ion of  sorcerers, the universe is
predatorial, and  sorcerers  more  than anyone else  have to  take this into
account in their daily sorcery activities. His  idea was  that consciousness
is intrinsically compelled to grow, and the only way it can  grow is through
strife, through life-or-death confrontations.
     "The awareness of sorcerers grows when they  do dreaming,"  he went on.
"And the moment  it  grows, something  out  there  acknowledges its  growth,
recognizes it and makes a bid for it. The inorganic beings  are  the bidders
for that new, enhanced awareness. Dreamers have to be forever on their toes.
They are prey the moment they venture out in that predatorial universe."
     "What do you suggest I do to be safe, don Juan?"
     "Be on your toes every second! Don't let anything or anybody decide for
you. Go to the inorganic beings' world only when you want to go."
     "Honestly, don Juan, I wouldn't know how to  do that. Once  I isolate a
scout, a tremendous pull is exerted on me to go. I don't  have a  chance  in
hell to change my mind."
     "Come on! Who do you think  you're kidding? You can definitely stop it.
You haven't tried to, that's all."
     I earnestly insisted that it was impossible for me to stop.  He did not
pursue  the subject any longer, and  I  was thankful for that.  A disturbing
feeling  of  guilt had  begun  to gnaw at me.  For some  unknown reason, the
thought of consciously stopping the pull of the scouts had never occurred to
me.
     As  usual, don  Juan was  correct. I found out that  I could change the
course of my dreaming by  intending that course. After all, I did intend for
the scouts  to  transport me  to their  world.  It  was  feasible that  if I
deliberately intended the opposite,  my dreaming would follow  the  opposite
course.
     With practice,  my capacity to intend  my  journeys into the  inorganic
beings' realm became extraordinarily keen.  An increased  capacity to intend
brought  forth  an  increased  control  over  my  dreaming  attention.  This
additional control  made  me more  daring. I  felt that I could journey with
impunity, because I could stop the journey any time I wanted to.
     "Your confidence is very scary" was don Juan's comment when I told him,
at  his request,  about  the  new  aspect  of my  control  over  my dreaming
attention.
     "Why  should  it be  scary?" I  asked.  I  was  truly convinced  of the
practical value of what I had found out.
     "Because yours is the confidence  of a fool," he  said. "I am  going to
tell you a sorcerers' story that is apropos. I didn't witness it myself, but
my teacher's teacher, the nagual Elias, did."
     Don  Juan  said  that  the nagual Elias and  the love of  his  life,  a
sorceress named Amalia, were lost, in  their youth, in the inorganic beings'
world.
     I  had  never heard  don Juan talk about sorcerers  being the  love  of
anybody's  life.  His  statement  startled  me.  I   asked  him  about  this
inconsistency.
     "It's  not an inconsistency.  I have  simply refrained all  along  from
telling  you  stories of  sorcerers' affection," he  said.  "You've been  so
oversaturated with love all your life that I wanted to give you a break.
     "Well, the nagual Elias and the love of his life, the witch Amalia, got
lost in the inorganic beings' world," don Juan went on. "They went there not
in dreaming but with their physical bodies."
     "How did that happen, don Juan?"
     "Their teacher, the  nagual Rosendo, was very close  in temperament and
practice  to  the  old sorcerers. He intended to help Elias and Amalia,  but
instead  he pushed  them across some  deadly  boundaries. The nagual Rosendo
didn't have that crossing in mind. What he  wanted  to do was to put his two
disciples into the  second attention, but what he got as a result was  their
disappearance."
     Don Juan said that he was not going to go into the details of that long
and complicated story. He was only going to tell me how they  became lost in
that world. He stated that the nagual Rosendo's miscalculation was to assume
that the inorganic beings are not, in  the slightest, interested  in  women.
His  reasoning was  correct and was guided  by the sorcerers' knowledge that
the  universe is  markedly female and that  maleness,  being an  offshoot of
femaleness, is almost scarce, thus, coveted.
     Don Juan made a digression and commented that  perhaps that scarcity of
males is the reason for men's unwarranted dominion on  our  planet. I wanted
to remain on that topic,  but he went ahead with his story. He said that the
nagual  Rosendo's  plan  was  to  give  instruction  to  Elias  and   Amalia
exclusively in the second attention. And to that effect, he followed the old
sorcerers'  prescribed  technique.  He  engaged a  scout,  in dreaming,  and
commanded  it to  transport  his  disciples  into the  second  attention  by
displacing their assemblage points on the proper position.
     Theoretically, a powerful scout could displace their assemblage  points
on  the proper  position with no effort at all. What the  nagual Rosendo did
not take into  consideration  was the trickery of the  inorganic beings. The
scout did displace the assemblage points  of his disciples, but it displaced
them on a position from which it was easy  to transport them bodily into the
realm of the inorganic beings. "Is this possible, to be transported bodily?"
I asked.  "It is possible," he assured me. "We are energy that  is kept in a
specific shape and position by  the fixation of the  assemblage point on one
location. If that location is changed, the shape and position of that energy
will change accordingly. All the inorganic beings have to do is to place our
assemblage point on the right location, and off we go, like a bullet, shoes,
hat, and all."
     "Can this happen to any one of us, don Juan?"
     "Most certainly. Especially if  our  sum  total  of  energy  is  right.
Obviously, the  sum total of the  combined energies of  Elias and Amalia was
something the inorganic beings couldn't overlook. It  is absurd to trust the
inorganic beings. They have their own rhythm, and it isn't human."
     I  asked  don Juan  what  exactly  the  nagual Rosendo did to  send his
disciples  to that world. I knew it was stupid of me to ask, knowing that he
was  going to ignore my  question. My  surprise was genuine when he began to
tell me.
     "The steps  are simplicity  itself,"  he said.  "He put  his  disciples
inside  a very  small, closed  space, something like a closet. Then  he went
into dreaming, called  a scout from the inorganic  beings' realm by  voicing
his intent to get one, then voiced his  intent to offer his disciples to the
scout.
     "The  scout, naturally, accepted  the  gift and took them away,  at  an
unguarded  moment, when they  were making love inside  that closet. When the
nagual opened the closet, they were no longer there."
     Don  Juan  explained that  making  gifts  of  their  disciples  to  the
inorganic beings was precisely what the old sorcerers used to do. The nagual
Rosendo did not mean to do that, but he got swayed by the absurd belief that
the inorganic beings were under his control.
     "Sorcerers'  maneuvers are deadly," don Juan went on. "I beseech you to
be  extraordinarily  aware.  Don't  get  involved  in  having  some  idiotic
confidence in yourself."
     "What finally happened to the nagual Elias and Amalia?" I asked.
     "The nagual  Rosendo  had  to go  bodily into that world  and look  for
them," he replied. "Did he find them?"
     "He  did,  after untold struggles. However, he could  not totally bring
them out. So the two young people were always semiprisoners of that realm."
     "Did you know them, don Juan?"
     "Of course I knew them, and I assure you, they were very strange."


        6. THE SHADOWS' WORLD

     You  must be extremely careful,  for you are about  to fall prey to the
inorganic beings," don  Juan  said to me, quite  unexpectedly, after we  had
been talking about something totally unrelated to dreaming.
     His statement  caught me by  surprise. As usual, I attempted to  defend
myself. "You don't have to warn me. I'm very careful," I assured him.
     "The  inorganic beings  are plotting," he said.  "I sense that,  and  I
can't console myself by saying that they set traps at the  beginning and, in
this manner, undesirable dreamers  are effectively and  permanently screened
out."
     The tone of his voice was so urgent that I immediately had  to reassure
him I was not going to fall into any trap.
     "You must seriously consider that  the inorganic beings have astounding
means  at  their disposal,"  he  went  on.  "Their awareness is  superb.  In
comparison,  we  are  children, children with  a lot  of  energy, which  the
inorganic beings covet."
     I wanted  to tell him that, on an  abstract level, I had understood his
point and  his  concern,  but, on a concrete plane, I saw no  reason for his
warning, because I was in control of my dreaming practices.
     A few minutes  of uneasy silence followed  before don Juan spoke again.
He changed the subject and said that he had  to bring to my attention a very
important  issue  of  his dreaming  instruction, an issue that had, so  far,
bypassed my awareness.
     "You  already  understand  that  the  gates  of  dreaming are  specific
obstacles," he said, "but you haven't understood  yet that whatever is given
as  the exercise to  reach and cross a gate  is not really what that gate is
all about."
     "This is not clear to me at all, don Juan."
     "I mean that it's not true to say, for example, that the second gate is
reached and  crossed  when a dreamer learns to wake up  in another dream, or
when a dreamer learns to change  dreams  without  waking  up in the world of
daily life."
     "Why isn't it true, don Juan?"
     "Because the second gate of dreaming is reached and crossed only when a
dreamer learns to isolate and follow the foreign energy scouts."
     "Why then is the idea of changing dreams given at all?"
     "Waking up in another dream or changing dreams is the drill  devised by
the old  sorcerers to exercise a dreamer's  capacity to isolate and follow a
scout."
     Don  Juan  stated that following  a scout is a high accomplishment  and
that when dreamers are able to perform it, the second gate is flung open and
the universe that  exists behind  it becomes accessible to them. He stressed
that this universe is  there  all  the  time but that we cannot go  into  it
because  we lack energetic prowess and that, in essence, the second gate  of
dreaming is the  door into the  inorganic beings' world, and dreaming is the
key that opens that door.
     "Can  a dreamer isolate a scout directly, without having to go  through
the drill of changing dreams?" I asked.
     "No, not at all," he said.  "The drill  is essential. The question here
is  whether this is the only drill  that  exists. Or  can a  dreamer  follow
another drill?"
     Don Juan looked at me quizzically. It seemed  that he actually expected
me to answer the question.  "It's too difficult to  come up  with a drill as
complete as the one  the old sorcerers devised," I said, without knowing why
but with irrefutable authority.
     Don Juan admitted that I  was  absolutely  right and said that  the old
sorcerers had devised a series of perfect drills to go  through the gates of
dreaming  into  the  specific  worlds  that  exist  behind  every  gate.  He
reiterated that dreaming, being  the  old sorcerers'  invention,  has to  be
played by their rules. He described  the rule of the second gate in terms of
a  series  of  three steps: one, through  practicing the  drill of  changing
dreams, dreamers  find out about  the scouts; two, by following  the scouts,
they enter into another  veritable universe; and three, in that universe, by
means of their actions, dreamers find out, on  their own, the governing laws
and regulations of that universe.
     Don  Juan said  that in  my dealings  with the inorganic  beings, I had
followed the  rule  so  well  that he feared  devastating  consequences.  He
thought that the unavoidable reaction  on the  part  of the inorganic beings
was going to be an attempt to keep me in their world.
     "Don't you think that you are exaggerating, don Juan?" I asked. I could
not believe that the picture was  as  bleak as he was painting it. "I am not
exaggerating at all," he said, in a dry, serious tone.
