaming  attention  was  its  inability  to
accomplish fully  such a  transformation; the  end result  was a bastardized
item, nearly unknown to me. The foreign energy then dissipated quite easily,
the bastardized  item vanished,  turning  into  a blob of  light, which  was
quickly absorbed by other pressing details of my dreams.
     When I asked don Juan to comment on  what was happening to me, he said,
"At this point in  your  dreaming,  scouts are  reconnoiterers sent  by  the
inorganic realm. They are very fast, meaning that they don't stay long."
     "Why do you say that they are reconnoiterers, don Juan?"
     "They come in search  of potential  awareness. They have  consciousness
and  purpose, although  it  is  incomprehensible to  our  minds,  comparable
perhaps  to the consciousness and purpose of trees. The inner speed of trees
and inorganic  beings is incomprehensible  to  us because  it  is infinitely
slower than ours."
     "What makes you say that, don Juan?"
     "Both trees and inorganic beings last longer than we do. They  are made
to stay put. They are immobile, yet they make everything move around them."
     "Do  you mean,  don Juan, that  inorganic  beings  are stationary  like
trees?"
     "Certainly. What you see in dreaming as bright or dark sticks are their
projections. What you hear as the voice of the dreaming emissary  is equally
their projection. And so are their scouts."
     For some unfathomable reason, I was overwhelmed  by these statements. I
was  suddenly  filled  with  anxiety.  I asked don  Juan if trees  also  had
projections like that."
     "They do," he said. "Their projections are, however, even less friendly
to us than those of the inorganic beings. Dreamers  never seek  them, unless
they  are  in a  state  of  profound  amenity with trees,  which  is  a very
difficult state to  attain. We have no friends on this  earth, you know." He
chuckled and added, "It's no mystery why."
     "It may not be a mystery to you, don Juan, but it certainly is to me."
     "We  are destructive. We have antagonized every  living being  on  this
earth. That's why we have no friends."
     I  felt  so  ill  at  ease  that  I  wanted  to stop  the  conversation
altogether. But a compulsive urge made me return to the subject of inorganic
beings. "What do you think I should do to follow the scouts?" I asked.
     "Why in the world would you want to follow them?"
     "I am conducting an objective inquiry about inorganic beings."
     "You're  pulling my leg, aren't you?  I  thought you  were unmovable on
your stand that inorganic beings don't exist."
     His scoffing tone and cackling laughter told me  what his thoughts  and
feelings about my objective inquiry were.
     "I've  changed  my  mind,  don Juan. Now I  want  to  explore all those
possibilities."
     "Remember, the realm of inorganic beings was  the old sorcerers' field.
To  get there, they tenaciously fixed their dreaming attention on the  items
of their dreams. In that fashion, they  were able to isolate the scouts. And
when they had the scouts in focus, they shouted their intent to follow them.
The instant the  old sorcerers  voiced that intent, off they went, pulled by
that foreign energy."
     "Is it that simple, don Juan?"
     He did not answer. He just laughed at me as if daring me to do it.
     At home,  I tired of  searching  for  don  Juan's  true meanings. I was
thoroughly unwilling to consider that  he  might  have described  an  actual
procedure. After  running out of ideas and patience, one day I let my  guard
down. In a  dream I  was  having  then,  I  was baffled by a fish  that  had
suddenly jumped out  of a pond I was walking  by. The  fish twitched  by  my
feet, then flew like a  colored bird,  perching on a branch,  still  being a
fish. The scene was so outlandish that my dreaming attention was galvanized.
I instantly knew it was a scout. A second  later,  when the fish-bird turned
into a point of light,  I shouted my intent to  follow it, and, just as  don
Juan had said, off I went into another world.
     I flew through a seemingly dark tunnel as if I were a weightless flying
insect. The sensation of a tunnel ended abruptly. It was exactly as if I had
been  spewed out of  a tube and  the  impulse had left me smack  against  an
immense physical mass; I was almost touching it. I could  not see the end of
it  in  any direction  I looked. The  entire  thing  reminded  me so much of
science fiction movies that I  was utterly convinced I was  constructing the
view of that mass myself, as one constructs a dream. Why  not? The thought I
had was that, after all, I was asleep, dreaming.
