Home, I soon realized that it was impossible for me to answer any of myquestions. In fact, I could not even formulate them. Perhaps that was becausethe boundary of the second attention had begun to collapse on me; this was whenI met Florinda Grau and Carol Tiggs in the world of everyday life. Theconfusion of not knowing them at all yet knowing them so intimately that Iwould have died for them at the drop of a hat was most deleterious to me. I hadmet Taisha Abelar a few years before, and I was just beginning to get used tothe confounded feeling of knowing her without having the vaguest idea of how.To add two more people to my overloaded system proved too much for me. I gotill out of fatigue and had to seek don Juan's aid. I went to the town insouthern Mexico where he and his companions lived.

Don Juan and his fellow sorcerers laughed uproariously at the mere mentionof my turmoils. Don Juan explained to me that they were not really laughing atme but at themselves. My cognitive problems reminded them of the ones they hadhad when the boundary of the second attention had collapsed on them, just as ithad on me. Their awareness, like mine, had not been prepared for it, he said.

"Every sorcerer goes through the same agony," don Juan went on."Awareness is an endless area of exploration for sorcerers and man in general.In order to enhance awareness, there is no risk we should not run, no means weshould refuse. Bear in mind, however, that only in soundness of mind canawareness be enhanced."

Don Juan reiterated, then, that his time was coming to an end and that Ihad to use my resources wisely to cover as much ground as I could before heleft. Talk like that used to throw me into states of profound depression. Butas the time of his departure approached, I had begun to react with moreresignation. I no longer felt depressed, but I still panicked.

Nothing else was said after that. The next day, at his request, I drovedon Juan to Mexico City. We arrived around noon and went directly to the hoteldel Prado, in the Paseo Alameda, the place he usually lodged when he was in thecity. Don Juan had an appointment with a lawyer that day, at four in theafternoon. Since we had plenty of time, we went to have lunch in the famousCafe Tacuba, a restaurant in the heart of downtown where it was purported thatreal meals were served.

Don Juan was not hungry. He ordered only two sweet tamales, while I gorgedmyself on a sumptuous feast. He laughed at me and made signs of silent despairat my healthy appetite.

"I'm going to propose a line of action for you," he said in acurt tone when we had finished our lunch. "It's the last task of the thirdgate of dreaming, and it consists of stalking the stalkers, a most mysteriousmaneuver. To stalk the stalkers means to deliberately draw energy from theinorganic beings' realm in order to perform a sorcery feat."

"What kind of sorcery feat, don Juan?"

"A journey, a journey that uses awareness as an element of theenvironment," he explained. "In the world of daily life, water is anelement of the environment that we use for traveling. Imagine awareness being asimilar element that can be used for traveling. Through the medium ofawareness, scouts from all over the universe come to us, and vice versa; viaawareness, sorcerers go to the ends of the universe."

There had been certain concepts, among the hosts of concepts don Juan hadmade me aware of in the course of his teachings, that attracted my fullinterest without any coaxing. This was one.

"The idea that awareness is a physical element isrevolutionary," I said in awe.

"I didn't say it's a physical element," he corrected me."It's an energetic element. You have to make that distinction. Forsorcerers who see, awareness is a glow. They can hitch their energy body tothat glow and go with it."

"What's the difference between a physical and an energeticelement?" I asked.

"The difference is that physical elements are part of ourinterpretation system, but energetic elements are not. Energetic elements, likeawareness, exist in our universe. But we, as average people, perceive only thephysical elements because we were taught to do so. Sorcerers perceive theenergetic elements for the same reason they were taught to do so."

Don Juan explained that the use of awareness as an energetic element ofour environment is the essence of sorcery, that in terms of practicalities, thetrajectory of sorcery is, first, to free the existing energy in us byimpeccably following the sorcerers' path; second, to use that energy to developthe energy body by means of dreaming; and, third, to use awareness as an elementof the environment in order to enter with the energy body and all ourphysicality into other worlds.