     "You'll see. The  inorganic beings don't let anyone go,  not  without a
real fight."
     "But what makes you think they want me?"
     "They've already shown you  too many things. Do you really believe that
they are going to all this trouble just to entertain themselves?"
     Don  Juan  laughed at his own  remark. I did  not find him  amusing.  A
strange fear made me ask  him whether  he thought I should interrupt or even
discontinue my dreaming practices.
     "You have to  continue your  dreaming  until you  have gone through the
universe behind the  second  gate," he  said.  "I  mean that  you alone must
either accept or reject the lure  of  the inorganic  beings. That is  why  I
remain aloof and hardly ever comment on your dreaming practices."
     I confessed to him that I had been at a loss  to explain  why he was so
generous in elucidating other aspects of his knowledge and so  miserly  with
dreaming.
     "I was  forced to teach you dreaming," he said,  "only because that  is
the  pattern set out by the  old  sorcerers. The path of dreaming  is filled
with pitfalls,  and  to  avoid  those  pitfalls or to fall into them  is the
personal and individual  affair of each dreamer, and I may  add that it is a
final affair."
     "Are  those  pitfalls  the  result of  succumbing  to  adulation  or to
promises of power?" I asked.
     "Not  only  succumbing to those, but succumbing to anything  offered by
the  inorganic  beings.  There is no way  for  sorcerers to accept  anything
offered by them, beyond a certain point."
     "And what is that certain point, don Juan?"
     "That  point depends on us as individuals. The challenge is for each of
us to take only what is needed from that world, nothing more. To know what's
needed is  the virtuosity of sorcerers, but to take  only what's  needed  is
their  highest accomplishment. To fail to understand this simple rule is the
surest way of plummeting into a pitfall."
     "What happens if you fall, don Juan?"
     "If  you  fall,  you pay  the  price,  and  the  price  depends on  the
circumstances and the  depth  of the  fall. But there is  really  no way  of
talking about  an eventuality of  this  sort, because  we  are not  facing a
problem  of  punishment. Energetic  currents  are  at stake  here, energetic
currents  which  create circumstances that  are more  dreadful  than  death.
Everything in the  sorcerers' path is a matter of life or death,  but in the
path of dreaming this matter is enhanced a hundred fold."
     I reassured don  Juan  that  I always exercised the utmost  care in  my
dreaming practices, and that I was extremely disciplined and conscientious.
     "I know  that  you  are,"  he  said. "But I  want  you to be  even more
disciplined and handle everything related to dreaming  with kid gloves.  Be,
above all, vigilant. I can't foretell where the attack will come from."
     "Are you seeing, as a seer, imminent danger for me, don Juan?"
     "I have seen  imminent  danger for you since the day you walked in that
mysterious city, the first time I helped you round up your energy body."
     "But  do you  know  specifically  what I should  do  and  what I should
avoid?"
     "No, I  don't. I only know that  the universe behind the second gate is
the closest to our own, and our own universe is pretty crafty and heartless.
So the two can't be that different."
     I persisted in asking him  to tell me what was in store  for me. And he
insisted that, as  a sorcerer, he sensed a state  of general danger but that
he could not be more specific.
     "The universe of the  inorganic beings is  always ready  to strike," he
went on. "But so is our own universe. That's why  you have to go into  their
realm exactly as if you were venturing into a war zone."
     "Do you mean, don Juan, that dreamers always have  to be afraid of that
world?"
     "No. I don't mean that. Once a dreamer goes through the universe behind
the second  gate,  or  once  a dreamer refuses  to consider it  as a  viable
option, there are no more headaches."
     Don Juan stated that only then are dreamers free to continue. I was not
sure what he meant; he explained that the universe behind the second gate is
so powerful and aggressive that it serves  as a natural screen or  a testing
ground where dreamers are probed for  their weaknesses. If they survive  the
tests, they  can  proceed to  the next  gate;  if  they  do not, they remain
forever trapped in that universe.
     I was left choking with  anxiety but, in spite of my coaxing, that  was
all he  said.  When I went home, I  continued my  journeys  to the inorganic
beings'  realm, exerting great care.  My carefulness seemed only to increase
my  sense of enjoying  those journeys.  I got to  the point  that  the  mere
contemplation  of  the  inorganic  beings' world  was  enough  to  create an
exultation impossible to describe. I feared that my delight was going to end
sooner or  later, but it was not  so. Something unexpected made it even more
intense.
     On  one  occasion, a  scout  guided me very roughly  through  countless
tunnels, as if searching for something, or as if  it were trying to draw all
my energy out and exhaust me. By the time it finally stopped, I felt as if I
had run a marathon.  I seemed to be at the edge of that world. There were no
more tunnels, only blackness  all around me. Then  something lit up the area
right in front of me; there, light shone from  an indirect source. It  was a
subdued light that rendered  everything  diffusely gray or  brownish. When I
became used to the light, I vaguely distinguished some dark,  moving shapes.
After a while, it seemed to me that focusing  my dreaming attention on those
moving shapes made them substantial. I  noticed that there were three types:
some of them were round, like balls;  others were like bells; and others yet
like gigantic, undulating candle flames.  All  of them  were basically round
and the same size. I  judged that they were three  to four feet in diameter.
There were hundreds, perhaps even thousands of them.
     I  knew that I  was having a  strange, sophisticated vision,  yet those
shapes  were so real that I found myself reacting with genuine queasiness. I
got the nauseating feeling of being over  a nest  of giant, round, brown and
grayish bugs. I felt somehow safe, though, hovering above them. I  discarded
all these considerations, however, the moment I realized that it was idiotic
of  me  to  feel  safe  or  ill at ease, as  if  my  dream were  a real-life
situation. However, as I observed those buglike shapes squirm, I became very
disturbed at the idea that they were about to touch me.
     "We are the mobile unit of our world,"  the emissary's voice said,  all
of a sudden. "Don't be afraid.  We  are  energy,  and, for  sure,  we're not
intending  to touch you.  It would be impossible anyway. We are separated by
real boundaries."
     After a long pause, the voice added, "We want you to join us. Come down
to  where we are. And don't be ill at ease. You are not ill at ease with the
scouts and certainly not with me. The scouts and I are just like the others.
I am bell-shaped, and scouts are like candle flames."
     That last statement was definitely a cue  of sorts for my energy  body.
On hearing it, my queasiness and fear vanished. I descended  to their level,
and the  balls and bells and candle flames surrounded me. They came so close
to me that they would have touched me had I had a physical body. Instead, we
went through one another, like encapsulated air puffs.
     I  had, at that  point, an unbelievable sensation. Although  I  did not
feel anything with  or  in  my energy body, I was feeling and recording  the
most unusual tickling somewhere  else; soft,  airlike things were definitely
going through me, but  not right there. The sensation was vague and fast and
did not give me  time to  catch it fully.  Instead  of focusing  my dreaming
attention on it, I became entirely absorbed in watching those oversized bugs
of energy.
     At  the  level  where  we  were,  it  seemed  to  me that there  was  a
commonality between the shadow entities and myself: size.
     Perhaps it was because I judged them to  be  the same size as my energy
body that I felt almost cozy with them. On examining them, I  concluded that
I did not mind them at all.  They  were  impersonal, cold,  detached,  and I
liked  that immensely. I wondered for an  instant  whether my disliking them
one minute and liking them the next was a natural consequence of dreaming or
a product of some energetic influence those entities were exerting on me.
     "They are most likable," I said to  the  emissary, at the very moment I
was overpowered by a wave of profound friendship or even affection for them.
     No sooner had I spoken my mind than the dark shapes scurried away, like
bulky guinea pigs, leaving me alone in semidarkness.
     "You  projected  too much feeling and scared them off," the  emissary's
voice said. "Feeling is too hard for them, and for me for that  matter." The
emissary actually laughed shyly.
     My dreaming session ended there. On awakening, my first reaction was to
pack  my  bag  to go  to  Mexico  and see don Juan.  However,  an unexpected
development in my  personal  life made it  impossible  for me to travel,  in
spite  of my frantic preparations to leave. The anxiety resulting  from this
setback  interrupted my dreaming practices  altogether. I did not  engage my
conscious volition to stop them; I had unwittingly put so  much  emphasis on
this specific dream  that I simply knew if I could not get to don Juan there
was no point in continuing dreaming.
     After an interruption that lasted over half a  year, I became more  and
more mystified by what had happened. I  had no idea  that my feelings  alone
were going  to  stop my  practices.  I wondered then if the  desire would be
sufficient to reinstate it. It was! Once  I  had  formulated  the thought of
reentering  dreaming,  my  practices  continued  as if  they  had never been
interrupted. The scout picked  up where we had left off and took me directly
to the vision I'd had during my last session.
     "This  is the shadows'  world," the emissary's  voice said as soon as I
was there. "But,  even though we are shadows, we shed light. Not only are we
mobile but we are the light in the tunnels. We are another kind of inorganic
being that exists  here. There are  three kinds:  one  is  like  an immobile
tunnel,  the other is like a mobile  shadow. We are  the mobile shadows. The
tunnels give us their energy, and we do their bidding."
     The  emissary stopped talking. I felt it was daring me to ask about the
third kind  of inorganic  being. I  also felt  that  if  I did not ask,  the
emissary would not tell  me. "What's  the third kind of inorganic  being?" I
said. The emissary coughed and chuckled. To me, it sounded  like it relished
being  asked. "Oh, that's our most mysterious feature," it said. "The  third
kind is revealed to our visitors only when they choose to stay with us."
     "Why is that so?" I asked.
     "Because it takes a  great deal of  energy  to see them," the  emissary
answered. "And we would have to provide that energy."
     I knew that the  emissary was telling me the truth. I also  knew that a
horrendous danger was  lurking. Yet  I was driven  by  a  curiosity  without
limits. I wanted to see that third kind.
     The  emissary  seemed to be aware  of my mood. "Would  you like  to see
them?" it asked casually. "Most certainly," I said.
     "All you have to do is to say out loud that you want  to stay with us,"
the emissary said  with a nonchalant  intonation. "But if I say that, I have
to stay,  right?" I  asked. "Naturally,"  the  emissary  said in a  tone  of
ultimate conviction. "Everything  you  say out  loud  in  this  world is for
keeps."
     I could  not help thinking that, if the emissary had wanted to trick me
into staying, all it  had  to  do was lie to me. I would not have  known the
difference.
     "I cannot lie to you, because a lie doesn't exist,"  the emissary said,
intruding into my thoughts. "I can  tell you  only about what  exists. In my
world, only intent exists; a lie has no intent  behind it; therefore, it has
no existence."
     I wanted to  argue that there  is intent even behind lies, but before I
could  voice  my argument,  the  emissary  said  that behind  lies  there is
intention but that intention is not intent.
     I  could  not keep my  dreaming  attention focused  on the argument the
emissary was posing. It went to  the shadow beings. Suddenly, I noticed that
they  had  the  appearance  of a herd  of  strange,  childlike  animals. The
emissary's voice  warned me to hold my emotions in  check, for sudden bursts
of  feelings had the capacity to make them  disperse, like a flock of birds.