     I settled down to observe the details of my dream.  What I  was viewing
looked very  much like a  gigantic sponge.  It  was porous  and cavernous. I
could  not feel its texture, but it looked  rough and  fibrous. It  was dark
brownish  in color.  Then I had a momentary jolt of doubt about that  silent
mass being just a dream. What I was facing did not change shape. It  did not
move either. As I  looked at  it fixedly,  I had the complete  impression of
something  real but stationary; it was planted somewhere, and it had such  a
powerful attraction that  I was incapable of deviating my dreaming attention
to examine anything else, including myself.  Some strange force, which I had
never before encountered in my dreaming, had me riveted down.
     Then I  clearly felt that the mass  released my dreaming attention; all
my awareness focused on the  scout that had taken me there. It looked like a
firefly in  the darkness, hovering over me, by my side. In its realm, it was
a blob of sheer energy. I was able  to see its energetic sizzling. It seemed
to be conscious of me. Suddenly, it lurched onto me and tugged me or prodded
me. I did not feel its touch, yet I knew it  was touching me. That sensation
was startling and new, it was as if a part of me that was not there had been
electrified  by  that  touch,  ripples of  energy went through it, one after
another.
     From that moment on, everything in my dreaming became much more real. I
had a very difficult time keeping the idea that I  was dreaming  a dream. To
this  difficulty,  I had to add the  certainty I had that with its touch the
scout had made an energetic connection with me.  I knew what it wanted me to
do the instant it seemed to tug me or shove me.
     The  first thing it did was to push me through a huge cavern or opening
into the  physical mass I had  been  facing. Once I was inside  that mass, I
realized that the interior was as  homogeneously porous  as  the outside but
much softer  looking, as if  the roughness had been sanded down. What  I was
facing was  a structure that looked something like the enlarged picture of a
beehive.  There were  countless  geometric-shaped  tunnels  going  in  every
direction. Some went up or  down, or to my left or  my  right; they were  at
angles with one another, or going up or down on steep or mild inclines.
     The  light was very  dim, yet  everything was  perfectly  visible.  The
tunnels  seemed to be alive  and conscious;  they sizzled. I stared at them,
and the realization that  I was seeing hit me. Those were tunnels of energy.
At  the  instant of this  realization,  the voice of the  dreaming  emissary
roared inside my ears, so loudly I could not understand what it said. "Lower
it down," I yelled with  unusual impatience and became aware that if I spoke
I blocked my view of the tunnels and entered into a vacuum where all I could
do was hear.
     The emissary modulated its voice and said, "You are inside an inorganic
being. Choose a tunnel and you can even live in it."  The voice  stopped for
an instant, then added, "That is, if you want to do it."
     I  could  not bring  myself  to  say anything. I  was  afraid  that any
statement of mine might be construed as the opposite of what I meant.
     "There are endless advantages for you," the emissary's voice continued.
"You can live  in  as many  tunnels  as you want. And each one  of them will
teach something  different.  The sorcerers of antiquity lived in this manner
and learned marvelous things."
     I sensed without any feeling that the scout was pushing me from behind.
It  appeared to want me  to  move onward. I took the tunnel to my  immediate
right. As  soon as  I was in it, something  made  me aware  that  I was  not
walking on the tunnel; I was hovering  in it, flying. I was a blob of energy
no different from the scout.
     The  voice of the emissary sounded inside my ears again. "Yes, you  are
just a blob  of energy,"  it  said.  Its redundancy  brought me  an  intense
relief. "And you are floating inside one inorganic being," it went on. "This
is the way  the scout wants you to move in this world. When  it touched you,
it changed you forever. You  are practically  one of us  now. If you want to
stay  here, just  voice your intent." The emissary stopped talking, and  the
view  of the tunnel returned to  me. But when  it spoke again, something had
been adjusted; I did not lose sight of that world and I still could hear the
emissary's voice. "The ancient sorcerers learned  everything they knew about
dreaming by staying here among us," it said.
     I was  going to ask  if they had  learned everything they knew  by just
living  inside  those tunnels, but before I voiced my question the  emissary
answered  it.  "Yes,  they learned  everything  by  just living  inside  the
inorganic beings," it  said. "To live inside them, all the old sorcerers had
to do was say they wanted  to, just like all it took for you to get here was
to voice your intent, loud and clear."
     The  scout  pushed  against  me  to  signal  me  to  continue moving. I
hesitated, and it did  something equivalent to shoving me with  such a force
that I shot like a bullet through endless tunnels. I finally stopped because
the scout stopped.  We  hovered  for an  instant;  then  we  dropped into  a
vertical tunnel. I did not feel  the drastic change of direction. As  far as
my  perception was concerned, I was still moving  seemingly parallel  to the
ground.
