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 beyou," don Juan said.

My energy level was so keyed up at the time that I went to work on thethird 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 energyimmediately rearranged the focus of my dreaming attention. Its focus was now onwaking up in a dream and seeing myself sleeping; journeying to the realm ofinorganic beings was no longer an issue for me.

Very soon after, I found myself in a dream looking at myself asleep. Iimmediately reported it to don Juan. The dream had happened while I was at hishouse.

"There are two phases to each of the gates of dreaming," hesaid. "The first, as you know, is to arrive at the gate; the second is tocross it. By dreaming what you've dreamt, that you saw yourself asleep, youarrived at the third gate. The second phase is to move around once you've seenyourself asleep.

"At the third gate of dreaming," he went on, "you begin todeliberately merge your dreaming reality with the reality of the daily world.This is the drill, and sorcerers call it completing the energy body. The mergebetween the two realities has to be so thorough that you need to be more fluidthan ever. Examine everything at the third gate with great care andcuriosity."

I complained that his recommendations were too cryptic and were not makingany sense to me. "What do you mean by great care and curiosity?" Iasked.

"Our tendency at the third gate is to get lost in detail," hereplied. "To view things with great care and curiosity means to resist thenearly irresistible temptation to plunge into detail.

"The given drill, at the third gate, as I said, is to consolidate theenergy body. Dreamers begin forging the energy body by fulfilling the drills ofthe first and second gates. When they reach the third gate, the energy body isready to come out, or perhaps it would be better to say that it is ready toact. Unfortunately, this also means that it's ready to be mesmerized bydetail."

"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 meaneverything. Every irrelevant, minute detail totally absorbs the energybody."

An awkward silence followed. I had no idea what to say. I had understoodhim perfectly, I just didn't have anything in my experience to give me an ideaof 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 theenergy body is staggering. I know that it sounds awkward to tell you to viewthings with care and curiosity, but that is the best way to describe what youshould do. At the third gate, dreamers have to avoid a nearly irresistibleimpulse to plunge into everything, and they avoid it by being so curious, sodesperate to get into everything that they don't let any particular thingimprison them."

Don Juan added that his recommendations, which he knew sounded absurd tothe mind, were directly aimed at my energy body. He stressed over and over thatmy 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 theinorganic beings' realm," he replied. "Now your entire energy bodyhas to be engaged to perform the drill of the third gate. Therefore, to makethings 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 experiencesyou've brought into my life."

"Don't say anything. At the third gate, rationality is responsiblefor the insistence of our energy bodies on being obsessed with superfluousdetail. At the third gate, then, we need irrational fluidity, irrationalabandon to counteract that insistence."

Don Juan's statement that each gate is an obstacle could not have beenmore truthful. I labored to fulfill the drill of the third gate of dreamingmore intensely than I had on the other two tasks combined. Don Juan puttremendous pressure on me. Besides, something else had been added to my life atrue sense of fear. I had been normally and even excessively afraid of onething or another throughout my life, but there had been nothing in myexperience comparable to the fear I felt after my bout with the inorganicbeings. 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 NationalMuseum of Anthropology and History in Mexico City. What had prompted myquestion was that, at the moment, I had the odd ability to remember everythingthat had Happened to me in the course of my association with don Juan. And thatmade me feel so free, so daring and light-footed that I Was practically dancingaround.

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

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

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

He instructed me to enter into total silence. He reminded me that I wasalready in a special state of awareness, because my Assemblage point had beenmade to shift by his presence. He assured me that entering into total silencewas going to allow the sculptures in that room to make me see and hearinconceivable things. He added, apparently to increase my confusion, that someof the archaeological pieces in that room had the capacity to produce, bythemselves, a shift of the assemblage Point, and that if I reached a state oftotal silence I would be actually witnessing scenes pertaining to the lives ofthe people Who made those pieces.

He then began the strangest tour of a museum I have ever taken. He wentaround the room, describing and interpreting astounding details of every one ofthe large pieces. According *0 him, every archaeological piece in that room wasa purposeful record left by the people of antiquity, a record that don Juan asa sorcerer was reading to me as one would read a book.

"Every piece here is designed to make the assemblage pointshift," 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 normalreach."

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

My discomfort was so great that I felt obliged to apologize to don Juanfor 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 recordsof their findings in the position of the assemblage point. He maintained thatwhen it comes to getting to the essence of a written account, we have to useour sense of sympathetic or imaginative participation to go beyond the merepage into the experience itself. However, in the sorcerers' world, since thereare no written pages, total records, which can be relived instead of read, areleft in the position of the assemblage point.