"What do you want me to do?" I asked. "Come down to our side and try to push
or pull  us," the emissary's  voice urged me. "The quicker  you learn to  do
that, the quicker  you'll be able to  move  things  around in your  world by
merely looking at them."
     My merchant's  mind went berserk with  anticipation.  I  was  instantly
among them, desperately trying to push them  or pull  them. After a while, I
thoroughly exhausted my  energy. I had then the  impression that  I had been
trying to do something equivalent to lifting a house with the strength of my
teeth.
     Another impression  I  had was that the  more  I  exerted  myself,  the
greater the  number of shadows.  It was as  if they  were  coming from every
corner  to  watch me, or to  feed on me. The moment I had  that thought, the
shadows again scurried away.
     "We are  not feeding on  you," the  emissary said. "We all come to feel
your energy, very much like what you do with sunlight on a cold day."
     The emissary urged me to open up to them by canceling out my suspicious
thoughts. I heard the voice, and, as I listened to  what  it was  saying,  I
realized  that I  was hearing, feeling, and  thinking exactly  as I do in my
daily world. I slowly turned to  see  around me. Taking  the clarity  of  my
perception  as  a  gauge,  I  concluded  that  I  was in a  real world.  The
emissary's voice sounded in my ears. It said that for me the only difference
between perceiving my world and  perceiving theirs was that perceiving their
world started  and ended  in the blink of  an  eye; perceiving mine did not,
because my awareness -  together with the awareness of an  immense number of
beings like me, who held my world in place  with their intent - was fixed on
my world. The emissary added  that perceiving my world started and ended the
same way for the  inorganic beings, in the blink of an  eye, but  perceiving
their world did not, because there were immense  numbers of them holding  it
in place with their intent.
     At that instant the scene started to dissolve. I was like a  diver, and
waking up from that world was like swimming up to reach the surface.
     In  the  following session,  the emissary began its dialogue with me by
restating  that  a  totally  coordinated and  coactive relationship  existed
between  mobile shadows and  stationary  tunnels. It finished its  statement
saying, "We can't exist without each other."
     "I understand what you mean," I said. There was a touch of scorn in the
emissary's voice when it retorted that I could not possibly understand  what
it means to be related in that fashion, which was infinitely more than being
dependent. I intended  to ask the emissary to explain what it meant by that,
but the  next instant I was inside of what I  can only describe as  the very
tissue of the tunnel. I saw some grotesquely merged, glandlike protuberances
that emitted an  opaque  light. The thought  crossed my mind that those were
the  same protuberances  that had  given me  the  impression  of being  like
Braille. Considering  that  they were  energy blobs three to  four  feet  in
diameter, I began to wonder about the actual size of those tunnels.
     "Size here  is not  like size in your  world,"  the emissary said. "The
energy  of this world is  a different  kind  of energy;  its features  don't
coincide with the features of the energy of your world, yet this world is as
real as your own."
     The emissary  went  on to  say that it had told me everything about the
shadow  beings when it  described  and  explained  the  protuberances on the
tunnels' walls. I retorted that I had  heard the explanations but I  had not
paid attention to them because I believed that they did not pertain directly
to dreaming.
     "Everything  here, in this realm,  pertains directly  to dreaming," the
emissary stated.
     I  wanted to  think  about the  reason for my misjudgment, but my  mind
became  blank.  My  dreaming attention  was  waning.  I  was  having trouble
focusing it on  the world  around  me. I braced myself  for waking  up.  The
emissary started  to speak again, and the sound of its voice propped  me up.
My dreaming attention perked up considerably.
     "Dreaming is the  vehicle  that brings  dreamers  to  this  world," the
emissary said, "and  everything sorcerers  know about dreaming was taught to
them by us. Our world is connected to yours by a door called dreams. We know
how to go through that door, but men don't. They have to learn it."
     The emissary's voice went  on explaining what it had  already explained
to me before.
     "The protuberances on the tunnels' walls are shadow beings,"  it  said.
"I  am  one of them.  We  move inside the tunnels, on their  walls, charging
ourselves with the energy of the tunnels, which is our energy."
     An idle thought crossed my mind: I was really incapable of conceiving a
symbiotic relationship such as the one I was witnessing.
     "If you would stay among us, you would certainly learn to feel  what it
is like to be connected as we are connected," the emissary said.
     The emissary seemed to be waiting for my reply. I had the feeling  that
what it really wanted was for me to say that I had decided to stay.
     "How many shadow beings are in each tunnel?" I asked to change the mood
and immediately  regretted  it  because  the  emissary  began to give  me  a
detailed account  of the numbers and functions of the shadow beings  in each
tunnel.  It  said  that  each  tunnel  had  a specific  number  of dependent
entities, which performed specific functions having to do with the needs and
expectations of the supporting tunnels.
     I did not want the emissary to go into more detail. I reasoned that the
less I  knew about  the tunnel  and shadow beings  the better off I was. The
instant I formulated that thought, the emissary stopped, and my  energy body
jerked  as  if it had been pulled  by a cable. The next  moment, I was fully
awake, in my bed.
     From  then  on,  I  had  no  more fears that could  have interrupted my
practices.  Another idea  had begun to rule me: the  idea  that I had  found
unparalleled excitation. I could hardly wait every day to start dreaming and
have the scout take me to the  shadows' world. The added attraction was that
my visions of the shadows' world became even more true to life  than before.
Judged by the  subjective standards of orderly  thoughts, orderly visual and
auditory sensory input, orderly responses on my part, my experiences, for as
long as they lasted, were as real as any situation in our daily world. Never
had  I had perceptual experiences in  which  the  only difference between my
visions and my everyday world was the speed with which my visions ended. One
instant  I was in  a strange, real world, and the next  instant I  was in my
bed.
     I craved don Juan's  commentaries  and  explanations, but  I was  still
marooned in Los Angeles. The more  I considered my situation, the greater my
anxiety; I even began to sense that something in the inorganic beings' realm
was brewing at tremendous speed.
     As my anxiety grew,  my  body entered into a state of profound  fright,
although my mind was ecstatic in the contemplation of the shadows' world. To
make  things worse,  the  dreaming  emissary's voice  lapsed into  my  daily
consciousness.  One  day while I was attending a class at  the university, I
heard the voice say, over and over, that any attempt on my part  to  end  my
dreaming practices would  be deleterious to  my total  aims. It  argued that
warriors  do not shy away from a challenge and that I had no valid rationale
for  discontinuing  my  practices.  I  agreed with the  emissary.  I had  no
intention of stopping  anything, and the voice was merely reaffirming what I
felt.
     Not only did the emissary change but a new scout appeared on the scene.
On one occasion,  before I  had begun to examine  the items of  my dream,  a
scout literally jumped in front of me and aggressively captured my  dreaming
attention. The notable feature of this scout was that it did not  need to go
through any energetic metamorphosis; it was a blob of energy from the start.
In the blink of an eye, the scout transported me, without my having to voice
my intent to go with it, to another part of the inorganic beings' realm: the
world of the saber-toothed tigers.
     I have  described  in my other works glimpses of those  visions. I  say
glimpses  because  I  did  not  have sufficient energy then to  render these
perceived worlds comprehensible to my linear mind.
     My nightly visions of the saber-toothed tigers occurred regularly for a
long time, until  one night when the aggressive scout that had  taken me for
the first time to that realm suddenly appeared again. Without waiting for my
consent, it took me to the tunnels.
     I heard the emissary's voice. It immediately went into the  longest and
most  poignant  sales  pitch I  had  heard  so far.  It  told me  about  the
extraordinary advantages  of  the  inorganic  beings'  world.  It  spoke  of
acquiring  knowledge  that  would  definitely  stagger  the mind  and  about
acquiring it by the simplest act, of staying  in those marvelous tunnels. It
spoke of incredible  mobility, of endless  time  to  find things, and, above
all, of being pampered by cosmic  servants that would cater to my  slightest
whims.
     "Aware beings from the most  unbelievable  corners  of the cosmos  stay
with us," the emissary said, ending its talk. "And they love their stay with
us. In fact, no one wants to leave."
     The thought that crossed my mind at that moment was that  servitude was
definitely antithetical to me.  I had  never  been at ease with servants  or
with being served.
     The scout took over and made  me glide through many tunnels. It came to
a  halt in a tunnel that seemed somehow larger  than the others. My dreaming
attention became  riveted on die size and configuration of  that tunnel, and
it would have  stayed  glued there had I not  been  made to  turn around. My
dreaming attention  focused  then on a blob  of energy a bit bigger than the
shadow  entities. It  was blue,  like the blue in  the center of a  candle's
flame.  I  knew that  this energy configuration was  not a shadow entity and
that it did not belong there.
     I became  absorbed in sensing  it. The scout signaled  me to leave, but
something was making me impervious  to its cues. I remained, uneasily, where
I  was. However,  the  scout's signaling broke my concentration,  and I lost
sight of the blue shape.
     Suddenly, a considerable force made me  spin around and put me squarely
in front of the blue shape. As I gazed at it, it turned into the figure of a
person: very small,  slender,  delicate,  almost  transparent. I desperately
attempted to  determine  whether it was  a  man or a  woman, but, hard as  I
tried, I could not.
     My attempts  to ask the emissary failed.  It flew away quite  abruptly,
leaving me suspended  in that tunnel,  facing now an unknown person. I tried
to talk to that person the  way I talked to the emissary. I got no response.
I  felt a wave  of  frustration at not being able to break the  barrier that
separated us. Then  I  was besieged by the fear of being  alone with someone
who might have been an enemy.
     I  had  a  variety of  reactions  triggered by  the  presence  of  that
stranger.  I even felt elation, because  I knew that the scout  had  finally
shown me another human being caught in that  world. I only despaired at  the
possibility that  we  were  not able  to  communicate  perhaps  because that
stranger was  one of  the  sorcerers of  antiquity  and belonged  to  a time
different from mine.
     The more  intense my elation and curiosity, the heavier I became, until
a moment  in which I  was so massive that I was back in my body, and back in
the world.  I found myself in Los Angeles, in a  park  by the  University of
California. I was standing on the grass, right in the line of people playing
golf.
     The person in front of me had solidified at the same rate. We stared at
each other for a fleeting instant. It was a girl, perhaps six or seven years
old. I thought I  knew her. On seeing her, my elation  and curiosity grew so
out of proportion  that they triggered  a reversal. I lost mass so fast that
in another instant I  was again a blob of  energy  in  the inorganic beings'
realm. The scout came back for me and hurriedly pulled me away.
     I woke up with a  jolt of  fright. In the process of surfacing into the
daily world, something had let a  message slip through. My mind went  into a
frenzy  trying to put together  what I knew or thought I knew. I spent  more
than forty-eight continuous hours attempting to get at a hidden feeling or a
hidden knowledge that had gotten stuck to  me. The only success I had was to
sense a force - I fancied it to be outside my mind or my body - that told me
not to trust my dreaming anymore.
