Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan’s Teachings

All that is required is your awareness of falling asleep. Dreaming has to be a very sober affair. No false movement can be afforded. Dreaming is a process of awakening, of gaining control. Our dreaming attention must be systematically exercised, for it is the door to the second attention.

The difference between the dreaming attention and the second attention is that the second attention is like an ocean, and the dreaming attention is like a river feeding into it. The second attention is the condition of being aware of total worlds, total like our world is total, while the dreaming attention is the condition of being aware of the items of our dreams.

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The dreaming attention is the key to every movement in the sorcerers’ world. Among the multitude of items in our dreams, there exist real energetic interferences, things that have been put in our dreams extraneously, by an alien force. To be able to find them and follow them is sorcery.

Dreams are, if not a door, a hatch into other worlds. As such, dreams are a two-way street. Our awareness goes through that hatch into other realms, and those other realms send scouts into our dreams.

Those scouts are energy charges that get mixed with the items of our normal dreams. They are bursts of foreign energy that come into our dreams, and we interpret them as items familiar or unfamiliar to us.

Dreams are a hatch into other realms of perception. Through that hatch, currents of unfamiliar energy seep in. Then the mind or the brain or whatever takes those currents of energy and turns them into parts of our dreams.

Sorcerers are aware of those currents of foreign energy. They notice them and strive to isolate them from the normal items of their dreams.

They isolate them because they come from other realms. If we follow them to their source, they serve us as guides into areas of such mystery that sorcerers shiver at the mere mention of such a possibility.

Sorcerers isolate them from the normal items of their dreams by the exercise and control of their dreaming attention. At one moment, our dreaming attention discovers them among the items of a dream and focuses on them, then the total dream collapses, leaving only the foreign energy.

I’m going to repeat what you must do in your dreams in order to pass the first gate of dreaming . First you must focus your gaze on your hands as the starting point. Then shift your gaze to other items and look at them in brief glances. Focus your gaze on as many things as you can. Remember that if you glance only briefly, then the images don’t shift. Then go back to your hands.

To pass the first gate of dreaming means that, first of all, we have reached the first gate of dreaming by becoming aware that we are falling asleep, or by having a gigantically real dream, and second, that we have crossed it by being able to sustain the sight of any item of our dreams.

In order to offset the evanescent quality of dreams, sorcerers have devised the use of the starting point item. Every time you isolate it and look at it, you get a surge of energy. As soon as the images begin to shift and you feel you are losing control, go back to your starting point item and start all over again.

The most astounding thing that happens to dreamers is that, on reaching the first gate, they also reach the energy body.

The energy body is the counterpart of the physical body. A ghostlike configuration made of pure energy. The physical body also is made out of energy.

The difference is that the energy body has only appearance but no mass. Since it’s pure energy, it can perform acts that are beyond the possibilities of the physical body; such as transporting itself in one instant to the ends of the universe. And dreaming is the art of tempering the energy body, of making it supple and coherent by gradually exercising it.

Through dreaming we condense the energy body until it’s a unit capable of perceiving. Its perception, although affected by our normal way of perceiving the daily world, is an independent perception. It has its own sphere.

That sphere is energy. The energy body deals with energy in terms of energy. There are three ways in which it deals with energy in dreaming : it can perceive energy as it flows, or it can use energy to boost itself like a rocket into unexpected areas, or it can perceive as we ordinarily perceive the world.

To perceive energy as it flows means to see . It means that the energy body sees energy directly as a light or as a vibrating current of sorts or as a disturbance. Or It feels it directly as a jolt or as a sensation that can even be pain.

Since energy is its sphere, it is no problem for the energy body to use currents of energy that exist in the universe to propel itself. All it has to do is isolate them, and off it goes with them.

Sorcerers isolate in their dreams scouts from other realms. Their energy bodies do that. They recognize energy and go for it. But it isn’t desirable for dreamers to indulge in searching for scouts. I was reluctant to tell you about it, because of the facility with which one can get swayed be that search.

Reaching, with deliberate control, the first gate of dreaming is a way of arriving at the energy body. But to maintain that gain is predicated on energy alone. Sorcerers get that energy by redeploying, in a more intelligent manner, the energy they have and use for perceiving the daily world.

We all have a determined quantity of basic energy. That quantity is all the energy we have, and we use all of it for perceiving and dealing with our engulfing world. There is no more energy for us anywhere and, since our available energy is already engaged, there is not a single bit left in us for any extraordinary perception, such as dreaming .

That leaves us to scrounge energy for ourselves, wherever we can find it.

Sorcerers have a scrounging method. They intelligently redeploy their energy by cutting down anything they consider superfluous in their lives. They call this method the sorcerers’ way. In essence, the sorcerers’ way is a chain of behavioral choices for dealing with the world, choices much more intelligent than those our progenitors taught us. These sorcerers’ choices are designed to revamp our lives by altering our basic reactions about being alive.

Those basic reactions are the two ways of facing our being alive. One is to surrender to it, either by acquiescing to its demands or by fighting those demands. The other is by molding our particular life situation to fit our own configurations.

One’s particular life situation can be molded to fit one’s specifications. Dreamers do that. A wild statement? Not really, if you consider how little we know about ourselves.

My interest, as a teacher, is to get you thoroughly involved with the themes of life and being alive; that is to say, with the difference between life, as a consequence of biological forces, and the act of being alive, as a matter of cognition.

When sorcerers talk about molding one’s life situation they mean molding the awareness of being alive. Through molding this awareness, we can get enough energy to reach and sustain the energy body, and with it we can certainly mold the total direction and consequences of our lives.

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Don’t merely think about what I have told you. Turn my concepts into a viable way of life by a process of repetition. Everything new in our lives, such as the sorcerers’ concepts I am teaching you, must be repeated to us to the point of exhaustion before we open ourselves to it. Repetition is the way our progenitors socialized us to function in the daily world.

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As we tighten the control over our dreams, we tighten the mastery over our dreaming attention. The dreaming attention comes into play when it is called, when it is given a purpose. Its coming into play is not really a process, as one would normally understand a process, that is as an ongoing system of operations or a series of actions or functions that bring about an end result. It is rather an awakening. Something dormant becomes suddenly functional.

A dreaming teacher must create a didactic synthesis in order to emphasize a given point. In essence, what I wanted with your first task was to exercise your dreaming attention by focusing it on the items of your dreams. To this effect I used as a spearhead the idea of being aware of falling asleep. My subterfuge was to say that the only way to be aware of falling asleep is to examine the elements of one’s dreams.