     We changed directions many times with the same perceptual effect on me.
I began to formulate a thought about my incapacity to feel that I was moving
up  or down  when I  heard the  emissary's voice.  "I think  you'll  be more
comfortable if you crawl rather than fly," it said.  "You can also move like
a spider or a fly, straight up or down or upside down."
     Instantaneously,  I  settled down.  It was as if  I had been fluffy and
suddenly I got some weight, which grounded me. I could not feel the tunnel's
walls,  but  the emissary  was  right about my being  more comfortable  when
crawling.
     "In this world you don't have to  be pinned down by  gravity," it said.
Of  course, I was  able to realize that myself.  "You  don't have to breathe
either," the voice went on. "And, for your convenience alone, you can retain
your eyesight and see as you see in your  world." The emissary  seemed to be
deciding  whether to add  more.  It  coughed, just  like a man  clearing his
throat,  and  said, "The eyesight  is never impaired;  therefore,  a dreamer
always speaks about his dreaming in terms of what he sees."
     The scout pushed  me  into a tunnel to  my right. It was somehow darker
than the others. To me, at a preposterous level,  it seemed cozier  than the
others, more friendly or even known to me. The  thought crossed my mind that
I was like that tunnel or that the tunnel was like me.
     "You two have met before," the emissary's voice said.
     "I beg your pardon," I  said. I  had understood what  it said,  but the
statement was incomprehensible."
     "You two  wrestled, and  because  of  that you  now carry each  other's
energy." I  thought that the emissary's voice carried a  touch of  malice or
even sarcasm.
     "No, it isn't  sarcasm,"  the emissary  said. "I am glad that you  have
relatives here among us."
     "What  do  you  mean  by  relatives?"  I  asked.  "Shared energy  makes
kinship," it replied. "Energy is like blood."
     I was unable to  say anything else. I clearly felt pangs of fear. "Fear
is  something that is absent in this world," the emissary said. And that was
the only statement that was not true.
     My  dreaming ended  there.  I  was  so  shocked  by  the  vividness  of
everything, and  by the impressive clarity and continuity  of the emissary's
statements, that  I could not  wait to  tell  don  Juan.  It  surprised  and
disturbed me that he did not want to hear my account. He did not say so, but
I had the impression that  he believed all of  it  had  been a product of my
indulging personality.
     "Why are you behaving like this with me?" I asked. "Are you  displeased
with me?"
     "No. I am  not  displeased  with  you," he said. "The problem is that I
can't talk  about this part of your dreaming. You are completely by yourself
in  this case. I have  said to you  that inorganic beings  are real. You are
finding out how real  they are.  But what you do  with  this finding is your
business, yours alone. Someday you'll see the reason for my staying away."
     "But  isn't  there  something  you  can tell  me  about that  dream?" I
insisted.
     "What I can say  is that it  wasn't a dream. It was a journey into  the
unknown. A necessary journey, I may add, and an ultrapersonal one."
     He changed the subject  then and  began to talk about other aspects  of
his  teachings.  From  that  day  on, in spite of  my  fear  and  don Juan's
reluctance to advise  me,  I became a  regular dream traveler to that spongy
world. I discovered right away that the greater  my  capacity to observe the
details of my dreams,  the greater my  facility to isolate  the scouts. If I
chose to acknowledge the  scouts as foreign energy, they  remained within my
perceptual field for a while. Now, if I chose to turn the scouts into  quasi
known objects,  they stayed even longer, changing shapes erratically. But if
I followed them, by revealing out loud my intent to go with them, the scouts
veritably transported  my dreaming attention to a  world  beyond what I  can
normally imagine.
     Don Juan had said that inorganic beings are always poised to teach. But
he  had  not told me that dreaming is what they are  poised to teach. He had
stated  that  the  dreaming emissary,  since  it is a voice,  is the perfect
bridge between that world and ours. I found  out  that the dreaming emissary
was not  only a teacher's  voice but the voice of a most subtle salesman. It
repeated  on and on, at the proper time and  occasion, the advantages of its
world. Yet it also taught me invaluable things  about dreaming. Listening to
what it said,  I  understood  the  old  sorcerers'  preference for  concrete
practices.
     "For perfect dreaming, the first thing you have  to do is shut off your
internal dialogue," it said to me one time. "For best results in shutting it
off, put between your fingers some  two- or three-inch-long quartz  crystals
or a couple of smooth,  thin river pebbles. Bend your fingers slightly,  and
press the crystals or pebbles with them."