     After a few days,  a dark and mysterious certainty began to get hold of
me,  a  certainty  that grew  by degrees  until I  had no  doubt  about  its
authenticity: I was sure that the blue blob  of energy was a prisoner in the
inorganic beings' realm.
     I needed  don Juan's  advice more desperately than ever. I knew that  I
was throwing years of work out the window, but I couldn't help it; I dropped
everything I was doing and ran to Mexico.
     "What do you really  want?" don Juan asked  me as a way  to  contain my
hysterical babbling.
     I could not  explain to him what  I wanted  because I did not  know  it
myself.
     "Your problem must be very serious to make you run like this," don Juan
said with a pensive expression.
     "It is, in spite of the fact that  I can't  figure out what my  problem
really is," I said.
     He  asked me  to describe my  dreaming practices in all the detail that
was pertinent. I told him about my vision of  the little girl and how it had
affected me  at  an  emotional level. He instantly advised me to  ignore the
event and regard  it  as  a  blatant attempt,  on the  part of the inorganic
beings,  to  cater  to  my  fantasies.  He  remarked  that  if  dreaming  is
overemphasized, it becomes  what it was  for the old  sorcerers: a source of
inexhaustible indulging.
     For some inexplicable reason,  I  was unwilling  to tell don Juan about
the realm of the shadow entities. It was only when he discarded my vision of
the little  girl that  I felt obliged to describe  to him my visits to  that
world. He was silent for a long time, as if he were overwhelmed.
     When he  finally spoke, he said, "You are more  alone  than I  thought,
because I can't  discuss  your  dreaming  practices at all.  You are at  the
position  of  the old sorcerers. All I can do is  to repeat to you that  you
must exercise all the care you arc able to muster up."
     "Why do you say that I am at the position of the old sorcerers?"
     "I've  told you repeatedly that your  mood  is dangerously like the old
sorcerers'. They were very capable beings; their flaw was that  they took to
the inorganic beings' realm like fish take to the water. You are in the same
boat. You  know things  about  it  that none of us can  even  conceive.  For
instance,  I  never knew  about  the shadows' world;  neither did the nagual
Julian  or the nagual Elias,  in spite of the fact that he spent a long time
in the world of the inorganic beings."
     "But what difference does knowing the shadows' world make?"
     "A  great deal of  difference.  Dreamers are taken  there only when the
inorganic beings are sure the  dreamers are going to stay in that world.  We
know this through the old sorcerers' stories."
     "I assure you, don Juan, that I have no intention whatsoever of staying
there. You talk as if  I am just about to be lured by promises of service or
promises of power. I am not interested in either, and that's that."
     "At  this level,  it isn't that easy anymore. You've  gone  beyond  the
point  where you could simply quit. Besides, you had the misfortune of being
singled out by  a watery inorganic being.  Remember how you tumbled with it?
And how it felt? I told you then that  watery inorganic beings  are the most
annoying. They are dependent and possessive, and once they sink their hooks,
they never give up."
     "And what does that mean in my case, don Juan?"
     "It means real trouble. The specific inorganic being who's running  the
show is the  one  you grabbed that fatal  day. Over the years, it  has grown
familiar with you. It knows you intimately."
     I sincerely  remarked to don Juan that the mere idea that  an inorganic
being knew me intimately made me sick to my stomach.
     "When dreamers realize that  the inorganic beings  have no appeal,"  he
said, "it is usually too late for them, because by then the inorganic beings
have them in the bag."
     I  felt  in the  depths  of me  that he was talking  abstractly,  about
dangers that might exist theoretically but not in practice.  I  was secretly
convinced there was no danger of any sort.
     "I am not going to allow the inorganic beings to lure me in any way, if
that's what you're thinking," I said.
     "I am thinking that  they are going to trick you," he said.  "Like they
tricked the nagual Rosendo.  They are going to set you up, and you won't see
the trap  or even suspect it. They  are smooth operators. Now they have even
invented a little girl."
     "But there is  no  doubt  in my  mind that  the  little girl exists," I
insisted.
     "There is no little girl," he snapped. "That bluish blob of energy is a
scout. An explorer caught  in the inorganic beings' realm.  I've said to you
that  the  inorganic beings  are  like  fishermen;  they  attract and  catch
awareness."
     Don Juan  said that he believed, without  a doubt, that the bluish blob
of energy was from a  dimension entirely  different  from ours, a scout that
got stranded and caught like a fly in a spider's web.
     I  did not  appreciate his  analogy.  It  worried  me to the  point  of
physical discomfort. I did mention this to don Juan, and  he told me that my
concern  with the prisoner scout was making him feel  very close to despair.
"Why does this bother you?" I asked.
     "Something is brewing in  that confounded world," he said. "And I can't
figure out what it is."
     While I remained with don Juan and his  companions, I  did not dream at
all about the inorganic beings' world. As usual, my practice was to focus my
dreaming attention on the items of  my dreams and to change dreams. As a way
to offset  my  concerns, don Juan made  me  gaze at  clouds  and  at faraway
mountain peaks. The result was an immediate feeling  of being level with the
clouds, or the feeling that I was actually at the faraway mountain peaks.
     "I am very pleased, but very worried," don Juan said as a comment on my
effort.  "You are  being taught marvels, and you don't  even  know it. And I
don't mean that you are being taught by me."
     "You are talking about the inorganic beings, true?"
     "Yes,  the  inorganic  beings.  I  recommend  that  you don't  gaze  at
anything; gazing was the old sorcerers' technique. They were  able to get to
their energy bodies  in the blink of an eye, simply by gazing at objects  of
their  predilection.  A very impressive  technique,  but  useless  to modern
sorcerers.  It does nothing to increase our sobriety or our capacity to seek
freedom. All  it does is  pin us down  to  concreteness, a most  undesirable
state."
     Don Juan  added that, unless I kept myself in  check, by the time I had
merged the second attention with the  attention  of my  everyday life, I was
going to be an insufferable man. There was, he said, a dangerous gap between
my mobility in the second  attention  and  my insistence on immobility in my
awareness of the daily world. He remarked that the  gap between the  two was
so  great that  in my daily state  I was nearly  an idiot, and in the second
attention I was a lunatic.
     Before I went home,  I  took  the  liberty  of  discussing  my dreaming
visions  of the  shadows' world  with Carol  Tiggs,  although don  Juan  had
advised  me not to discuss them with anybody. She was most understanding and
most interested, since she was my total counterpart. Don Juan was definitely
annoyed with  me for having revealed my troubles to her.  I  felt worse than
ever. Self-pity possessed me, and I began to complain about always doing the
wrong thing.
     "You haven't done anything yet," don Juan snapped at  me. "That much, I
know."
     Was  he right!  On my next  dreaming session,  at home, all hell  broke
loose.  I reached the shadows'  world, as I had done on countless occasions;
the difference was  the presence of  the blue energy shape. It was among the
other shadow  beings.  I felt  it  was possible that the blob had been there
before and  I  hadn't  noticed it.  As soon  as  I spotted  it, my  dreaming
attention was inescapably attracted to that blob  of energy. In a matter  of
seconds,  I was next  to  it. The other shadows came to me,  as usual, but I
paid no attention to them.
     All of a sudden, the blue, round  shape turned  into the little girl  I
had seen before. She  craned  her thin, delicate, long neck to one side  and
said in a barely  audible  whisper, "Help  me!"  Either  she said that  or I
fantasized  that  she said  it. The  result  was  the same: I  stood frozen,
galvanized by  genuine concern. I experienced a chill,  but not in my energy
mass. I felt a chill in another part of me. This  was the first  time  I was
completely  aware  that  my  experience  was  thoroughly  separate  from  my
sensorial feelings.  I  was  experiencing  the shadows' world,  with all the
implications of what I normally  consider experiencing: I was able to think,
to assess,  to make  decisions;  I  had  psychological continuity; in  other
words, I was myself. The  only  part of me that was missing was my sensorial
self. I  had  no bodily  sensations.  All  my input came through  seeing and
hearing.  My  rationality  then  considered a  strange  dilemma:  seeing and
hearing  were not  physical faculties  but  qualities of the  visions  I was
having.
     "You  are  really  seeing  and  hearing,"  the  emissary's voice  said,
erupting  into my  thoughts.  "That  is the  beauty  of this  place. You can
experience everything through seeing and hearing, without having to breathe.
Think of it! You don't have to breathe! You can go anywhere in the  universe
and not breathe."
     A most disquieting ripple of emotion went through me, and, again, I did
not  feel  it there,  in the shadows'  world. I felt it in  another place. I
became enormously agitated by the obvious yet veiled realization  that there
was a live connection between the me  that was  experiencing and a source of
energy, a source of sensorial feeling located somewhere else. It occurred to
me that this somewhere else was my actual physical body, which was asleep in
my bed.
     At  the instant of this thought, the shadow beings  scurried away,  and
the  little girl  was alone in  my field of vision. I watched her and became
convinced  that I  knew  her. She seemed to falter as  if she were about  to
faint. A boundless wave of affection for her enveloped me.
     I tried to speak to her,  but  I was incapable  of uttering sounds.  It
became clear  to me then  that all my dialogues with the  emissary  had been
elicited and accomplished by the emissary's  energy. Left to my own devices,
I was  helpless. I attempted next to direct my thoughts  to the little girl.
It  was useless.  We were  separated  by  a  membrane  of energy I could not
pierce.
     The   little  girl  seemed  to  understand  my  despair   and  actually
communicated with  me, directly into my  thoughts. She told me, essentially,
what don Juan had already said: that she was a scout  caught in the webs  of
that world. Then she added  that she had adopted the shape of a  little girl
because that shape was familiar to me and to her and that she needed my help
as much  as I needed hers.  She said this to  me in one clump  of  energetic
feeling,  which  was  like  words that  came  to  me all at  once. I  had no
difficulty understanding her, although this  was  the first time anything of
the sort had happened to me.
     I  did not know what to do.  I tried to convey to  her  my sensation of
incapacity. She  seemed to comprehend me instantly. She silently appealed to
me with a  burning look. She even smiled  as if to let me know  that she had
left  it up  to me to extricate  her from her bonds. When  I retorted, in  a
thought, that I had no abilities whatsoever, she gave me the impression of a
hysterical child in the throes of despair.
     I frantically tried to talk  to her.  The little  girl  actually cried,
like  a child  her age  would  cry, out  of desperation and fear. I couldn't
stand  it. I charged at her,  but with no effective  result.  My energy mass
went through her. My idea was to lift her up and take her with me.
     I attempted the same maneuver over and  over until  I  was exhausted. I
stopped to consider my next  move. I was  afraid that my dreaming  attention
was going to wane, and then  I  would lose sight of her. I doubted that  the
inorganic beings would bring  me back to  that specific part of their realm.
It seemed to me that this was  going to be my last visit to them: the  visit
that counted.