To illustrate his argument, don Juan talked about the sorcerers' teachingsfor the second attention. He said that they are given when the apprentice'sassemblage point is on a place other than the normal one. The position of theassemblage point becomes, in this manner, the record of the lesson. In order toplay the lesson back, the apprentice has to return his assemblage point to theposition it occupied when the lesson was given. Don Juan concluded his remarksby reiterating that to return the assemblage point to all the positions itoccupied when the lessons were given is an accomplishment of the highestmagnitude.

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

The first thing I mentioned was a baffling recurrence. For a period ofmonths, 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 hadbeen so far I examined every possible item in my dreams, I changed dreams, andoccasionally, driven by a suicidal curiosity, I followed the foreign energyscouts, although I felt extremely guilty doing this. I fancied it to be likehaving a secret drug addiction. The realness of that world was irresistible tome.

Secretly, I felt somehow exonerated from total responsibility, because donJuan himself had suggested that I ask the dreaming emissary about what to do tofree the blue scout trapped among us. He meant for me to pose the question inmy everyday practice, but I construed his statement to imply that I had to askthe emissary while I was in its world. The question I really wanted to ask theemissary was whether the inorganic beings had set a trap for me. The emissarynot only told me that everything don Juan had said was true but also gave meinstructions on what Carol Tiggs and I had to do to liberate the scout.

"The regularity of your dreams is something that I ratherexpected," 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 notpursue the subject any further.

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

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

"The only possible explanation for such regularity is that theinorganic beings are catering to you again," don Juan said in a ' serioustone.

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

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

"But I've done all the recapitulating possible," I protested."I've been recapitulating for years. There is nothing more I can rememberabout 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 subjectever again.

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

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

"To recapitulate is too involving, don Juan. Maybe there is somethingelse I can do instead."

"No. There isn't. Recapitulating and dreaming go hand in hand. As weregurgitate our lives, we get more and more airborne."

Don Juan had given me very detailed and explicit instructions about therecapitulation. It consisted of reliving the totality of one's life experiencesby remembering every possible minute detail of them. He saw the recapitulationas the essential factor in a dreamer's redefinition and redeployment of energy."The recapitulation sets free energy imprisoned within us, and withoutthis 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 Ihad met in my life, starting at the present. He helped me to arrange my list inan orderly fashion, breaking it down into areas of activity, such as jobs I hadhad, schools I had attended. Then he guided me to go, without deviation, fromthe first person on my list to the last one, reliving every one of myinteractions with them.

He explained that recapitulating an event starts with one's mind arrangingeverything pertinent to what is being recapitulated. Arranging meansreconstructing the event, piece by piece, starting by recollecting the physicaldetails of the surroundings, then going to the person with whom one shared theinteraction, 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 gentlyand slowly from right to left; and long inhalations are taken as the head movesback from left to right. He called this act of moving the head from side toside "fanning the event." The mind examines the event from beginningto end while the body fans, on and on, everything the mind focuses on.

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

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

Don Juan stated that the old sorcerers' rationale behind therecapitulation was their conviction that there is an inconceivable dissolvingforce in the universe, which makes organisms live by lending them awareness.That force also makes organisms die, in order to extract the same lentawareness, which organisms have enhanced through their life experiences. DonJuan explained the old sorcerers' reasoning. They believed that since it is ourlife experience this force is after, it is of supreme importance that it can besatisfied with a facsimile of our life experience the recapitulation. Havinghad what it seeks, the dissolving force then lets sorcerers go, free to expandtheir 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 thatmy dreaming practices were automatically suspended the moment my recapitulationbegan. I asked don Juan about this unwanted recess.

"Dreaming requires every bit of our available energy," hereplied. "If there is a deep preoccupation in our life, there is nopossibility of dreaming."

"But I have been deeply preoccupied before," I said, "andmy 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 bepreoccupied, for sorcerers, means that all your energy sources are taken on. Thisis the first time you've engaged your energy sources in their totality. Therest of the time, even when you recapitulated before, you were not completelyabsorbed."

Don Juan gave me this time a new recapitulation pattern. I was supposed toconstruct 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 youlet 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 pointsout."

The results of that pattern of recapitulation were shocking to me on manylevels. It was very impressive to find out that, whenever I silenced my mind, aseemingly independent force immediately plunged me into a most detailed memoryof some event in my life. But it was even more impressive that a very orderlyconfiguration resulted. What I thought was going to be chaotic turned out to beextremely effective.