     The emissary said that metal pins, if they were  the size  and width of
one's fingers, were equally effective.  The procedure consisted of  pressing
at least  three thin items between the fingers of each hand and creating, an
almost painful pressure in the hands. This pressure had the strange property
of shutting off the internal dialogue. The  emissary's expressed  preference
was  for quartz crystals; it said that they gave the best  results, although
with practice anything was suitable.
     "Falling  asleep  at a  moment of total silence  guarantees  a  perfect
entrance into dreaming," said the emissary's voice, "and  it also guarantees
the enhancing of one's dreaming attention."
     "Dreamers  should wear a  gold ring,"  said the emissary to me  another
time, "preferably fitted a bit tight."
     The emissary's explanation was that such a ring  serves as a bridge for
surfacing  from dreaming back into  the daily world or for sinking  from our
daily awareness into the inorganic beings' realm.
     "How does  this bridge  work?" I asked.  I had not  understood what was
involved.
     "The contact of  the fingers  on the ring  lays  the bridge down,"  the
emissary  said. "If a dreamer comes into my  world wearing a ring, that ring
attracts  the energy of my world and keeps  it;  and when it's needed,  that
energy  transports the dreamer back to this  world, by the ring releasing it
into the dreamer's fingers.
     "The pressure  of that  ring  around a  finger  serves equally well  to
ensure a  dreamer's return  to  his world. It gives him a constant, familiar
sense on his finger."
     During another dreaming session, the emissary said that our skin is the
perfect organ for transposing energy waves from the mode  of the daily world
to  the mode  of the inorganic beings and vice versa. It recommended  that I
keep my skin cool  and free from  pigments or oils. It also recommended that
dreamers wear a  tight belt  or headband or  necklace to  create a  pressure
point  that serves as  a  skin  center  of  energy  exchange.  The  emissary
explained that the skin automatically screens energy, and  that what we need
to do to make the skin not only screen but exchange energy from one  mode to
the other is to express our intent out loud, in dreaming.
     One day the emissary's voice gave me a fabulous bonus. It said that, in
order to ensure the keenness and accuracy of our dreaming attention, we must
bring it from behind  the roof of the mouth, where an enormous reservoir  of
attention is located in all human beings. The emissary's specific directions
were to practice and learn the discipline and control necessary to press the
tip of the tongue on the roof of the  mouth while dreaming. This task  is as
difficult and  consuming,  the emissary  said, as finding one's  hands  in a
dream.  But, once it is accomplished,  this task gives  the most  astounding
results in terms of controlling the dreaming attention.
     I  received  a profusion  of instructions on every conceivable subject,
instructions  that I promptly forgot if they were not endlessly  repeated to
me. I sought don Juan's advice on how to resolve this problem of forgetting.
     His  comment  was as  brief  as I had expected. "Focus only on what the
emissary tells you about dreaming," he said.
     Whatever the emissary's  voice repeated enough  times, I  grasped  with
tremendous  interest and  fervor. Faithful to don  Juan's  recommendation, I
only followed its  guidance when  it referred to  dreaming and I  personally
corroborated  the  value  of  its  instruction.  The  most  vital  piece  of
information for  me was that the dreaming  attention  comes from  behind the
roof of  the mouth. It took a  great  deal of effort on my part to  feel  in
dreaming that I was pressing the roof of my mouth with the tip of my tongue.
Once I  accomplished  this, my dreaming attention took on a life of  its own
and became, I may say, keener than my normal attention to the daily world.
     It  did not  take  much for  me to deduce how  deep  must have been the
involvement  of  the  old sorcerers with  the  inorganic beings.  Don Juan's
commentaries and warnings  about the  danger of  such  an involvement became
more  vital  than  ever. I  tried my best  to  live up to  his standards  of
self-examination with  no indulgence. Thus, the emissary's voice and what it
said became a superchallenge for me. I had to avoid, at all cost, succumbing
to the temptation  of the emissary's promise of knowledge,  and I had to  do
this all by  myself  since don Juan  continued  to  refuse  to  listen to my
accounts.
     "You must give me at least a hint about what I  should do,"  I insisted
on one occasion when I was bold enough to ask him.
     "I  can't," he said with finality, "and don't ask again. I've told you,
in this instance, dreamers have to be left alone."
     "But you don't even know what I want to ask you."