"There are two kinds of energy journeys into other worlds," hewent on. "One is when awareness picks up the sorcerer's energy body andtakes it wherever it may, and the other is when the sorcerer decides, in fullconsciousness, to use the avenue of awareness to make a journey. You've donethe first kind of journeying. It takes an enormous discipline to do thesecond."

After a long silence, don Juan stated that in the life of sorcerers thereare issues that require masterful handling, and that dealing with awareness, asan energetic element open to the energy body, is the most important, vital, anddangerous of those issues.

I had no comment. I was suddenly on pins and needles, hanging on every oneof his words.

"By yourself, you don't have enough energy to perform the last taskof the third gate of dreaming," he went on, "but you and Carol Tiggstogether can certainly do what I have in mind."

He paused, deliberately egging me on with his silence to ask what he hadin mind. I did. His laughter only increased the ominous mood.

"I want you two to break the boundaries of the normal world and,using awareness as an energetic element, enter into another," he said."This breaking and entering amounts to stalking the stalkers. Usingawareness as an element of the environment bypasses the influence of theinorganic beings, but it still uses their energy."

He did not want to give me any more information, in order not to influenceme, he said. His belief was that the less I knew beforehand the better off Iwould be. I disagreed, but he assured me that, in a pinch, my energy body wasperfectly capable of taking care of itself.

We went from the restaurant to the lawyer's office. Don Juan quicklyconcluded his business, and we were, in no time at all, in a taxi on our way tothe airport. Don Juan informed me that Carol Tiggs was arriving on a flightfrom Los Angeles, and that she was coming to Mexico City exclusively to fulfillthis last dreaming task with me.

"The valley of Mexico is a superb place to perform the kind ofsorcery feat you are after," he commented.

"You haven't told me yet what the exact steps to follow are," Isaid.

He didn't answer me. We did not speak any more, but while we waited forthe plane to land, he explained the procedure I had to follow. I had to go toCarol's room at the Regis Hotel, across the street from our hotel, and, aftergetting into a state of total inner silence, with her I had to slip gently intodreaming, voicing our intent to go to the realm of the inorganic beings.

I interrupted to remind him that I always had to wait for a scout to showup before I could manifest out loud my intent to go to the inorganic beings'world.

Don Juan chuckled and said, "You haven't dreamt with Carol Tiggs yet.You'll find out that it's a treat. Sorceresses don't need any props. They justgo to that world whenever they want to; for them, there is a scout on permanentcall."

I could not bring myself to believe that a sorceress would be able to dowhat he was asserting. I thought I had a degree of expertise in handling theinorganic beings' world. When I mentioned to him what was going through mymind, he retorted that I had no expertise whatsoever when it came to whatsorceresses are capable of.

"Why do you think I had Carol Tiggs with me to pull you bodily out ofthat world?" he asked. "Do you think it was because she'sbeautiful?" "Why was it, don Juan?"

"Because I couldn't do it myself; and for her, it was nothing. Shehas a knack for that world."

"Is she an exceptional case, don Juan?"

"Women in general have a natural bent for that realm; sorceressesare, of course, the champions, but Carol Tiggs is better than anyone I knowbecause she, as the nagual woman, has superb energy."

I thought I had caught don Juan in a serious contradiction. He had told methat the inorganic beings were not interested at all in women. Now he wasasserting the opposite.

"No. I'm not asserting the opposite," he remarked when Iconfronted him. "I've said to you that the inorganic beings don't pursuefemales; they only go after males. But I've also said to you that the inorganicbeings are female, and that the entire universe is female to a large degree. Sodraw your own conclusions."

Since I had no way to draw any conclusions, Don Juan explained to me thatsorceresses, in theory, come and go as they please in that world because oftheir enhanced awareness and their femaleness.

"Do you know this for a fact?" I asked.

"The women of my party have never done that," he confessed,"not because they can't but because I dissuaded them. The women of yourparty, on the other hand, do it like changing skirts."

I felt a vacuum in my stomach. I really did not know anything about thewomen of my party. Don Juan consoled me, saying that my circumstances weredifferent from his, as was my role as a nagual. He assured me that I did nothave it in me to dissuade any of the women of my party, even if I stood on myhead.