I asked don Juan why he had not made me recapitulate in this manner fromthe 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 bethis time. The ability to concentrate, which I had acquired by means of mydreaming practices, permitted me to I examine my life at a depth I would neverhave imagined possible. It took me over a year to view and review all I couldabout ?! my life experiences. At the end, I had to agree with don Juan I therehad been immensities of loaded emotions hidden so deeply inside me as to bevirtually 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 ofstairs to the street.

I was elated with what I had done and reported it to don Juan. My disappointmentwas 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 Ihad I would have had a sensation other than walking down a flight of stairs.

"What kind of sensation are you talking about, don Juan?" Iasked, with genuine curiosity.

"You have to establish some valid guide to find out whether you areactually seeing your body asleep in your bed," he said instead ofanswering my question. "Remember, you must be in your actual room, seeingyour actual body. Otherwise, what you are having is merely a dream. If that'sthe case, control that dream, either by observing its detail or by changingit."

I insisted he tell me more about the valid guide he had referred to, buthe cut me short. "Figure out a way to validate the fact that you arelooking at yourself," he said.

"Do you have any suggestions as to what can be a valid guide?" Iinsisted.

"Use your own judgment. We are coming to the end of our timetogether. You have to be on your own very soon."

He changed the subject then, and I was left with a clear taste of myineptitude. I was unable to figure out what he wanted or what he meant by avalid guide.

In the next dream in which I saw myself asleep, instead of leaving theroom and walking down the stairs, or waking up screaming, I remained glued, fora 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 awhite T-shirt that was ripped at the shoulder. I tried to come closer andexamine the rip, but moving was beyond my capabilities. I felt a heaviness thatseemed to be part of my very being. In fact, I was all weight. Not knowing whatto do next, I instantly entered into a devastating confusion. I tried to changedreams, but some unaccustomed force kept me staring at my sleeping body.

In the midst of my turmoil, I heard the dreaming emissary saying that nothaving control to move around was frightening me to the point that I might haveto do another recapitulation. The emissary's voice and what it said did notsurprise me at all. I had never felt so vividly and terrifyingly unable tomove. I did not, however, give in to my terror. I examined it and found outthat it was not a psychological terror but a physical sensation ofhelplessness, despair, and annoyance. It bothered me beyond words that I wasnot capable of moving my limbs. My annoyance grew in proportion to myrealization that something outside me had me brutally pinned down. The effort Imade to move my arms or legs was so intense and single-minded that at onemoment I actually saw one leg of my body, sleeping on the bed, flung out as ifkicking.

My awareness was then pulled into my inert, sleeping body, and I woke upwith such a force that it took more than half an hour to calm myself down. Myheart was beating almost erratically. I was shivering, and some of the musclesin my legs twitched uncontrollably. I had suffered such a radical loss of bodyheat 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 sensationof paralysis, and about the fact that I really had been wearing a rippedT-shirt, thus, I had indeed seen myself asleep. Besides, I was deadly afraid ofhypothermia. He was reluctant to discuss my predicament. All I got out of himwas a caustic remark.

"You like drama," he said flatly. "Of course you really sawyourself asleep. The problem is that you got nervous, because your energy bodyhas never been consciously in one piece before. If you ever get nervous andcold again, hold on to your dick. That will restore your body temperature in ajiffy and without any fuss."

I felt a bit offended by his crassness. However, the advice provedeffective. The next time I became frightened, I relaxed and returned to normalin a few minutes, doing what he had prescribed. In this manner, I discoveredthat if I did not fret and kept my annoyance in check, I did not panic. Toremain controlled did not help me move, but it certainly gave me a deepsensation of peace and serenity

After months of useless efforts at walking, I sought don Juan's commentsonce again, not so much for his advice this time but because I wanted toconcede defeat. I was up against an impassable barrier, and I knew withindisputable certainty that I had failed.

"Dreamers have to be imaginative," don Juan said with amalicious grin. "Imaginative you are not. I didn't warn you about havingto use your imagination to move your energy body because I wanted to find outwhether you could resolve the riddle by yourself. You didn't, and your friendsdidn't help you either."

In the past, I had been driven to defend myself viciously whenever heaccused me of lacking imagination. I thought I was imaginative, but having donJuan as a teacher had taught me, the hard way, that I am not. Since I was notgoing 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 theenergy body. You are trying to move it as if you were in the daily world. Wespend so much time and effort learning to walk that we believe our dreamingbodies should also walk. There is no reason why they should, except thatwalking is foremost in our minds."