     Then  I  did  something  unthinkable.  Before  my  dreaming   attention
vanished,  I  yelled  loud and clear my intent  to merge my energy  with the
energy of that prisoner scout and set it free.


        7. THE BLUE SCOUT

     I was  dreaming  an  utterly nonsensical  dream. Carol Tiggs  was by my
side. She was speaking to me, although I could not understand what she said.
Don Juan  was also in  my dream, as  were all the members of his party. They
seemed to be trying to drag me out of a foggy, yellowish world.
     After a serious effort, during  which I lost and regained sight of them
various times,  they  succeeded in extricating  me from  that place. Since I
could not conceive the sense of all that endeavor, I  finally figured that I
was having a normal, incoherent dream.
     My surprise was staggering when I  woke up and found myself in bed,  in
don Juan's house. I was incapable of moving. I had  no energy at  all. I did
not know  what  to think,  although  I immediately  sensed the gravity of my
situation. I had the vague feeling  that  I  had lost  my energy because  of
fatigue caused by dreaming.
     Don Juan's  companions  seemed to be extremely affected by whatever was
happening  to me. They kept  on coming into my  room, one  at  a  time. Each
stayed for a moment, in  complete silence,  until someone else showed up. It
appeared to me that they were taking turns watching over  me. I was too weak
to ask them to explain their behavior.
     During the subsequent days, I began to feel better, and they started to
talk to me about my dreaming. At first,  I did not know what  they wanted of
me.  Then it  dawned  on  me,  because of their  questions,  that  they were
obsessed with the shadow beings. Every one of them appeared to be scared and
said to me more or less  the same  thing. They insisted that they had  never
been in the shadows' world. Some of them even claimed that they did not know
it  existed. Their claims  and reactions  increased my sense of bewilderment
and my fear.
     The  questions  everyone asked were, "Who took you into  that world? Or
how did  you even begin to know how to get there?" When I told them that the
scouts had  shown me that world, they could  not believe me. Obviously, they
had surmised that  I had been there, but since it was not possible for  them
to use their personal experience as a reference point,  they were unable  to
fathom  what I was saying.  Yet they still wanted to  know all  I could tell
them about the shadow beings and their realm.  I obliged them. All  of them,
with the exception of don Juan, sat by my bed, hanging on every word I said.
However, every  time I asked them about my situation,  they  scurried  away,
just like the shadow beings.
     Another disturbing reaction, which they never had before, was that they
frantically avoided any physical contact with me. They kept their  distance,
as if  I were carrying the plague. Their reaction worried me  so much that I
felt obliged to ask them about it. They denied it. They seemed  insulted and
even went so far as to insist  on proving to me that  I was wrong. I laughed
heartily  at the tense situation that ensued. Their  bodies went rigid every
time they tried to embrace me.
     Florinda  Grau, don Juan's closest  cohort,  was the only member of his
party who lavished physical attention on me and tried  to explain to me what
was  going  on. She told  me that  I had been  discharged of energy  in  the
inorganic beings' world and charged again, but  that my new energetic charge
was a bit disturbing to the majority of them.
     Florinda used  to put  me to bed every night, as  if I were an invalid.
She even spoke to  me in baby talk, which all  of them celebrated with gales
of laughter. But regardless of how she made  fun  of me,  I appreciated  her
concern, which seemed to be real.
     I have written about Florinda before in connection with my meeting her.
She was by far the most beautiful woman  I had ever met. Once I said to her,
and I really meant  it, that she could  have been  a fashion magazine model.
"Of a magazine of nineteen ten," she retorted.
     Florinda, although  she was old, was not old  at all. She was young and
vibrant. When I asked don  Juan  about her unusual  youthfulness, he replied
that sorcery kept her in  a vital state. Sorcerers' energy, he remarked, was
seen by the eye as youth and vigor.
     After satisfying  their initial curiosity about the shadows' world, don
Juan's  companions  stopped  coming into  my room,  and  their  conversation
remained  at the  level  of casual inquiries about  my health. Every time  I
tried to get up, however, there was someone around who gently put me back to
bed. I did not want their ministrations, yet it seemed that I needed them; I
was weak. I accepted that.  But  what  really took  its  toll on me was  not
having anyone explain to me what I was  doing  in Mexico when I  had gone to
bed to dream in Los Angeles. I asked them repeatedly. Every one of them gave
me the same answer, "Ask the nagual. He's the only one who can explain it.
     Finally,  Florinda  broke  the ice. "You were lured into a trap; that's
what happened to you," she said.
     "Where was I lured into a trap?"
     "In the world of the inorganic beings, of  course.  That  has been  the
world you've been dealing with for years. Isn't that so?"
     "Most definitely, Florinda. But can you  tell me about the kind of trap
it was?"
     "Not really. All I can tell you is that you lost all your energy there.
But you fought very well."
     "Why am I sick, Florinda?"
     "You  are not sick with an illness; you were energetically wounded. You
were critical, but now you are only gravely wounded."
     "How did all this happen?"
     "You entered into  a mortal combat  with the inorganic  beings, and you
were defeated."
     "I don't remember fighting anyone, Florinda."
     "Whether  you  remember  or  not  is  immaterial. You  fought  and were
outclassed. You didn't have a chance against those masterful manipulators."
     "I fought the inorganic beings?"
     "Yes. You had a mortal encounter with them. I really don't know how you
have survived their death blow."
     She refused  to tell  me anything  else and hinted that the  nagual was
coming to see me any day.
     The next day don Juan showed up. He was very jovial and  supportive. He
jokingly announced that he was  paying me a  visit in his capacity of energy
doctor. He  examined me by gazing at me from head  to  toe.  "You're  almost
cured," he concluded.
     "What happened to me, don Juan?" I asked.
     "You fell into a trap the inorganic beings set for you," he answered.
     "How did I end up here?"
     "Right  there  is  the big  mystery,  for  sure,"  he said  and  smiled
jovially, obviously trying to make light of a serious matter. "The inorganic
beings snatched  you,  body and all. First they took your energy  body  into
their realm, when  you followed one of their scouts, and then they took your
physical body."
     Don Juan's companions seemed  to be in a state of  shock.  One of  them
asked don  Juan whether the  inorganic beings could abduct anyone.  Don Juan
answered that they certainly could. He  reminded them that the  nagual Elias
was taken into that universe, and he definitely did not intend to go there.
     All of them assented with  a nod. Don Juan  continued speaking to them,
referring to me in the third person.  He said that the combined awareness of
a group of inorganic  beings had first consumed my energy body by forcing an
emotional  outburst  from  me:  to  free the blue scout. Then  the  combined
awareness of the same group of inorganic beings had pulled my inert physical
mass into their  world.  Don Juan added that without the energy body one  is
merely a lump of organic matter that can be easily manipulated by awareness.
     "The inorganic beings are glued together,  like the cells of the body,"
don  Juan  went  on.  "When  they put  their  awareness  together, they  are
unbeatable. It's nothing for  them to yank us out of our moorings and plunge
us into  their  world.  Especially  if we  make  ourselves  conspicuous  and
available, like he did."
     Their sighs  and gasps echoed against the walls. All of them  seemed to
be genuinely frightened and concerned.
     I wanted to  whine  and  blame don  Juan  for  not  stopping  me, but I
remembered how he had  tried to warn me, to deviate me, time and time again,
to no  avail. Don Juan was definitely aware of what was going on in my mind.
He gave a knowing smile.
     "The  reason you think you're  sick," he said,  addressing me, "is that
the inorganic beings discharged your energy and gave you theirs. That should
have  been enough to  kill anyone. As  the  nagual, you have  extra  energy;
therefore, you barely survived."
     I mentioned to don Juan that I remembered  bits  and pieces of quite an
incoherent dream, in  which I was in a yellow-fogged world. He, Carol Tiggs,
and his companions were pulling me out.
     "The  inorganic beings' realm looks like  a  yellow- fog  world to  the
physical  eye,"  he  said. "When you thought you were  having  an incoherent
dream, you  were actually looking  with  your physical eyes, for  the  first
time, at the inorganic beings' universe. And, strange as it may seem to you,
it was also  the first  time  for us. We  knew about  the fog  only  through
sorcerers' stories, not through experience."
     Nothing of  what  he was saying made  sense to me.  Don Juan assured me
that,  because  of  my  lack  of  energy,  a more complete  explanation  was
impossible; I had to be satisfied, he said, with what he  was telling me and
how I  understood it. "I  don't understand it at all," I insisted. "Then you
haven't lost anything," he said. "When  you get stronger, you  yourself will
answer your questions."
     I confessed to don Juan that  I was having hot flashes.  My temperature
rose  suddenly, and,  while I felt hot and sweaty,  I  had extraordinary but
disturbing insights into my situation.
     Don Juan scanned my entire body with his penetrating gaze. He said that
I was in a  state of energetic shock. Losing energy had temporarily affected
me, and what I interpreted as hot flashes were, in essence, blasts of energy
during  which  I  momentarily  regained control  of my energy body and  knew
everything that had happened to me.
     "Make  an  effort, and  tell me  yourself what happened to  you in  the
inorganic beings' world," he ordered me. I told him that the clear sensation
I got, from time to time, was that he and his companions  had gone into that
world with their physical  bodies and had snatched  me out  of the inorganic
beings' clutches.
     "Right!"  he exclaimed.  "You're doing  fine.  Now, turn that sensation
into a view of what happened."
     I  was  unable to do what he wanted, hard  as I tried. Failing made  me
experience an unusual fatigue, which seemed to dry up the inside of my body.
Before don Juan left the room,  I remarked  to him that I was suffering from
anxiety.
     "That means nothing," he said, unconcerned. "Gain back your energy, and
don't worry about nonsense."
     More than  two  weeks went by, during  which  I  slowly gained  back my
energy. However, I kept on worrying about everything. I worried mainly about
being unknown to myself, especially  about a streak of coldness in me that I
had not  noticed before,  a sort  of indifference,  a detachment that  I had
attributed to my lack of energy until I regained it. Then I realized that it
was  a new feature of my being,  a  feature  that had me  permanently out of
synchronization. To elicit the feelings I was accustomed to, I had to summon
them up and  actually wait a moment until they made  their  appearance in my
mind.
     Another new feature of my being was a strange longing that took hold of
me from  time to time. I longed for  someone I did  not know; it was such an
overpowering and  consuming feeling that, when I experienced  it,  I had  to
move around the room incessantly to alleviate  it. The longing remained with
me until  I  made use  of another newcomer in my  life:  a  rigid control of
myself, so new and powerful that it only added more fuel to my worrying.
     By the end of the fourth week, everybody felt that I was finally cured.
They  cut down their  visits drastically.  I spent much of  the time  alone,
sleeping.  The rest  and  relaxation I was getting was  so complete  that my
energy began to increase remarkably. I felt like my old  self  again. I even
began to exercise.