As the taxi drove us to her hotel, Carol delighted don Juan and me withher impersonations of people we knew. I tried to be serious and questioned herabout our task. She mumbled some apologies for not being able to answer me withthe seriousness I deserved. Don Juan laughed uproariously when she mimicked mysolemn tone of voice.

After registering Carol at the hotel, the three of us meandered arounddowntown, looking for secondhand bookstores. We ate a light dinner at theSanborn's restaurant in the House of Tiles. About ten o'clock, we walked to theRegis Hotel. We went directly to the elevator. My fear had sharpened mycapacity to perceive details. The hotel building was old and massive. Thefurniture in the lobby had obviously seen better days. Yet there was still, allaround us, something left of an old glory that had a definite appeal. I couldeasily understand why Carol liked that hotel so much.

Before we got into the elevator, my anxiety mounted to such heights that Ihad to ask don Juan for last-minute instructions. "Tell me again how weare going to proceed," I begged.

Don Juan pulled us to the huge, ancient stuffed chairs in the lobby andpatiently explained to us that, once we were in the world of the inorganicbeings, we had to voice our intent to transfer our normal awareness to our energybodies. He suggested that Carol and I voice our intent together, although thatpart was not really important. What was important, he said, was that each of usintend the transfer of the total awareness of our daily world to our energybody.

"How do we do this transference of awareness?" I asked."Transferring awareness is purely a matter of voicing our intent andhaving the necessary amount of energy," he said. "Carol knows allthis. She's done it before. She entered physically into the inorganic beings'world when she pulled you out of it, remember? Her energy will do the trick.It'll tip the scales."

"What does it mean to tip the scales? I am in limbo, don Juan."

Don Juan explained that to tip the scales meant to add one's totalphysical mass to the energy body. He said that using awareness as a medium tomake the journey into another world is not the result of applying anytechniques but the corollary of intending and having enough energy. The bulk ofenergy from Carol Tiggs added to mine, or the bulk of my energy added toCarol's, was going to make us into one single entity, energetically capable ofpulling our physicality and placing it on the energy body in order to make thatjourney.

"What exactly do we have to do in order to enter into that Other world?"Carol asked. Her question scared me half to death; I thought she knew what wasgoing on.

"Your total physical mass has to be added to your energy body,"don Juan replied, looking into her eyes. "The great difficulty of thismaneuver is to discipline the energy body, a thing the two of you have alreadydone. Lack of discipline is the only reason the two of you may fail inperforming this feat of ultimate stalking. Sometimes, as a fluke, an averageperson ends up performing it and entering into another world. But this isimmediately explained away as insanity or hallucination."

I would have given anything in the world for don Juan to .Continuetalking. But he put us in the elevator, and we went up to the second floor, toCarol's room, despite my protests and my rational need to know. Deep down,however, my turmoil was not so much that I needed to know; the bottom line wasmy fear. Somehow, this sorcerers' maneuver was more frightening to me thananything I had done so far.

Don Juan's parting words to us were "Forget the self and you willfear nothing." His grin and the nodding of his head Were invitations toponder the statement.

Carol laughed and began to clown, imitating don Juan's voice as he gave ushis cryptic instructions. Her lisping added quite a bit of color to what donJuan had said. Sometimes I found her lisping adorable. Most of the time, Idetested it. Fortunately, that night her lisping was hardly noticeable.

We went to her room and sat down on the edge of the bed. My last consciousthought was that the bed was a relic from the beginning of the century. BeforeI had time to utter a single word, I found myself in a strange-looking bed.Carol was with me. She half sat up at the same time I did. We were naked, eachcovered with a thin blanket.

"What's going on?" she asked in a feeble voice.

"Are you awake?" I asked inanely.

"Of course I am awake," she said in an impatient tone.

"Do you remember where we were?" I asked.

There was a long silence, as she obviously tried to put her thoughts inorder. "I think I am real, but you are not," she finally said."I know where I was before this. And you want to trick me."

