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 insanity," I said. "What I do doesn't make sense."
     "It  does  make sense. The inorganic  beings  are still reeling you in,
like a fish  hooked at the  end of  a line," he said.  "They throw worthless
bait at you from time to time  to keep you going. To arrange your  dreams to
occur every  four days without fail is worthless bait. But they didn't teach
you how to move your energy body."
     "Why do you think they didn't?"
     "Because when  your  energy body learns  to  move by itself,  you'll be
thoroughly out  of their reach. It  was premature of me  to believe that you
are free  from  them. You are  relatively but not completely  free. They are
still bidding for your awareness."
     I felt a chill in my back. He had touched  a sore spot in me.  "Tell me
what to do, don Juan, and I'll do it," I said.
     "Be  impeccable. I have told you this dozens of times. To be impeccable
means to  put your life on the  line in order to back up your decisions, and
then to do quite a lot more than  your best to realize those decisions. When
you are  not  deciding anything,  you are merely  playing roulette with your
life in a helter-skelter way."
     Don Juan ended our conversation, urging me to ponder what he had said.
     At  the  first opportunity I  had, I  put don  Juan's suggestion  about
moving my  energy body to  the test. When I found myself  looking at my body
asleep,  instead of  struggling to walk  toward it I simply willed myself to
move closer to the bed. Instantly, I was nearly touching  my body. I  saw my
face. In fact, I could see every pore in my skin. I cannot say  that I liked
what  I saw. My view of my own body  was too  detailed  to be  aesthetically
pleasing. Then something like a wind came into the room, totally disarranged
everything, and erased my view.
     During subsequent dreams, I entirely corroborated that the only way the
energy body can move is to glide or soar. I discussed this with don Juan. He
seemed unusually satisfied with  what I had done, which certainly  surprised
me. I was accustomed to his cold reaction to anything  I  did in my dreaming
practices.
     "Your energy body is used to moving only  when something pulls it,"  he
said. "The  inorganic beings have  been pulling your energy  body  right and
left,  and  until  now you have never moved  it  by yourself,  with your own
volition. It doesn't seem like you've done much, moving the way you did, yet
I assure you that I was seriously considering ending  your practices. For  a
while, I believed you were not going to learn how to move on your own."
     "Were you considering ending my dreaming practices because I am slow?"
     "You're  not  slow.  It takes sorcerers  forever to  learn to move  the
energy body. I was going to end your  dreaming  practices because  I have no
more time. There are other topics, more pressing than dreaming, on which you
can use your energy."
     "Now that I've learned how to move my energy body by myself,  what else
should I do, don Juan?"
     "Continue moving. Moving your energy body has opened  up a new area for
you, an area of extraordinary exploration."
     He  urged me again to come up with an idea to validate the faithfulness
of  my  dreams; that request did not seem as odd as it had the first time he
voiced it.
     "As you know, to be transported by a scout is the real dreaming task of
the second gate,"  he  explained. "It is a very serious  matter, but  not as
serious as  forging and  moving the energy body. Therefore, you have to make
sure,  by some means of your own,  whether you are actually  seeing yourself
asleep  or whether you  are merely  dreaming  that  you're  seeing  yourself
asleep. Your new extraordinary  exploration hinges on really seeing yourself
asleep."
     After some heavy pondering and wondering, I believed that I had come up
with the  right  plan.  Having seen my ripped  T-shirt gave me an idea for a
valid  guide.  I  started  from  the assumption that,  if  I  were  actually
observing myself  asleep,  I would also  be observing whether I had the same
sleeping attire I had gone to bed in, an attire that I had decided to change
radically every four days. I  was confident that I was not going to have any
difficulty in remembering, in dreams, what I was wearing when I went to bed;
the  discipline I had acquired through  my  dreaming practices made me think
that  I had the  ability to record things  like this in my mind and remember
them in dreams.
     I engaged my best efforts to follow this guide, but the results did not
pan  out as  I  thought they  would. I lacked the necessary control  over my
dreaming  attention,  and  I  could not  quite  remember the details  of  my
sleeping attire. Yet something else was definitely at work; somehow I always
knew whether my  dreams were ordinary dreams  or not. The outstanding aspect
of the dreams that were not just ordinary dreams was that my body lay asleep
in bed while my consciousness observed it.
