The Art of Dreaming by Carlos Castaneda Page B

experienced the outlandish joy of examining your
dreams' contents. Imagine yourself going from dream to dream, watching
everything, examining every detail. It's very easy to realize that one may sink
to mortal depths. Especially if one is given to indulging."
    "Wouldn't
the body or the brain naturally put a stop to it?"
    "If
it's a natural sleeping situation, meaning normal, yes. But this is not a
normal situation. This is dreaming . A dreamer on crossing the first gate
has already reached the energy body. So what is really going through the second
gate, hopping from dream to dream, is the energy body."
    "What's
the implication of all this, don Juan?"
    "The
implication is that on crossing the second gate you must intend a greater and
more sober control over your dreaming attention : the only safety valve
for dreamers."
    "What
is this safety valve?"
    "You
will find out for yourself that the true goal of dreaming is to perfect
the energy body. A perfect energy body, among other things of course, has such
a control over the dreaming attention that it makes it stop when needed.
This is the safety valve dreamers have. No matter how indulging they might be,
at a given time, their dreaming attention must make them surface."
    I started
all over again on another dreaming quest. This time the goal was more
elusive and the difficulty even greater. Exactly as with my first task, I could
not begin to figure out what to do. I had the discouraging suspicion that all
my practice was not going to be of much help this time. After countless
failures, I gave up and settled down to simply continue my practice of fixing
my dreaming attention on every item of my dreams. Accepting my
shortcomings seemed to give me a boost, and I became even more adept at
sustaining the view of any item in my dreams.
    A year went
by without any change. Then one day something changed. As I was watching a
window in a dream, trying to find out if I could catch a glimpse of the scenery
outside the room, some windlike force, which I felt as a buzzing in my ears,
pulled me through the window to the outside. Just before that pull, my dreaming
attention had been caught by a strange structure some distance away. It
looked like a tractor. The next thing I knew, I was standing by it, examining
it.
    I was
perfectly aware that I was dreaming . I looked around to find out if I
could tell from what window I had been looking. The scene was that of a farm in
the countryside. No buildings were in sight. I wanted to ponder this. However,
the quantity of farm machinery lying around, as if abandoned, took all my
attention. I examined mowing machines, tractors, grain harvesters, disk plows,
thrashers. There were so many that I forgot my original dream. What I wanted
then was to orient myself by watching the immediate scenery. There was
something in the distance that looked like a billboard and some telephone poles
around it.
    The instant
I focused my attention on that billboard, I was next to it. The steel structure
of the billboard gave me a fright. It was menacing. On the billboard itself was
a picture of a building. I read the text; it was an advertisement for a motel.
I had a peculiar certainty that I was in Oregon or northern California.
    I looked
for other features in the environment of my dream. I saw mountains very far
away and some green, round hills not too far. On those hills were clumps of
what I thought were California oak trees. I wanted to be pulled by the green
hills, but what pulled me were the distant mountains. I was convinced that they
were the Sierras.
    All my dreaming energy left me on those mountains. But before it did, I was pulled by every
possible feature. My dream ceased to be a dream. As far as my capacity to
perceive was concerned, I was veritably in the Sierras, zooming into ravines,
boulders, trees, caves. I went from scarp faces to mountain peaks until I had
no more drive and could not focus my dreaming attention on anything. I
felt myself losing control.