I thought she was doing the same thing herself. She knew what was going onand was testing me or pulling my leg. Don Juan had told me that her demons andmine were caginess and distrust. I was having a grand sample of that.

"I refuse to be part of any shit where you are in control," shesaid. She looked at me with venom in her eyes. "I am talking to you,whoever you are."

She took one of the blankets we had been covered with and wrapped herselfwith it. "I am going to lie here and go back to where I came from,"she said, with an air of finality. "You and the nagual go and play witheach other."

"You have to stop this nonsense," I said forcefully. "Weare in another world."

She didn't pay any attention and turned her back to me like an annoyed,pampered child. I did not want to waste my dreaming attention in futilediscussions of realness. I began to examine my surroundings. The only light inthe room was moonlight shining through the window directly in front of us. Wewere in a small room, on a high bed. I noticed that the bed was primitivelyconstructed. Four thick posts had been planted in the ground, and the bed framewas a lattice, made of long poles attached to the posts. The bed had a thickmattress, or rather a compact mattress. There were no sheets or pillows. Filledburlap sacks were stacked up against the walls. Two sacks by the foot of thebed, staggered one on top of the other, served as a stepladder to climb ontoit.

Looking for a light switch, I became aware that the high bed was in acorner, against the wall. Our heads were to the wall; I was on the outside ofthe bed and Carol on the inside. When I sat on the edge of the bed, I realizedthat it was perhaps over three feet above the ground.

Carol sat up suddenly and said with a heavy lisp, "This isdisgusting! The nagual certainly didn't tell me I was going to end up likethis."

"I didn't know it either," I said. I wanted to say more andstart a conversation, but my anxiety had grown to extravagant proportions.

"You shut up," she snapped at me, her voice cracking with anger."You don't exist. You're a ghost. Disappear! Disappear!"

Her lisping was actually cute and distracted me from my obsessive fear. Ishook her by the shoulders. She yelled, not so much in pain as in surprise orannoyance.

"I'm not a ghost," I said. "We made the journey because wejoined our energy."

Carol Tiggs was famous among us for her speed in adapting to any situation.In no time at all she was convinced of the real-ness of our predicament andbegan to look for her clothes in the semidarkness. I marveled at the fact thatshe was not afraid. She became busy, reasoning out loud where she might haveput her clothes had she gone to bed in that room.

"Do you see any chair?" she asked.

I faintly saw a stack of three sacks that might have served as a table orhigh bench. She got out of the bed, went to it, and found her clothes and mine,neatly folded, the way she always handled garments. She handed my clothes tome; they were my clothes, but not the ones I had been wearing a few minutesbefore, in Carol's room at the Regis Hotel.

"These are not my clothes," she lisped. "And yet they aremine. How strange!"

We dressed in silence. I wanted to tell her that I was about to burst withanxiety. I also wanted to comment on the speed of our journey, but, in the timeI had taken to dress, the thought of our journey had become very vague. I couldhardly remember where we had been before waking up in that room. It was as if Ihad dreamt the hotel room. I made a supreme effort to recollect, to push awaythe vagueness that had begun to envelop me. I succeeded in dispelling the fog,but that act exhausted all my energy. I ended up panting and sweating.

"Something nearly, nearly got me," Carol said. I looked at her.She, like me, was covered with perspiration. "It nearly got you too. Whatdo you think it is?"

"The position of the assemblage point," I said with absolutecertainty.

She did not agree with me. "It's the inorganic beings collectingtheir dues," she said shivering. "The nagual told me it was going tobe horrible, but I never imagined anything this horrible."

I was in total agreement with her; we were in a horrifying mess, yet I couldnot conceive what the horror of that situation was. Carol and I were notnovices; we had seen and done endless things, some of them outright terrifying.But there was something in that dream room that chilled me beyond belief.

"We are dreaming, aren't we?" Carol asked.

Without hesitation, I reassured her that we were, although I would havegiven anything to have don Juan there to reassure me of the same thing.