I marveled at the simplicity of the solution. I instantly knew that donJuan was right. I had gotten stuck again at the level of interpretation. He hadtold me I had to move around once I reached the third gate of dreaming, and tome 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 movelike energy moves fast and directly. Your energy body knows exactly how tomove. It can move as it moves in the inorganic beings' world.

"And this brings us to the other issue here," don Juan addedwith an air of pensiveness. "Why didn't your inorganic being friends helpyou?"

"Why do you call them my friends, don Juan?"

"They are like the classic friends who are not really thoughtful orkind to us but not mean either. The friends who are just waiting for us to turnour 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 askedhim, more rhetorically than not.

"You don't have any suicidal tendency," he said. "What youhave is a total disbelief that you were near death. Since you were not inphysical pain, you can't quite convince yourself you were in mortaldanger."

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. DonJuan listened in silence as I described to him my predicament. I could notdiscard or explain away my urge to go to the inorganic beings' world, in spiteof what I knew about it,

"I have a streak of insanity," I said. "What I do doesn'tmake 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 throwworthless bait at you from time to time to keep you going. To arrange yourdreams to occur every four days without fail is worthless bait. But they didn'tteach 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 bethoroughly out of their reach. It was premature of me to believe that you arefree from them. You are relatively but not completely free. They are stillbidding for your awareness."

I felt a chill in my back. He had touched a sore spot in me. "Tell mewhat to do, don Juan, and I'll do it," I said.

"Be impeccable. I have told you this dozens of times. To beimpeccable means to put your life on the line in order to back up yourdecisions, and then to do quite a lot more than your best to realize thosedecisions. When you are not deciding anything, you are merely playing roulettewith 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 movingmy 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 closerto the bed. Instantly, I was nearly touching my body. I saw my face. In fact, Icould see every pore in my skin. I cannot say that I liked what I saw. My viewof my own body was too detailed to be aesthetically pleasing. Then somethinglike a wind came into the room, totally disarranged everything, and erased myview.

During subsequent dreams, I entirely corroborated that the only way theenergy body can move is to glide or soar. I discussed this with don Juan. Heseemed unusually satisfied with what I had done, which certainly surprised me.I was accustomed to his cold reaction to anything I did in my dreamingpractices.

"Your energy body is used to moving only when something pullsit," he said. "The inorganic beings have been pulling your energybody right and left, and until now you have never moved it by yourself, withyour own volition. It doesn't seem like you've done much, moving the way youdid, 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 yourown."

"Were you considering ending my dreaming practices because I amslow?"

"You're not slow. It takes sorcerers forever to learn to move theenergy body. I was going to end your dreaming practices because I have no moretime. There are other topics, more pressing than dreaming, on which you can useyour energy."

"Now that I've learned how to move my energy body by myself, whatelse should I do, don Juan?"

"Continue moving. Moving your energy body has opened up a new areafor you, an area of extraordinary exploration."

He urged me again to come up with an idea to validate the faithfulness ofmy dreams; that request did not seem as odd as it had the first time he voicedit.

"As you know, to be transported by a scout is the real dreaming taskof the second gate," he explained. "It is a very serious matter, butnot as serious as forging and moving the energy body. Therefore, you have tomake sure, by some means of your own, whether you are actually seeing yourselfasleep or whether you are merely dreaming that you're seeing yourself asleep.Your new extraordinary exploration hinges on really seeing yourselfasleep."

After some heavy pondering and wondering, I believed that I had come upwith the right plan. Having seen my ripped T-shirt gave me an idea for a validguide. I started from the assumption that, if I were actually observing myselfasleep, I would also be observing whether I had the same sleeping attire I hadgone to bed in, an attire that I had decided to change radically every fourdays. I was confident that I was not going to have any difficulty inremembering, in dreams, what I was wearing when I went to bed; the discipline Ihad acquired through my dreaming practices made me think that I had the abilityto 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 notpan out as I thought they would. I lacked the necessary control over mydreaming attention, and I could not quite remember the details of my sleepingattire. Yet something else was definitely at work; somehow I always knewwhether my dreams were ordinary dreams or not. The outstanding aspect of hedreams that were not just ordinary dreams was that my body lay asleep in bedwhile my consciousness observed it.