     A notable  feature of these dreams was  my  room. It was never  like my
room in the daily world but an enormous empty hall with my bed at one end. I
used to soar over a considerable distance to be at the side of the bed where
my body lay.  The moment I was next to it, a windlike  force used to make me
hover over  it, like a  hummingbird.  At  times  the  room used  to  vanish;
disappear piece by piece until only my body and the bed  were left. At other
times, I used  to  experience a  complete  loss  of  volition.  My  dreaming
attention  seemed  then to  function  independently  of  me.  Either it  was
completely  absorbed  by  the first  item it encountered in the room  or  it
seemed unable to decide  what to do. In those instances, I had the sensation
that I was helplessly floating, going from item to item.
     The  voice of the  dreaming emissary explained to  me once that all the
elements of the dreams,  which were not just commonplace dreams, were really
energy  configurations  different  from  those  of  our  normal  world.  The
emissary's voice pointed out that,  for example, the  walls were  liquid. It
urged me then to plunge into one of them.
     Without thinking twice, I dived into  a wall as if I were diving into a
huge lake. I did not feel the waterlike wall; what I felt was not a physical
sensation of  plunging into  a body of  water  either. It was  more like the
thought of diving and the visual sensation of going through liquid matter. I
was going, head-first,  into something that opened up, like water does, as I
kept moving downward.
     The sensation  of going  down,  headfirst, was so real  that I began to
wonder how long or how deep or how  far I was diving. From my point of view,
I spent  an  eternity in there. I saw clouds and  rocklike masses of  matter
suspended  in  a  waterlike substance.  There  were some  glowing, geometric
objects that resembled  crystals, and  blobs of the deepest primary colors I
had ever seen. There were also zones  of intense light and others  of  pitch
blackness. Everything went by me, either  slowly  or at a fast speed.  I had
the thought that I  was viewing the  cosmos. At the instant of that thought,
my speed increased so immensely that everything became blurred, and all of a
sudden, I found myself awake with my nose smack against the wall of my room.
     Some hidden fear urged  me to consult with don Juan. He listened to me,
hanging on every word.
     "You need to do some drastic maneuvering at this point,"  he said. "The
dreaming emissary has no business  interfering with your dreaming practices.
Or rather, you should not, under any conditions, permit it to do so."
     "How can I stop it?"
     "Perform a simple  but difficult maneuver. Upon entering into dreaming,
voice out loud your desire not to have the dreaming emissary anymore."
     "Does that mean, don Juan, that I will never hear it again?"
     "Positively. You'll get rid of it forever."
     "But is it advisable to get rid of it forever?"
     "It most certainly is, at this point."
     With those words,  don Juan involved me in a most disturbing dilemma. I
did not want to put an end to my relationship with the emissary, but, at the
same time, I wanted to follow don Juan's advice. He noticed my hesitation.
     "I  know it's  a very difficult affair," he conceded, "but if you don't
do it, the inorganic beings will always have a  line on you.  If you want to
avoid this, do what I said, and do it now."
     During my next dreaming  session,  as  I prepared  myself to  utter  my
intent, the emissary's voice interrupted me.  It said, "If you refrain  from
stating your request,  I  promise you never to interfere with your  dreaming
practices and talk to you only if you ask me direct questions."
     I instantly accepted its proposition  and sincerely felt  that it was a
good  deal.  I was even relieved  it had turned out this way.  I was afraid,
however, that don Juan was going to be disappointed.
     "It was a good maneuver," he remarked  and laughed.  "You were sincere;
you  really intended to voice your request. To be  sincere  is  all that was
required. There was, essentially, no need for you to eliminate the emissary.
What  you  wanted  was  to  corner  it into  proposing  an alternative  way,
convenient to you. I am sure the emissary won't interfere anymore."
     He  was right. I continued my dreaming practices  without any  meddling
from  the  emissary.  The remarkable consequence  was  that  I began to have
dreams in which my  dream rooms  were my room  in the  daily world, with one
difference: in the dreams, my room was always so slanted, so distorted  that
it looked  like  a giant cubist  painting; obtuse and acute angles  were the
rule instead of the  normal right angles of walls, ceiling, and floor. In my
lopsided room, the very slant, created by the  acute or obtuse angles, was a
device to display prominently some absurd, superfluous, but real detail; for
example, intricate lines in the hardwood floor, or weather discolorations in
the wall paint, or dust spots on the ceiling, or smudged fingerprints on the
edge of a door.