"Why am I so frightened?" she asked me, as if I were capable ofrationally explaining it.

Before I could formulate a thought about it, she answered her questionherself. She said that what frightened her was to realize, at a body level,that perceiving is an all-inclusive act when the assemblage point has beenimmobilized on one position. She reminded me that don Juan had told us that thepower our daily world has over us is a result of the fact that our assemblagepoint is immobile on its habitual position. This immobility is what makes ourperception of the world so inclusive and overpowering that we cannot escapefrom it. Carol also reminded me about another thing the nagual had said that ifwe want to break this totally inclusive force, all we have to do is dispel thefog, that is to say, displace the assemblage point by intending its displacement.

I had never really understood what don Juan meant until the moment I hadto bring my assemblage point to another position, in order to dispel thatworld's fog, which had begun to swallow me.

Carol and I, without saying another word, went to the window and lookedout. We were in the country. The moonlight revealed some low, dark shapes ofdwelling structures. By all indications, we were in the utility or supply roomof a farm or a big country house.

"Do you remember going to bed here?" Carol asked.

"I almost do," I said and meant it. I told her I had to fight tokeep the image of her hotel room in my mind, as a point of reference.

"I have to do the same," she said in a frightened whisper."I know that if we let go of that memory, we are goners."

Then she asked me if I wanted us to leave that shack and venture outside.I did not. My apprehension was so acute that I was unable to voice my words. Icould only give her a signal with my head.

"You are so very right not to want to go out," she said. "Ihave the feeling that if we leave this shack, we'll never make it back."

I was going to open the door and just look outside, but she Stopped me."Don't do that," she said. "You might let the outside in."

The thought that crossed my mind at that instant was that we had beenplaced inside a frail cage. Anything, such as opening the door, might upset theprecarious balance of that cage. At the moment I had that thought, both of ushad the same urge. We took off our clothes as if our lives depended on that; wethen jumped into the high bed without using the two sack steps, only to jumpdown from it in the next instant.

It was evident that Carol and I had the same realization at the same time.She confirmed my assumption when she said, "Anything that we use belongingto this world can only weaken us. If I stand here naked and away from the bedand away from the window, I don't have any problem remembering where I camefrom. But if I lie in that bed or wear those clothes or look out the window, Iam done for."

We stood in the center of the room for a long time, huddled together. Aweird suspicion began to fester in my mind. "How are we going to return toour world?" I asked, expecting her to know.

"The reentry into our world is automatic if we don't let the fog setin," she said with the air of a foremost authority, which was hertrademark.

And she was right. Carol and I woke up, at the same time, in the bed ofher room in the Regis Hotel. It was so obvious we were back in the world ofdaily life that we didn't ask questions or make comments about it. The sunlightwas nearly blinding.

"How did we get back?" Carol asked. "Or rather, when did weget back?"

I had no idea what to say or what to think. I was too numb to speculate,which was all I could have done.

"Do you think that we just returned?" Carol insisted. "Ormaybe we've been asleep here all night. Look! We're naked. When did we take ourclothes off?"

"We took them off in that other world," I said and surprisedmyself with the sound of my voice.

My answer seemed to stump Carol. She looked uncomprehendingly at me andthen at her own naked body.

We sat there without moving for an endless time. Both of us seemed to bedeprived of volition. But then, quite abruptly, we had the same thought atexactly the same time. We got dressed in record time, ran out of the room, wentdown two flights of stairs, crossed the street, and rushed into don Juan'shotel.

Inexplicably and excessively out of breath, since we had not reallyexerted ourselves physically, we took turns explaining to him what we had done.

He confirmed our conjectures. "What you two did was about the mostdangerous thing one can imagine," he said.

He addressed Carol and told her that our attempt had been both a totalsuccess and a fiasco. We had succeeded in transferring our awareness of thedaily world to our energy bodies, thus making the journey with all ourphysicality, but we had failed in avoiding the influence of the inorganicbeings. He said that ordinarily dreamers experience the whole maneuver as aseries of slow transitions, and that they have to voice their intent to useawareness as an element. In our case, all those steps were dispensed with.Because of the intervention of the inorganic beings, the two of us had actuallybeen hurled into a deadly world with a most terrifying speed.