     One day around noon, after a light lunch, I returned to my room to take
a nap. Just before I sank into a deep sleep, I was tossing in my bed, trying
to find a  more comfortable spot, when a strange pressure on my temples made
me open my eyes. The little girl of the inorganic beings' world was standing
by the foot of my bed, peering at me with her cold, steel blue eyes.
     I  jumped out of  bed and  screamed so loudly that three  of don Juan's
companions were  in  the room before  I had  stopped my  scream.  They  were
aghast. They watched in horror as the little girl came to me and was stopped
by the boundaries of my luminous physical being. We looked at each other for
an eternity.  She  was telling me something, which I could not comprehend at
first but which in the  next moment became as clear as a bell. She said that
for me to understand what she was saying, my awareness had to be transferred
from my physical body into my energy body.
     Don Juan came into the room at  that moment. The little  girl  and  don
Juan stared at each other. Without a word, don Juan turned around and walked
out of  the  room.  The little  girl  swished  past the door after him.  The
commotion this scene created among don Juan's  companions was indescribable.
They lost all their composure. Apparently, all of them  had seen  the little
girl as she left the room with the nagual.
     I myself seemed to  be on the verge of exploding. I felt  faint and had
to sit down. I had experienced the presence of the little girl as  a blow on
my solar  plexus. She bore an astonishing likeness  to my  father.  Waves of
sentiment hit  me. I wondered about the meaning of this until I was actually
sick.
     When don Juan returned to the room, I had gained  minimal control  over
myself. The expectation of hearing what he had to  say about the little girl
was making my breathing very difficult. Everybody was as  excited as I  was.
They all talked to don Juan at once and laughed when they realized what they
were  doing.  Their main interest was  to  find  out whether there  was  any
uniformity in the way  they  had perceived the scout's appearance. Everybody
was in agreement that they had seen  a little  girl, six to seven years old,
very thin, with angular, beautiful features. They also  agreed that her eyes
were  steel  blue and burning  with  a  mute emotion;  her eyes, they  said,
expressed gratitude and loyalty.
     Every  detail they  described  about  the  little girl  I  corroborated
myself. Her  eyes were so  bright  and overpowering that they  had  actually
caused me  something like pain.  I  had  felt the  weight  of her look on my
chest.
     A  serious query, which  don  Juan's companions had and which  I echoed
myself, was about  the implications of this event. All agreed that the scout
was  a  portion  of foreign  energy  that had  filtered  through  the  walls
separating the second attention and the attention of  the daily  world. They
asserted that since they were not dreaming and yet  all of them had seen the
alien  energy projected  into  the figure of  a human child; that child  had
existence.
     They  argued  that there must have  been hundreds, if not thousands, of
cases in  which foreign energy slips unnoticed through natural barriers into
our human  world, but  that in  the history of their  lineage there  was  no
mention  whatsoever of an event of  this nature. What worried them  the most
was that there were no sorcerers' stories about it.
     "Is  this the first  time  in  the  history  of  mankind that  this has
happened?" one of them asked don Juan.
     "I  think  it  happens  all the  time,"  he replied, "but it  has never
happened in such an overt, volitional way."
     "What does it mean to us?" another one of them asked don Juan.
     "Nothing to us, but everything to him," he said and pointed at me.
     All of them then entered into a most disturbing silence. Don Juan paced
back and forth for a moment.  Then  he stopped in front of  me and peered at
me, giving all the indications of  someone who cannot find  words to express
an overwhelming realization.
     "I can't even begin to assess the scope of what you've done,"  don Juan
finally said to me in a tone of bewilderment. "You fell into  a pitfall, but
it  wasn't the  kind  of  pitfall I was  worrying  about.  Your pitfall  was
designed  for you alone,  and  it was deadlier than anything  I  could  have
thought of. I worried about  your falling prey to flattery and being served.
What I never  counted on  was that the shadow beings would set a trap  using
your inherent aversion to chains."
     Don Juan  had once made a comparison  of his reaction and mine,  in the
sorcerers' world, to the things that  pressed us the most.  He said, without
making it sound  like a  complaint, that although he wanted and tried to, he
had never been able to inspire the kind of affection his teacher, the nagual
Julian, inspired in people.
     "My  unbiased reaction, which I  am  putting  on the table  for  you to
examine, is to be able to say, and mean  it: it's not my fate to evoke blind
and total affection. So be it!"
     "Your unbiased reaction," he went on, "is that you can't  stand chains,
and you would forfeit your life to break them."
     I sincerely disagreed with him and told him that he  was  exaggerating.
My views were not that clear.
     "Don't worry,"  he  said laughing,  "sorcery is action. When  the  time
comes, you'll act your passion the same way I act mine. Mine is to acquiesce
to  my fate, not  passively,  like an idiot,  but actively, like a  warrior.
Yours  is to jump  without  either  capriciousness or  premeditation to  cut
someone else's chains."
     Don  Juan  explained that upon merging my energy with  the  scout I had
truthfully  ceased to  exist. All my physicalness had then been  transported
into the  inorganic beings' realm and, had  it  not been for the  scout  who
guided don Juan and  his companions  to where  I was, I  would  have died or
remained in that world, inextricably lost.
     "Why  did the scout guide you to where I was?" I asked. "The scout is a
sentient being  from another  dimension," he said. "It's  a little girl now,
and  as such she told me that in order to get  the necessary energy to break
the barrier that had trapped her in the inorganic beings' world, she  had to
take all of yours. That's her human part now. Something resembling gratitude
drove her to me. When I saw her, I knew instantly that you were done for."
     "What did you do then, don Juan?"
     "I rounded up everyone I could get hold of, especially Carol Tiggs, and
off we went into the inorganic beings' realm."
     "Why Carol Tiggs?"
     "In the first place, because she has endless energy, and, in the second
place, because she had to familiarize herself with the scout. All  of us got
something invaluable out  of this experience.  You and  Carol Tiggs  got the
scout. And the rest of us got a reason to round up our physicality and place
it on our energy bodies; we became energy."
     "How did all of you do that, don Juan?"
     "We displaced our  assemblage points,  in unison. Our impeccable intent
to save you did the work.  The scout took  us,  in the blink of  an  eye, to
where you were lying, half dead, and Carol dragged you out."
     His explanation made no sense to me.  Don Juan laughed when I  tried to
raise that point.
     "How can you understand this when  you don't even have enough energy to
get out of your bed?" he retorted.
     I confided  to him that I was certain  I knew infinitely  more  than  I
rationally admitted but that something was keeping a tight lid on my memory.
     "Lack of energy  is what has  put a tight lid on your memory," he said.
"When you have sufficient energy, your memory will work fine."
     "Do you mean that I can remember everything if I want to?"
     "Not quite. You may  want as much as you like, but if your energy level
is not on a par with the importance of what you know, you might as well kiss
your knowledge good-bye: it'll never be available to you."
     "So what's the thing to do, don Juan?"
     "Energy  tends  to  be  cumulative;  if you  follow  the  warrior's way
impeccably, a moment will come when your memory opens up."
     I confessed that hearing  him talk gave me the  absurd sensation that I
was indulging in feeling sorry for myself, that there was nothing wrong with
me.
     "You are not just indulging," he said. "You were actually energetically
dead  four weeks ago. Now you  are merely stunned. Being stunned and lacking
energy is what makes  you hide your  knowledge. You certainly know more than
any of  us about the inorganic beings' world.  That world was the  exclusive
concern  of the old  sorcerers.  All of us  have told  you that only through
sorcerers' stories do we know about it. I sincerely say that it is more than
strange to me  that  you've become,  in  your  own right,  another source of
sorcerers' stories for us."
     I  reiterated that  it  was impossible  for  me to  believe I had  done
something he  had not.  But I could not believe  either  that  he was merely
humoring me.
     "I am not flattering  or humoring you," he said, visibly annoyed. "I am
stating  a sorcery fact.  Knowing  more  than  any of  us  about that  world
shouldn't  be a  reason for feeling pleased.  There's no  advantage  in that
knowledge; in fact, in spite of all you know, you couldn't save yourself. We
saved you, because we found you. But without the aid of the scout, there was
no point in  even trying  to find you. You were  so infinitely lost in  that
world that I shudder at the mere thought."
     In my  state of mind,  I did not  find  it strange in the least  that I
actually  saw a ripple of emotion going through all of don Juan's companions
and apprentices.  The only one who  remained unaltered was Carol Tiggs.  She
seemed to have fully accepted her role. She was one with me.
     "You did free  the scout,"  don  Juan continued, "but you gave up  your
life. Or, worse yet, you gave up your freedom. The inorganic beings let  the
scout go, in exchange for you."
     "I  can  hardly believe  that, don  Juan.  Not that  I  doubt you,  you
understand, but  you  describe  such  an  underhanded  maneuver  that  I  am
stunned."
     "Don't  consider  it underhanded  and  you have the  whole thing  in  a
nutshell.  The inorganic  beings  are forever  in  search of  awareness  and
energy;  if you supply them with  the possibility of both, what do you think
they'll do? Blow you kisses from across the street?"
     I  knew  that don  Juan  was  right.  However,  I  could not hold  that
certainty for too long; clarity kept drifting away from me.
     Don Juan's  companions continued asking him questions.  They wanted  to
know if he had given any thought to what to do with the scout.
     "Yes, I  have. It is a most  serious problem, which the nagual here has
to resolve," he said, pointing at  me. "He and Carol Tiggs are the only ones
who can free the scout. And he knows it too."
     Naturally, I asked him the only possible question, "How can I free it?"
     "Instead of my  telling  you how, there is a much  better and more just
way of finding out," don Juan said with a big smile. "Ask  the emissary. The
inorganic beings cannot lie, you know."


        8. The third gate of dreaming

     "The  third gate of dreaming is  reached when  you  find  yourself in a
dream, staring at someone else who  is  asleep. And that someone else  turns
out to be you," don Juan said.
     My energy level was so  keyed up at the time that I went to work on the
third  task right away, although he did not offer any more information about
it. The first thing I noticed, in my dreaming practices, was that a surge of
energy immediately rearranged the focus of my dreaming attention. Its  focus
was now on waking  up in  a dream and seeing  myself sleeping; journeying to
the realm of inorganic beings was no longer an issue for me.
     Very soon after, I found myself in a dream looking at  myself asleep. I
immediately reported it to don Juan. The  dream had happened while I  was at
his house.
     "There are two phases to each of  the gates of dreaming," he said. "The
first, as  you know, is to arrive at the gate; the second is to cross it. By
dreaming what you've dreamt,  that you saw  yourself asleep, you  arrived at
the third gate. The second phase is to move around once you've seen yourself
asleep.
     "At the third gate of dreaming," he went on, "you begin to deliberately
merge your dreaming reality with the reality of the daily world. This is the
drill, and sorcerers call it completing the  energy body.  The merge between
the two realities has to be so thorough that you need to be more fluid  than
ever. Examine everything at the third gate with great care and curiosity."