     "Oh yes I do.  You want me  to tell you that it is all right to live in
one of  those  tunnels,  if for no other  reason  than just to know what the
emissary's voice is talking about."
     I admitted that this was exactly my dilemma.  If nothing else, I wanted
to know  what  was implied in  the statement that one can live inside  those
tunnels.
     "I went through the same turmoil myself," don Juan went on, "and no one
could help me, because this is a  superpersonal and final decision,  a final
decision made the  instant  you voice your desire to live in that  world. In
order to get  you  to voice  that desire,  the inorganic beings are going to
cater to your most secret wishes."
     "This is really diabolical, don Juan."
     "You can say that again. But not just because of what you are thinking.
For you, the diabolical part  is  the temptation to give in, especially when
such  great  rewards  are  at  stake. For  me, the  diabolical nature of the
inorganic beings' realm is  that it might very  well be the  only  sanctuary
dreamers have in a hostile universe."
     "Is it really a haven for dreamers, don Juan?"
     "It definitely  is for some dreamers. Not for me. I don't need props or
railings.  I know what I am.  I am alone  in a hostile  universe, and I have
learned to say. So be it!"
     That was the end of  our  exchange. He had not said  what  I  wanted to
hear, yet I knew that even  the desire to know what it was like to live in a
tunnel meant almost to choose that way of life. I was not interested in such
a  thing. I made  my  decision right then to continue my  dreaming practices
without any further implications.  I quickly told don Juan  about it. "Don't
say anything," he advised me. "But do understand that if you choose to stay,
your decision is final. You'll stay there forever."
     It is impossible for me to judge objectively what took place during the
countless times I dreamt of that world. I can  say that  it appeared to be a
world as real  as any dream can be real. Or I can say that it appeared to be
as  real as our daily world is real. Dreaming of that world,  I became aware
of what don Juan had said  to  me  many times:  that  under the influence of
dreaming, reality suffers a metamorphosis. I found  myself then  facing  the
two  options  which,  according to don  Juan, are  the options  faced by all
dreamers: either  we carefully revamp or we completely disregard our  system
of sensory input interpretation.
     For don Juan,  to  revamp our interpretation system meant to intend its
reconditioning. It  meant  that one deliberately  and carefully  attempts to
enlarge  its capabilities. By living in accordance with  the sorcerers' way,
dreamers save and store  the necessary energy to suspend  judgment and  thus
facilitate  that intended revamping.  He explained  that  if  we  choose  to
recondition  our interpretation system, reality becomes fluid, and the scope
of what  can  be real  is  enhanced  without  endangering  the  integrity of
reality. Dreaming, then, indeed opens the door into other aspects of what is
real.
     If we  choose to  disregard  our  system,  the  scope  of  what can  be
perceived  without interpretation  grows  inordinately. The expansion of our
perception is so gigantic that  we are  left with very few tools for sensory
interpretation and, thus, a sense of an infinite realness  that is unreal or
an infinite unrealness that could very well be real but is not.
     For me, the  only acceptable option was reconstructing and enlarging my
interpretation system. In  dreaming the inorganic beings' realm, I was faced
with the  consistence of that world from dream to  dream, from isolating the
scouts through  listening to  the dreaming emissary's voice to going through
tunnels. I went through them without  feeling anything, yet being aware that
space  and  time  were  constant,  although  not  in  terms  discernible  by
rationality under normal conditions. However,  by noticing the difference or
the absence  or profusion of detail in each tunnel, or by noticing the sense
of distance  between tunnels, or by noticing the apparent length or width of
each  tunnel in  which  I  traveled,  I  arrived at  a  sense  of  objective
observation.
     The area where this reconstruction of my interpretation  system had the
most dramatic effect was the knowledge of how I related  to the world of the
inorganic beings. In that  world,  which was  real to  me, I  was a blob  of
energy. Thus, I could whiz  in  the tunnels, like a fast-moving light, or  I
could crawl on their walls, like  an insect.  If I flew, a voice told me not
arbitrary but consistent information about details on the  walls on which  I
had  focused   my  dreaming   attention.   Those   details  were   intricate
protuberances, like the Braille  system of  writing.  When  I crawled on the
walls, I could see the same details with greater accuracy and hear the voice
giving me more complex descriptions.
     The unavoidable consequence for me was the development of a dual stand.
On the one hand, I knew I  was dreaming a dream; on the other,  I knew I was
involved in a pragmatic journey,  as real as any journey  in the world. This
bona fide  split was  a  corroboration  of what don  Juan had said: that the
existence of inorganic beings is the foremost assailant of our rationality.
