DREAMING

“You must start by doing something very simple,” he said. “Tonight in your dreams you must
look at your hands.”
“Every time you look at anything in your dreams it changes shape,” he said after a long silence.
“The trick in learning to set up dreaming is obviously not just to look at things but to sustain the
sight of them. Dreaming is real when one has succeeded in bringing everything into focus. Then
there is no difference between what you do when you sleep and what you do when you are not
sleeping. Do you see what I mean?”
“I’m going to remind you of all the techniques you must practice,” he said. “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
only glance briefly the images do not shift. Then go back to your hands.
“Every time you look at your hands you renew the power needed for dreaming, so in the
beginning don’t look at too many things. Four items will suffice every time. Later on, you may
enlarge the scope until you can cover all you want, but as soon as the images begin to shift and
you feel you are losing control go back to your hands.”
“The next step in setting up dreaming is to learn to travel,” he said. “The same way you have
learned to look at your hands you can will yourself to move, to go places. First you have to
establish a place you want to go to. Pick a well-known spot – perhaps your school, or a park, or
a friend’s house – then, will yourself to go there.”

“This technique is very difficult. You must perform two tasks: you must will yourself to go to the
specific locale; and then, when you have mastered that technique, you have to learn to control
the exact time of your traveling.”

He asked me then if I was capable of selecting topics for dreaming. I said that I did not have the
faintest idea of how to do that.

“The sorcerers’ explanation of how to select a topic for dreaming” he said, “is that a warrior
chooses the topic by deliberately holding an image in his mind while he shuts off his internal
dialogue. In other words, if he is capable of not talking to himself for a moment and then holds
the image or the thought of what he wants in dreaming, even if only for an instant, then the
desired topic will come to him. I’m sure you’ve done that, although you were not aware of it.”

“The Nagual Juan Matus used to put cold, wet river pebbles on my belly to get me to feel that
area. Or he would place a weight on it; I had a chunk of lead that he got for me. He would make
me close my eyes and focus my attention on the spot where the weight was. I used to fall
asleep every time. But that didn’t bother him. It doesn’t really matter what one does as long as
the attention is on the womb.
“I don’t know why the Nagual didn’t tell me from the very beginning,” la Gorda said, “that the
best position for a woman to start from is to sit with her legs crossed and then let the body fall,
as it may do once the attention is on dreaming. The Nagual told me about this perhaps a year
after I had begun. Now I sit in that position for a moment, I feel my womb, and right away I’m
dreaming.”

TECHNIQUE:

Sit in a chair with eyes closed.

Follow that little voice in your head. It’s talking. Mostly complaining in all likelihood.
It has to go to sleep. But you have to remain awake.
You have 2 choices. Either force it off, as fiercely as you can (unpleasant but more effective), or
relax it off.
Relaxing it off is “cheating”, meaning, you look for something else to pay attention to. Something
coming from the second attention.
It’s what you see, when your eyes are closed and the darkness seems to change. It’s still plain
darkness, but it takes on some feeling of depth.
If you’re lucky, you’ll see colors. That’s great. Just watch them. And let that internal voice relax away.
Gently try to reduce the number of words. As they reduce, try to notice how many seconds between
words.
If you can watch and let yourself drift, you’ll be creating a passage directly into dreaming. A
conscious pathway. If you do this for 1 hour each day, you’ll begin to see dreaming images. Just a
little thing here and there. A light, a spinning thing.
Play with the things you see coming from the second attention. If you see a light, roll your gaze and
fan it. Make it brighter. Blow into it. Figure out some way to make that light brighter.
If you find yourself fuming over some social situation, that was the command to take an inventory.
Something out there wants you to look inside. The problem is, you always look for the things that
have you imprisoned here. Try to look at the second attention instead. If you get stuck and start
fussing again for a long time, just remember to return to practicing.
Don’t worry! There’s a trick built into all of this. Just trying is actually what we’re after. You’re
intending dreaming.
Keep careful track of blacking out, and how long it takes you to realize it. Gently lift the head back up
if it fell, and keep trying. When you can catch your chin just as it begins to fall, you’re in the sweet
spot. Look for tingling. That’s the assemblage point moving.
And never forget this: If you struggle like a son of a bitch to get silent, and nothing happens, you just
built more lean muscle that you would have, had you succeeded easily. Remember this: we're
building "silence muscles" here.
In the chair, you are facing infinity with your eyes closed.
On the bed, you're facing slumber and loss of consciousness.
Take your pick. Infinity and hard work, or unconsciousness and less effort.