     I complained that his  recommendations  were too  cryptic  and were not
making  any  sense to me. "What do you mean by great care and  curiosity?" I
asked. "Our  tendency at  the  third gate  is to get  lost  in  detail,"  he
replied. "To view things with great  care and curiosity means to resist  the
nearly irresistible temptation to plunge into detail.
     "The given  drill, at the third gate, as I said, is to consolidate  the
energy body. Dreamers begin forging the energy body by fulfilling the drills
of the first  and second gates. When they reach the third  gate,  the energy
body is ready to come out, or perhaps it would be better  to say that it  is
ready  to  act.  Unfortunately,  this  also means  that  it's  ready  to  be
mesmerized by detail."
     "What does it mean to be mesmerized by detail?"
     "The energy  body  is  like a child who's been imprisoned all its life.
The  moment  it is  free,  it soaks up  everything it can  find, and I  mean
everything.  Every  irrelevant,  minute  detail totally absorbs  the  energy
body."
     An  awkward  silence  followed. I  had no  idea  what  to  say.  I  had
understood him perfectly,  I just didn't have anything in  my  experience to
give me an idea of exactly what it all meant.
     "The most asinine detail becomes a world for the energy body," don Juan
explained. "The effort that dreamers have to make to  direct the energy body
is staggering. I know that it sounds awkward to tell you to view things with
care and curiosity, but that is the best way to describe what you should do.
At  the third gate, dreamers have  to avoid a nearly irresistible impulse to
plunge into everything,  and they avoid it by being so curious, so desperate
to  get  into everything that  they don't  let any particular thing imprison
them."
     Don Juan  added that his recommendations, which he  knew sounded absurd
to  the  mind, were directly aimed at my  energy body.  He stressed over and
over that my energy body had to unite all its resources in order to act.
     "But hasn't my energy body been acting all along?" I asked.
     "Part of it has, otherwise you wouldn't have journeyed to the inorganic
beings' realm,"  he replied. "Now your entire energy body has  to be engaged
to perform the drill of the third gate. Therefore, to make things easier for
your energy body, you must hold back your rationality."
     "I am afraid you are barking up the wrong tree," I said. "There is very
little rationality left in me  after all the experiences you've brought into
my life."
     "Don't say anything. At the third gate, rationality is  responsible for
the  insistence  of our  energy  bodies  on being obsessed with  superfluous
detail. At  the  third gate,  then, we need irrational fluidity,  irrational
abandon to counteract that insistence."
     Don  Juan's statement that each gate is an obstacle could not have been
more truthful. I labored to fulfill  the drill of the third gate of dreaming
more intensely  than I  had on the  other two tasks combined.  Don Juan  put
tremendous pressure on  me.  Besides,  something else had  been added to  my
life: a true sense of fear.  I had been normally and even excessively afraid
of one thing or another throughout my life, but there had been nothing in my
experience  comparable  to the fear I felt after my  bout with the inorganic
beings. Yet  all  this wealth of  experience  was  inaccessible to my normal
memory. Only in the presence of don Juan were those memories at my disposal.
     I asked  him about this  strange  situation once  when we  were  at the
National  Museum  of  Anthropology  and History  in Mexico  City.  What  had
prompted  my  question was that, at  the  moment, I had the  odd ability  to
remember everything that had  happened to me in the course of my association
with don Juan. And that  made me feel  so  free, so  daring and light-footed
that I was practically dancing around.
     "It just happens that the presence of the nagual induces a shift of the
assemblage point," he said.
     He guided me then into one of the display rooms of the museum  and said
that my question was apropos to what he had been planning to tell me.
     "My intention was to explain to you that the position of the assemblage
point is like a  vault  where sorcerers keep their records," he said. "I was
tickled pink when your energy body felt my intent and you asked me about it.
The energy body knows immensities. Let me show you how much it knows."
     He instructed me to enter into total silence. He reminded me that I was
already  in  a special state of  awareness,  because my assemblage point had
been made to  shift by his  presence. He assured me that entering into total
silence  was  going to allow the sculptures  in that room to make me see and
hear inconceivable things.  He  added, apparently to  increase my confusion,
that some  of the archaeological  pieces in  that  room had  the capacity to
produce, by themselves,  a  shift of  the  assemblage  point,  and that if I
reached a  state  of total  silence  I would be  actually witnessing  scenes
pertaining to the lives of the people who made those pieces.
     He then began the strangest tour of a museum I have ever taken. He went
around the room, describing and interpreting astounding details of every one
of the  large pieces. According  to him, every  archaeological piece in that
room was a purposeful record left by  the people of antiquity, a record that
don Juan as a sorcerer was reading to me as one would read a book.
     "Every  piece  here is designed to make the assemblage point shift," he
went on. "Fix  your  gaze  on any of them,  silence your mind, and  find out
whether or not your assemblage point can be made to shift."
     "How would I know that it has shifted?"
     "Because you would  see and  feel  things  that are  beyond your normal
reach."
     I gazed at the sculptures and saw and heard things that I would be at a
loss to explain. In the past, I had examined all  those pieces with the bias
of anthropology, always bearing in mind the descriptions of scholars  in the
field. Their descriptions of the functions of those pieces, rooted in modern
man's  cognition  of the world,  appeared to me,  for the  first time, to be
utterly prejudiced if not asinine. What don Juan said about those pieces and
what I  heard and saw myself, gazing  at them, was  the  farthest thing from
what I had always read about them.
     My discomfort was so great that I felt obliged to apologize to don Juan
for what  I thought  was my suggestibility. He did  not laugh or make fun of
me.  He patiently explained that sorcerers were  capable of leaving accurate
records of  their  findings  in  the position of the  assemblage  point.  He
maintained  that  when it  comes to  getting to  the  essence of  a  written
account,   we  have   to  use   our  sense  of  sympathetic  or  imaginative
participation  to  go  beyond  the  mere  page into  the experience  itself.
However, in the  sorcerers' world,  since there  are no written pages, total
records, which can be relived instead of read, are left  in  the position of
the assemblage point.
     To  illustrate his  argument,  don  Juan  talked about  the  sorcerers'
teachings for the  second  attention. He said that they  are  given when the
apprentice's assemblage  point is  on a place other than the normal one. The
position of the assemblage point becomes, in this manner, the record of  the
lesson. In order to play the  lesson back, the apprentice has to  return his
assemblage point  to the position it occupied when the lesson was given. Don
Juan concluded  his  remarks by reiterating that  to  return  the assemblage
point to  all the  positions it occupied when the  lessons  were given is an
accomplishment of the highest magnitude.
     For nearly  a year, don  Juan did  not  ask me anything about  my third
dreaming task. Then one day, quite abruptly, he wanted me to describe to him
all the nuances of my dreaming practices.
     The first thing I mentioned was a baffling recurrence. For a period  of
months, I had dreams in which I found myself  staring at me,  sleeping in my
bed. The odd part  was the  regularity of  those dreams; they happened every
four days, like clockwork. During the other three days, my dreaming was what
it  always had been so far: I  examined every possible  item in my dreams, I
changed dreams, and occasionally, driven by a suicidal curiosity, I followed
the  foreign  energy scouts, although I felt extremely guilty  doing this. I
fancied it to be like having  a secret drug addiction. The realness of  that
world was irresistible to me.
     Secretly, I felt somehow exonerated from  total responsibility, because
don  Juan himself had suggested that I ask  the dreaming emissary about what
to do to free the blue  scout trapped among us.  He meant for me to pose the
question in  my everyday practice, but I  construed  his statement  to imply
that I had  to  ask  the emissary while I was in its world.  The question  I
really wanted to ask the emissary was whether the inorganic beings had set a
trap for me. The emissary not only told me that everything don Juan had said
was  true but also gave me instructions on what Carol Tiggs and I had  to do
to liberate the scout.
     "The regularity  of your dreams is  something that  I rather expected,"
don Juan remarked, after listening to me.
     "Why did you expect something like that, don Juan?"
     "Because of your relationship with the inorganic beings."
     "That's  over and  forgotten,  don Juan," I lied,  hoping he  would not
pursue the subject any further.
     "You are saying that for my benefit, aren't  you?  You don't need to; I
know  the true  story. Believe me, once you get to play with them,  you  are
hooked. They'll always be after  you. Or, what's worse yet, you'll always be
after them."
     He stared at me, and my  guilt must have been  so obvious that it  made
him laugh.
     "The  only  possible  explanation  for  such  regularity  is  that  the
inorganic beings are catering  to  you  again," don Juan said in  a  serious
tone.
     I hurried to change the subject and told  him that another nuance of my
dreaming practices worth  mentioning was my reaction to the  sight of myself
lying sound asleep. That view was  always so startling  that it either glued
me to the  spot until the dream  changed or frightened me so profoundly that
it made me wake up,  screaming at the top of  my voice. I had  gotten to the
point where I was afraid to  go to  sleep on the days I  knew I was going to
have that dream.
     "You are not yet ready for a true merging of your dreaming reality  and
your  daily  reality,"  he  concluded.  "You  must  recapitulate  your  life
further."
     "But I've  done all the  recapitulating  possible," I protested.  "I've
been recapitulating for years. There is nothing more I can remember about my
life."
     "There must be much more," he said  adamantly, "otherwise, you wouldn't
wake up screaming."
     I did not like the idea of having to recapitulate again. I had done it,
and I  believed  I had done it so well that  I did not  need  to  touch  the
subject ever again.
     "The recapitulation of  our lives never  ends, no matter how well we've
done  it once," don Juan  said. "The reason average people lack volition  in
their  dreams is  that they  have never recapitulated  and  their  lives are
filled to capacity with heavily loaded emotions like memories, hopes, fears,
et cetera, et cetera.
     "Sorcerers,  in  contrast,  are  relatively  free from  heavy,  binding
emotions, because  of their  recapitulation. And if something stops them, as
it has stopped you at this  moment, the  assumption is that  there  still is
something in them that is not quite clear."
     "To recapitulate is too involving,  don Juan. Maybe there is  something
else I can do instead."
     "No. There isn't. Recapitulating  and dreaming  go hand in  hand. As we
regurgitate our lives, we get more and more airborne."
     Don Juan had given me very detailed and explicit instructions about the
recapitulation.  It  consisted  of  reliving  the  totality  of  one's  life
experiences by remembering  every possible minute detail of them. He saw the
recapitulation  as the  essential  factor  in a dreamer's  redefinition  and
redeployment  of  energy.  "The recapitulation sets free  energy  imprisoned
within us, and without this liberated energy dreaming is not possible." That
was his statement.
     Years before,  don Juan had coached me to make a list of all the people
I had met in  my life, starting at the present. He helped  me to  arrange my
list in an orderly fashion, breaking it down into areas of activity, such as
jobs  I had had, schools I  had  attended. Then he guided me to go,  without
deviation, from the first person on my list to the last  one, reliving every
one of my interactions with them.