     In those  dreams,  I unavoidably got lost in the waterlike universes of
the detail pointed  out by the  slant.  During my entire dreaming practices,
the profusion of detail  in my room  was so immense  and its pull so intense
that it instantly made me dive into it.
     At the first free  moment I had, I was at don  Juan's place, consulting
him about this state. "I can't overcome my room," I  said to him after I had
given him the details of my dreaming practices.
     "What  gives  you  the idea you have to overcome it?" he asked  with  a
grin.
     "I feel that I have to move beyond my room, don Juan."
     "But  you  are moving beyond your room. Perhaps you should ask yourself
whether you are caught again  in interpretations.  What do you  think moving
means in this case?"
     I told him walking  from my room to the street had been such a haunting
dream for me that I felt a real need to do it again.
     "But you are doing greater things  than  that," he protested.  "You are
going to unbelievable regions. What else do you want?"
     I tried to explain to him that I had  a physical urge to move away from
the trap of detail. What upset me the  most was my incapacity to free myself
from whatever caught my  attention. To have  a modicum  of volition  was the
bottom line for me.
     A very long  silence followed. I waited  to hear more about the trap of
detail. After all, he had warned me about its dangers. "You are doing fine,"
he  finally  said. "Dreamers take a  very long time to perfect their  energy
bodies.  And  this is exactly  what's  at stake here: perfecting your energy
body."
     Don Juan  explained that the  reason my energy body  was  compelled  to
examine detail and  get inextricably stuck in  it was  its inexperience, its
incompleteness. He  said that sorcerers spend  a  lifetime consolidating the
energy body by letting it sponge up everything possible.
     "Until  the energy body is complete and mature,  it  is self-absorbed,"
don Juan went on.  "It can't get  free from the compulsion to be absorbed by
everything. But  if one  takes this into consideration, instead  of fighting
the energy body, as you're doing now, one can lend it a hand."
     "How can I do that, don Juan?"
     "By directing its behavior, that is to say, by stalking it."
     He explained that since everything related  to the  energy body depends
on the appropriate  position  of the assemblage point, and since dreaming is
nothing else  but the  means to displace  it, stalking is, consequently, the
way  to  make the assemblage point stay put on the perfect position, in this
case, the position  where the  energy body  can become consolidated and from
which it can finally emerge.
     Don  Juan said that the moment the  energy  body can  move on its  own,
sorcerers assume that the optimum position of  the assemblage point has been
reached.  The  next step  is  to stalk it, that is,  to  fixate  it on  that
position  in  order  to  complete  the energy  body.  He remarked  that  the
procedure is simplicity itself. One intends to stalk it.
     Silence and  looks  of expectation followed that statement.  I expected
him to say  more, and he expected me to have understood  what he had said. I
had not.
     "Let your  energy  body intend to reach the optimum dreaming position,"
he explained. "Then, let your energy body  intend  to  stay at that position
and you will be stalking."
     He  paused and,  with  his eyes,  urged me  to consider  his statement.
"Intending  is the secret, but you already know that,"  he said.  "Sorcerers
displace their assemblage points through intending and fixate them, equally,
through  intending.  And  there is no  technique for  intending. One intends
through usage."
     To have another of my wild assumptions about my worth as a sorcerer was
unavoidable at that  point. I  had boundless  confidence that  something was
going to put me on the right track to intend the fixation of  my  assemblage
point  on  the  ideal  spot.  I had accomplished in the  past  all  kinds of
successful maneuvers  without knowing how I performed them. Don Juan himself
had marveled at my ability or my luck, and I was sure this was going  to  be
one of those instances. I was gravely mistaken. No matter what I did, or how
long I waited, I had no success whatsoever in fixing my assemblage  point on
any spot, much less on the ideal one.
     After  months  of  serious  but unsuccessful  struggling, I gave up. "I
really believed I could do  it," I said to don Juan, the moment I was in his
house. "I am afraid that nowadays I am more of an egomaniac than ever."
     "Not  really,"  he said with a  smile. "What happens  is that  you  are
caught in another of your routinary misinterpretations of terms. You want to
find the  ideal spot,  as if you were  finding  your lost car keys. Then you
want  to tie your assemblage point,  as if  you were  tying  your shoes. The
ideal spot and the fixation of the assemblage point are metaphors. They have
nothing to do with the words used to describe them."
     He asked  me  then  to tell  him  the  latest events  of  any  dreaming
practices.  The first thing I  mentioned was that my urge to be  absorbed by
detail  had subsided  notably. I said that perhaps  because I  moved  in  my
dreams,  compulsively and incessantly,  the  movement  might have been  what
always managed to stop me before I plunged into  the detail I was observing.