A notable feature, of these dreams was my room. It was never like my roomin the daily world but an enormous empty hall with my bed at one end. I used tosoar over a considerable distance to be at the side of the bed where my bodylay. The moment I was next to it, a windlike force used to make me hover overit, like a hummingbird. At times the room used to vanish; disappear piece bypiece until only my body and the bed were left. At other times, I used toexperience a complete loss of volition. My dreaming attention seemed then tofunction independently of me. Either it was completely absorbed by the firstitem it encountered in the room or it seemed unable to decide what to do. Inthose instances, I had the sensation that I was helplessly floating, going fromitem to item.

The voice of the dreaming emissary explained to me once that all theelements of the dreams, which were not just commonplace dreams, were reallyenergy configurations different from those of our normal world. The emissary'svoice pointed out that, for example, the walls were liquid. It urged me then toplunge into one of them.

Without thinking twice, I dived into a wall as if I were diving into ahuge lake. I did not feel the waterlike wall; what I felt was not a physicalsensation of plunging into a body of water either. It was more like the thoughtof diving and the visual sensation of going through liquid matter. I was going,headfirst, into something that opened up, like water does, as I kept movingdownward.

The sensation of going down, headfirst, was so real that I began to wonderhow long or how deep or how far I was diving. From my point of view, I spent aneternity in there. I saw clouds and rocklike masses of matter suspended in awaterlike substance. There were some glowing, geometric objects that resembledcrystals, and blobs of the deepest primary colors I had ever seen. There werealso zones of intense light and others of pitch blackness. Everything went byme, either slowly or at a fast speed. I had the thought that I was viewing thecosmos. At the instant of that thought, my speed increased so immensely thateverything became blurred, and all of a sudden, I found myself awake with mynose 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," hesaid. "The dreaming emissary has no business interfering with yourdreaming practices. Or rather, you should not, under any conditions, permit itto do so."

"How can I stop it?"

"Perform a simple but difficult maneuver. Upon entering intodreaming, 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 didnot want to put an end to my relationship with the emissary, but, at the sametime, I wanted to follow don Juan's advice. He noticed my hesitation.

"I know it's a very difficult affair," he conceded, "but ifyou don't do it, the inorganic beings will always have a line on you. If youwant 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 statingyour request, I promise you never to interfere with your dreaming practices andtalk to you only if you ask me direct questions."

I instantly accepted its proposition and sincerely felt that it was a gooddeal. 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. "Youwere sincere; you really intended to voice your request. To be sincere is allthat was required. There was, essentially, no need for you to eliminate theemissary. 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 fromthe emissary. The remarkable consequence was that I began to have dreams inwhich my dream rooms were my room in the daily world, with one difference inthe dreams, my room was always so slanted, so distorted that it looked like agiant cubist painting; obtuse and acute angles were the rule instead of thenormal right angles of walls, ceiling, and floor. In my lopsided room, the veryslant, created by the acute or obtuse angles, was a device to displayprominently some absurd, superfluous, but real detail; for example, intricate linesin the hardwood floor, or weather discolorations in the wall paint, or dustspots on the ceiling, or smudged fingerprints on the edge of a door.

In those dreams, I unavoidably got lost in the waterlike universes of thedetail pointed out by the slant. During my entire dreaming practices, theprofusion of detail in my room was so immense and its pull so intense that itinstantly made me dive into it.

At the first free moment I had, I was at don Juan's place, consulting himabout this state. "I can't overcome my room," I said to him after Ihad given him the details of my dreaming practices.

"What gives you the idea you have to overcome it?" he asked witha grin.

"I feel that I have to move beyond my room, don Juan."

"But you are moving beyond your room. Perhaps you should ask yourselfwhether you are caught again in interpretations. What do you think moving meansin this case?"

I told him walking from my room to the street had been such a hauntingdream 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 thetrap of detail. What upset me the most was my incapacity to free myself fromwhatever caught my attention. To have a modicum of volition was the bottom linefor me.

A very long silence followed. I waited to hear more about the trap ofdetail. After all, he had warned me about its dangers. "You are doingfine," he finally said. "Dreamers take a very long time to perfecttheir energy bodies. And this is exactly what's at stake here perfecting yourenergy body."

Don Juan explained that the reason my energy body was compelled to examinedetail and get inextricably stuck in it was its inexperience, itsincompleteness. He said that sorcerers spend a lifetime consolidating theenergy body by letting it sponge up everything possible.