     He  explained that  recapitulating  an  event starts  with  one's  mind
arranging everything pertinent  to  what  is being  recapitulated. Arranging
means reconstructing the event, piece by piece, starting by recollecting the
physical details of the surroundings, then going to the person with whom one
shared  the interaction, and then going  to oneself, to  the  examination of
one's feelings. Don Juan taught me that the recapitulation is coupled with a
natural,  rhythmical breathing. Long exhalations  are performed as  the head
moves gently and slowly from right to  left; and long inhalations  are taken
as the head moves back from left  to right. He called this act of moving the
head from side to side "fanning the event." The mind examines the event from
beginning to end while the body fans, on and on, everything the mind focuses
on.
     Don Juan said  that the  sorcerers  of antiquity,  the inventors of the
recapitulation, viewed  breathing as a magical, life-giving act and used it,
accordingly, as a magical  vehicle;  the  exhalation, to  eject  the foreign
energy left  in them during the  interaction  being  recapitulated  and  the
inhalation to pull back the  energy that they themselves  left behind during
the interaction.
     Because  of  my academic training, I took  the recapitulation to be the
process  of analyzing one's life. But don  Juan insisted  that  it was  more
involved   than   an   intellectual   psychoanalysis.   He  postulated   the
recapitulation  as  a  sorcerer's  ploy  to   induce  a  minute  but  steady
displacement  of the assemblage  point. He said  that the  assemblage point,
under the impact of reviewing past actions and feelings, goes back and forth
between  its  present site and  the site it  occupied  when the  event being
recapitulated took place.
     Don  Juan   stated   that  the  old  sorcerers'  rationale  behind  the
recapitulation  was  their  conviction  that   there  is  an   inconceivable
dissolving force in the universe, which makes organisms live by lending them
awareness. That force also makes organisms die, in order to extract the same
lent  awareness,  which   organisms   have   enhanced  through   their  life
experiences. Don  Juan explained the old sorcerers' reasoning. They believed
that since  it is our life experience this force is after,  it is of supreme
importance that it can be satisfied with a facsimile of our life experience:
the recapitulation. Having had what it seeks, the dissolving force then lets
sorcerers  go, free to expand  their capacity to  perceive and reach with it
the confines of time and space.
     When  I  started again to  recapitulate, it was a great surprise  to me
that  my dreaming  practices  were  automatically  suspended  the moment  my
recapitulation began. I asked don Juan about this unwanted recess.
     "Dreaming requires every bit of our available energy," he replied.  "If
there is  a deep preoccupation in  our  life,  there  is  no possibility  of
dreaming."
     "But I have been deeply preoccupied before," I said, "and  my practices
were never interrupted."
     "It must be then that every time  you thought you were preoccupied, you
were only egomaniacally  disturbed," he said, laughing. "To  be preoccupied,
for sorcerers, means that all your energy sources are  taken on. This is the
first time you've engaged your energy sources in their totality. The rest of
the time,  even  when  you  recapitulated  before,  you were not  completely
absorbed."
     Don Juan gave me this time a new recapitulation pattern. I was supposed
to construct a jigsaw puzzle by recapitulating,  without any apparent order,
different events of my life. "But it's going to be a mess," I protested.
     "No, it won't be," he assured  me. "It'll be  a  mess  if  you let your
pettiness choose the events you are going to recapitulate. Instead, let  the
spirit decide. Be silent, and then get to the event the spirit points out."
     The results of  that  pattern  of recapitulation were shocking to me on
many levels. It was very impressive to find out that, whenever I silenced my
mind, a  seemingly  independent force  immediately plunged  me  into a  most
detailed memory of  some  event in my life. But it  was even more impressive
that a  very orderly configuration resulted. What I thought  was going to be
chaotic turned out to be extremely effective.
     I  asked  don Juan why  he had not made me recapitulate in  this manner
from  the  start.  He  replied  that  there  are  two  basic  rounds to  the
recapitulation,  that  the first  is  called formality and rigidity, and the
second fluidity.
     I had no inkling about how different my recapitulation  was going to be
this  time.  The ability to concentrate, which I had acquired by means of my
dreaming practices, permitted me to examine my life at a depth I would never
have imagined possible. It  took  me over a year to  view  and  review all I
could about my life experiences. At  the  end, I had to agree with don Juan:
there  had been immensities of loaded emotions hidden so deeply inside me as
to be virtually inaccessible.
     The result  of  my  second  recapitulation  was  a  new,  more  relaxed
attitude. The very  day I returned to my dreaming practices, I dreamt  I saw
myself asleep. I turned around and daringly left  my room, penuriously going
down a flight of stairs to the street.
     I was elated with what  I had done  and  reported  it  to  don Juan. My
disappointment  was enormous when he did not consider  this dream part of my
dreaming practices. He  argued that  I had  not gone to  the street  with my
energy  body, because  if I  had I would have  had a  sensation  other  than
walking down a flight of stairs.
     "What kind of sensation are you talking about, don Juan?" I asked, with
genuine curiosity.
     "You have  to establish some valid guide  to find out  whether you  are
actually seeing your body asleep in your bed," he  said instead of answering
my question. "Remember, you  must be in your actual room, seeing your actual
body. Otherwise, what you are having is  merely a dream. If that's the case,
control that dream, either by observing its detail or by changing it."
     I insisted he tell me more about  the valid guide  he  had referred to,
but he cut me short. "Figure  out a way  to validate the  fact  that you are
looking at yourself," he said.
     "Do you  have any  suggestions  as to  what can be  a valid  guide?"  I
insisted.
     "Use your own judgment. We  are coming to the end of our time together.
You have to be on your own  very  soon." He changed the subject  then, and I
was left with  a clear taste of my ineptitude.  I  was  unable to figure out
what he wanted or what he meant by a valid guide.
     In the next dream in which I saw myself asleep, instead  of leaving the
room  and walking down the stairs, or waking up screaming, I remained glued,
for a  long time,  to the spot  from which I watched.  Without  fretting  or
despairing, I observed the details  of my dream.  I  noticed then that I was
asleep wearing a white  T-shirt that was ripped at the shoulder.  I tried to
come closer and examine the rip,  but  moving was  beyond my capabilities. I
felt a heaviness that seemed to be part of my very being. In fact, I was all
weight. Not knowing  what to do next, I instantly entered into a devastating
confusion. I tried to  change  dreams, but some  unaccustomed force  kept me
staring at my sleeping body.
     In the midst of  my turmoil,  I heard the dreaming emissary saying that
not having control  to move  around was  frightening me to the  point that I
might have  to do another recapitulation. The emissary's  voice and what  it
said  did  not  surprise  me at  all.  I  had  never  felt  so  vividly  and
terrifyingly  unable to move. I  did  not, however, give in to my  terror. I
examined  it and  found out that it  was not  a psychological  terror but  a
physical sensation of  helplessness, despair, and  annoyance. It bothered me
beyond words that I was not capable of moving my limbs. My annoyance grew in
proportion  to my realization  that  something  outside  me had me  brutally
pinned down. The effort I made to  move my  arms or legs was so  intense and
single-minded that at one moment I actually saw one leg of my body, sleeping
on the bed, flung out as if kicking.
     My awareness  was then pulled into my inert, sleeping  body, and I woke
up with such a force  that it  took  more  than half an hour to  calm myself
down. My  heart was beating almost erratically. I was shivering, and some of
the  muscles  in  my  legs twitched uncontrollably. I had  suffered  such  a
radical loss of body heat that I  needed  blankets  and hot-water bottles to
raise my temperature.
     Naturally,  I went  to  Mexico  to  ask don  Juan's  advice  about  the
sensation of paralysis, and  about the fact that I really had been wearing a
ripped T-shirt, thus, I had indeed seen myself asleep. Besides, I was deadly
afraid of hypothermia. He was reluctant to discuss my predicament. All I got
out of him was a caustic remark.
     "You  like  drama," he said flatly.  "Of course you really saw yourself
asleep. The problem  is  that you got nervous, because your  energy body has
never been consciously in one piece before. If you ever get nervous and cold
again, hold on  to your  dick. That will restore your body  temperature in a
jiffy and without any fuss."
     I felt  a  bit offended by his  crassness.  However,  the advice proved
effective.  The  next time  I became frightened, I  relaxed and  returned to
normal in a  few  minutes, doing what he had  prescribed.  In this manner, I
discovered that if I did not fret and kept  my annoyance in check, I did not
panic. To remain controlled did not help me move, but it certainly gave me a
deep sensation of peace and serenity.
     After  months  of  useless efforts  at  walking,  I  sought  don Juan's
comments  once  again,  not so  much for his advice  this time but because I
wanted to concede defeat. I was up against an impassable barrier, and I knew
with indisputable certainty that I had failed.
     "Dreamers have to be imaginative," don Juan said with a malicious grin.
"Imaginative  you  are  not. I didn't  warn  you  about having to  use  your
imagination to move  your energy body  because I wanted to find out  whether
you  could resolve  the riddle  by  yourself.  You didn't, and your  friends
didn't help you either."
     In  the past, I had  been driven to defend myself viciously whenever he
accused  me of lacking imagination. I thought I was imaginative, but  having
don Juan as  a teacher had taught me,  the hard way, that I am not. Since  I
was not going to engage my energy in futile  defenses of myself, I asked him
instead, "What is this riddle you are talking about, don Juan?"
     "The riddle of how impossible and yet how easy it is to move the energy
body. You are trying to move it as if you were  in the daily world. We spend
so much time and effort learning to walk that we believe our dreaming bodies
should also walk. There is no reason why they should, except that walking is
foremost in our minds."
     I marveled at the simplicity of the solution. I instantly knew that don
Juan was right. I had gotten stuck again at the  level of interpretation. He
had told me I had to move around once I reached  the third gate of dreaming,
and to  me  moving  around meant  walking.  I told him that I understood his
point.
     "It  isn't my  point," he  curtly  answered. "It's  a sorcerers' point.
Sorcerers say that at  the third gate the entire  energy body  can move like
energy moves: fast and directly. Your energy body knows exactly how to move.
It can move as it moves in the inorganic beings' world.
     "And  this brings us to the other issue  here," don Juan added with  an
air of pensiveness. "Why didn't your inorganic being friends help you?"
     "Why do you call them my friends, don Juan?"
     "They are like  the classic friends who  are not  really  thoughtful or
kind  to  us but not mean either. The friends who are just waiting for us to
turn our backs so they can stab us there."
     I understood him completely and agreed with him one hundred percent.
     "What makes me go there? Is it a suicidal tendency?" I  asked him, more
rhetorically than not.
     "You don't have any suicidal tendency," he  said. "What you have  is  a
total  disbelief  that  you were near death.  Since you were not in physical
pain, you can't quite convince yourself you were in mortal danger."
     His argument was most reasonable, except that I  did  believe  a  deep,
unknown  fear  had been  ruling my  life since  my  bout with the  inorganic
beings. Don Juan listened in silence as I described to him my predicament. I
could not discard or explain away  my  urge to go  to the inorganic  beings'
world, in spite of what I knew about it.
     "I have a streak of insani