"It wasn't your combined energy that made your journeypossible," he continued. "Something else did that. It even selectedadequate clothes for you."

"Do you mean, nagual, that the clothes and the bed and the roomhappened only because we were being run by the inorganic beings?" Carolasked.

"You bet your life," he replied. "Ordinarily, dreamers aremerely voyeurs. The way your journey turned out, you two got a ringside seatand lived the old sorcerers' damnation. What happened to them was preciselywhat happened to you. The inorganic beings took them to worlds from which theycould not return. I should have known, but it didn't even enter my mind, thatthe inorganic beings would take over and try to set up the same trap for youtwo."

"Do you mean they wanted to keep us there?" Carol asked.

"If you had gotten outside that shack, you'd now be meanderinghopelessly in that world," don Juan said.

He explained that since we entered into that world with all ourphysicality, the fixation of our assemblage points on the position preselectedby the inorganic beings was so overpowering that it created a sort of fog thatobliterated any memory of the world we came from.. He added that the naturalconsequence of such an immobility, as in the case of the sorcerers ofantiquity, is that the dreamer's assemblage point cannot return to its habitualposition.

"Think about this," he urged us. "Perhaps this is exactlywhat is happening to all of us in the world of daily life. We are here, and thefixation of our assemblage point is so overpowering that it has made us forgetwhere we came from, and what our purpose was for coming here."

Don Juan did not want to say any more about our journey. I felt that hewas sparing us further discomfort and fear. He took us to eat a late lunch. Bythe time we reached the restaurant, a couple of blocks down Francisco MaderoAvenue, it was six o'clock in the afternoon. Carol and I had slept, if that iswhat we did, about eighteen hours.

Only don Juan was hungry. Carol remarked with a touch of anger that he waseating like a pig. Quite a few heads turned in our direction on hearing donJuan's laughter.

It was a warm night. The sky was clear. There was a soft, caressing breezeas we sat down on a bench in the Paseo Alameda.

"There is a question that's burning me," Carol said to don Juan."We didn't use awareness as a medium for traveling, right?"

"That's true," don Juan said and sighed deeply. "The taskwas to sneak by the inorganic beings, not be run by them."

"What's going to happen now?" she asked.

"You are going to postpone stalking the stalkers until you two arestronger," he said. "Or perhaps you'll never accomplish it. Itdoesn't really matter; if one thing doesn't work, another will. Sorcery is anendless challenge."

He explained to us again, as if he were trying to fix his explanation inour minds, that in order to use awareness as an element of the environment,dreamers first have to make a journey to the inorganic beings' realm. Then theyhave to use that journey as a springboard, and, while they are in possession ofthe necessary dark energy, they have to intend to be hurled through the mediumof awareness into another world.

"The failure of your trip was that you didn't have time to useawareness as an element for traveling," he went on. "Before you evengot to the inorganic beings' world, you two were already in anotherworld."

"What do you recommend we do?" Carol asked.

"I recommend that you see as little of each other as possible,"he said. "I'm sure the inorganic beings will not pass up the opportunityto get you two, especially if you join forces."

So Carol Tiggs and I deliberately stayed away from each other from thenon. The prospect that we might inadvertently elicit a similar journey was toogreat a risk for us. Don Juan encouraged our decision by repeating over andover that we had enough combined energy to tempt the inorganic beings to lureus again.

Don Juan brought my dreaming practices back to seeing energy inenergy-generating dreamlike states. In the course of time, I saw everythingthat presented itself to me. I entered in this manner into a most peculiarstate I became incapable of rendering intelligently what I saw. My sensationwas always that I had reached states of perception for which I had no lexicon.

Don Juan explained my incomprehensible and indescribable visions as myenergy body using awareness as an element not for journeying, because I neverhad enough energy, but for entering into the energy fields of inanimate matteror of living beings.