To be stopped in that  fashion gave me the opportunity to examine the act of
being absorbed  by detail. I came  to the conclusion that  inanimate  matter
actually  possesses an immobilizing force, which  I  saw as a beam  of  dull
light  that kept me pinned down. For example, many times some minute mark on
the walls or in the wood lines of the hardwood floor of my room used to send
a line  of light that transfixed  me; from the moment  my dreaming attention
was focused on that light, the whole dream rotated around that  minute mark.
I  saw it enlarged perhaps to the size of the cosmos. That view used to last
until I woke up, usually with my  nose pressed against the wall or  the wood
floor. My own  observations were that, in the first  place,  the detail  was
real, and, in the  second place, I seemed to have been observing it while  I
was asleep.
     Don  Juan smiled and said,  "All this is happening  to you because  the
forging of your  energy body was completed  the moment it moved by itself. I
didn't tell you that, but I insinuated it. I  wanted to know  whether or not
you were capable of finding it out by yourself, which, of course, you did."
     I  had  no  idea  what he  meant.  Don Juan scrutinized me in his usual
manner. His penetrating gaze scanned my body.
     "What exactly did I find out by myself, don Juan?" I was forced to ask.
     "You found out that your energy body had been completed," he answered.
     "I didn't find out anything of the kind, I assure you."
     "Yes, you did. It started some time ago, when you couldn't find a guide
to validate the realness of your dreams, but then something went to work for
you and let you know whether you were having a regular dream. That something
was your energy body. Now, you despair that you couldn't find the ideal spot
to  fix  your assemblage  point. And  I tell you that you did. The  proof is
that,  by  moving around,  your energy  body curtailed  its  obsession  with
detail."
     I was nonplussed. I could not even ask one of my feeble questions.
     "What comes next for you is  a sorcerers' gem," don Juan  went on. "You
are  going to practice seeing energy, in your  dreaming. You  have fulfilled
the drill for the third gate of dreaming: moving your energy body by itself.
Now you are going  to perform  the real task: seeing energy with your energy
body.
     "You  have seen energy before," he went on, "many  times,  in fact. But
each  of  those  times, seeing  was  a  fluke.  Now you are going  to  do it
deliberately.
     "Dreamers have a rule of thumb," he continued. "If their energy body is
complete, they <i>see</i>  energy  every  time  they  gaze at an item in the  daily
world. In  dreams, if they  see  the energy of an item, they  know  they are
dealing with  a real world, no matter how distorted that world may appear to
their dreaming attention. If they can't see the  energy of an item, they are
in an ordinary dream and not in a real world."
     "What is a real world, don Juan?"
     "A  world that  generates  energy; the opposite  of a phantom world  of
projections, where nothing generates energy, like most of  our dreams, where
nothing has an energetic effect."
     Don Juan  then gave  me another  definition  of dreaming: a process  by
which   dreamers   isolate  dream   conditions   in   which  they  can  find
energy-generating elements. He must have noticed my bewilderment. He laughed
and gave another, even more convoluted definition:  dreaming is  the process
by which we  intend to  find  adequate positions  of  the assemblage  point,
positions  that permit us  to perceive energy-generating items in  dreamlike
states.
     He explained that  the energy body is also capable of perceiving energy
that is quite different from the  energy of our own world, as in the case of
items of  the inorganic beings' realm,  which  the energy  body perceives as
sizzling energy. He added that in our world nothing sizzles; everything here
wavers.
     "From now on,"  he said, "the issue of your dreaming is going to be  to
determine whether  the  items on which you focus your dreaming attention are
energy  generating,  mere  phantom  projections,  or  generators of  foreign
energy."
     Don Juan admitted that he  had hoped I was  going to come  up  with the
idea  of <i>seeing</i>  energy  as  the  gauge  to determine  whether  or not I was
observing my  real body asleep. He laughed at my  spurious device of putting
on  elaborate sleeping attire, every four days. He said that I'd had, at  my
fingertips, all the information  necessary to deduce what was the  real task
of the third gate of dreaming and to come up with the right idea but that my
interpretation  system had forced me to seek contrived solutions that lacked
the simplicity and directness of sorcery.


        9. THE NEW AREA OF EXPLORATION

     Don Juan told me that in order to <i>