"Until the energy body is complete and mature, it isself-absorbed," don Juan went on. "It can't get free from thecompulsion to be absorbed by everything. But if one takes this intoconsideration, instead of fighting the energy body, as you're doing now, onecan 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 onthe appropriate position of the assemblage point, and since dreaming is nothingelse but the means to displace it, stalking is, consequently, the way to makethe assemblage point stay put on the perfect position, in this case, theposition where the energy body can become consolidated and from which it cartfinally 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 beenreached. The next step is to stalk it, that is, to fixate it on that positionin order to complete the energy body. He remarked that the procedure issimplicity itself. One intends to stalk it.

Silence and looks of expectation followed that statement. I expected himto 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 dreamingposition," he explained. "Then, let your energy body intend to stayat 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 fixatethem, equally, through intending. And there is no technique for intending. Oneintends through usage."

To have another of my wild assumptions about my worth as a sorcerer wasunavoidable at that point. I had boundless confidence that something was goingto put me on the right track to intend the fixation of my assemblage point onthe ideal spot. I had accomplished in the past all kinds of successfulmaneuvers without knowing how I performed them. Don Juan himself had marveledat my ability or my luck, and I was sure this was going to be one of thoseinstances. 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, muchless on the ideal one.

After months of serious but unsuccessful struggling, I gave up. "Ireally believed I could do it," I said to don Juan, the moment I was inhis house. "I am afraid that nowadays I am more of an egomaniac thanever."

"Not really," he said with a smile. "What happens is thatyou are caught in another of your routinary misinterpretations of terms. Youwant to find the ideal spot, as if you were finding your lost car keys. Thenyou want to tie your assemblage point, as if you were tying your shoes. Theideal spot and the fixation of the assemblage point are metaphors. They havenothing 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 hadsubsided notably. I said that perhaps because I moved in my dreams,compulsively and incessantly, the movement might have been what always managedto stop me before I plunged into the detail I was observing. To be stopped inthat fashion gave me the opportunity to examine the act of being absorbed bydetail. I came to the conclusion that inanimate matter actually possesses animmobilizing force, which I saw as a beam of dull light that kept me pinneddown. For example, many times some minute mark on the walls or in the woodlines of the hardwood floor of my room used to send a line of light thattransfixed 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 tothe size of the cosmos. That view used to last until I woke up, usually with mynose 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 tohave been observing it while I was asleep.

Don Juan smiled and said, "All this is happening to you because theforging of your energy body was completed the moment it moved by itself. Ididn't tell you that, but I insinuated it. I wanted to know whether or not youwere 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 forcedto ask.

"You found out that your energy body had been completed," heanswered.

"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 tovalidate the realness of your dreams, but then something went to work for youand let you know whether you were having a regular dream. That something wasyour energy body. Now, you despair that you couldn't find the ideal spot to fixyour assemblage point. And I tell you that you did. The proof is that, bymoving 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 havefulfilled the drill for the third gate of dreaming moving your energy body byitself. Now you are going to perform the real task seeing energy with yourenergy body.

"You have seen energy before," he went on, "many times, infact. But each of those times, seeing was a fluke. Now you are going to do itdeliberately.

"Dreamers have a rule of thumb," he continued. "If theirenergy body is complete, they see energy every time they gaze at an item in thedaily world. In dreams, if they see the energy of an item, they know they aredealing with a real world, no matter how distorted that world may appear totheir dreaming attention. If they can't see the energy of an item, they are inan 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 ofprojections, where nothing generates energy, like most of our dreams, wherenothing has an energetic effect."

Don Juan then gave me another definition of dreaming a process by whichdreamers isolate dream conditions in which they can find energy-generatingelements. He must have noticed my bewilderment. He laughed and gave another,even more convoluted definition dreaming is the process by which we intend tofind adequate positions of the assemblage point, positions that permit us toperceive energy-generating items in dreamlike states.

He explained that the energy body is also capable of perceiving energythat is quite different from the energy of our own world, as in the case ofitems of the inorganic beings' realm, which the energy body perceives assizzling energy. He added that in our world nothing sizzles; everything herewavers.

"From now on," he said, "the issue of your dreaming isgoing to be to determine whether the items on which you focus your dreamingattention are energy generating, mere phantom projections, or generators offoreign energy."

Don Juan admitted that he had hoped I was going to come up with the ideaof seeing energy as the gauge to determine whether or not I was observing myreal body asleep. He laughed at my spurious device of putting on elaboratesleeping attire, every four days. He said that I'd had, at my fingertips, allthe information necessary to deduce what was the real task of the third gate ofdreaming and to come up with the right idea but that my interpretation systemhad forced me to seek contrived solutions that lacked the simplicity anddirectness of sorcery.