     Only after I had really suspended judgment did I get any relief. At one
moment, when the tension of my  untenable position - seriously  believing in
the attestable existence of inorganic beings, while seriously believing that
it was only  a  dream - was about to  destroy me,  something in  my attitude
changed drastically, but without any solicitation on my part.
     Don  Juan maintained  that  my  energy level,  which had been  steadily
growing,  one  day  reached  a  threshold  that  allowed  me   to  disregard
assumptions  and  prejudgments  about  the   nature  of  man,  reality,  and
perception.  That day I  became enamored with knowledge, regardless of logic
or functional value, and, above all, regardless of personal convenience.
     When  my objective inquiry  into  the  subject of  inorganic  beings no
longer mattered  to  me, don Juan himself brought up the subject of my dream
journey  into  that world.  He  said,  "I don't  think  you are aware of the
regularity of your meetings with inorganic beings."
     He  was  right. I had never bothered to  think about it. I commented on
the oddity of my oversight.
     "It isn't an  oversight," he said. "It's the  nature of  that  realm to
foster secretiveness. Inorganic beings veil themselves in mystery, darkness.
Think about their world:  stationary, fixed to draw us like moths to a light
or a fire.
     "There is something  the emissary hasn't dared to tell you so far: that
the inorganic beings are after our awareness or  the awareness of  any being
that falls into their nets. They'll give us knowledge, but they'll extract a
payment: our total being."
     "Do you mean, don Juan, that the inorganic beings are like fishermen?"
     "Exactly. At one moment, the  emissary will show you men who got caught
in there or other beings that are not human that also got caught in there."
     Revulsion and fear should have been my response. Don Juan's revelations
affected me  deeply, but in the sense of creating uncontainable curiosity. I
was nearly panting.
     "Inorganic beings can't force anyone to stay  with them," don Juan went
on. "To  live in their world is a voluntary affair. Yet they are  capable of
imprisoning  any  one  of  us by catering to  our  desires, by pampering and
indulging us. Beware of awareness that  is immobile. Awareness like that has
to  seek  movement,  and  it  does  this,  as  I've  told  you, by  creating
projections, phantasmagorical projections at times."
     I asked don Juan to explain what "phantasmagorical projections"  meant.
He  said that  inorganic beings hook onto  dreamers' innermost  feelings and
play  them mercilessly. They  create phantoms to please dreamers or frighten
them. He reminded  me  that  I had  wrestled with one  of those phantoms. He
explained that inorganic beings are  superb  projectionists, who delight  in
projecting themselves like pictures on the wall.
     "'The  old  sorcerers were brought down by their inane  trust in  those
projections," he  continued.  "The old sorcerers believed  their allies  had
power. They overlooked the fact their allies were tenuous  energy  projected
through worlds, like in a cosmic movie."
     "You are contradicting yourself, don  Juan. You yourself said that  the
inorganic beings are real. Now you tell me that they are mere pictures."
     "I  meant  to say that the  inorganic beings, in  our  world,  are like
moving pictures projected on a screen; and I may even add that they are like
moving pictures of rarefied energy projected  through the boundaries of  two
worlds."
     "But  what about inorganic  beings in  their world?  Are they also like
moving pictures?"
     "Not  a  chance. That world is as real as our world. The  old sorcerers
portrayed  the  inorganic  beings'  world  as a  blob of caverns  and  pores
floating in some dark space.  And  they portrayed  the  inorganic beings  as
hollow canes bound together, like the cells of our bodies. The old sorcerers
called that immense bundle the labyrinth of penumbra."
     "Then every dreamer sees that world in the same terms, right?"
     "Of course. Every  dreamer sees  it  as  it is. Do  you  think you  are
unique?"
     I confessed that  something  in that world had been giving me all along
the sensation  I was  unique.  What  created this  most  pleasant  and clear
feeling of being exclusive  was not the voice of the  dreaming  emissary, or
anything I could consciously  think about. "That's  exactly what floored the
old sorcerers," don Juan said. "The inorganic  beings did to them  what they
are  doing to  you now; they created  for  them the sense of  being  unique,
exclusive plus a more pernicious sense yet: the sense of having power. Power
and uniqueness are unbeatable as corrupting forces. Watch out!"
     "How did you avoid that danger yourself, don Juan?"
     "I went to that world a few times, and then I never went back."
     Don  Juan explained that in  the opin