Free The Art of Dreaming by Carlos Castaneda

and the mountain town in Arizona. In their place stood
two strange-looking figures. They were thin, less than a foot wide, but long,
perhaps seven feet. They were looming over me like two gigantic earthworms.
    I knew that
it was a dream, but I also knew that I was seeing . Don Juan had
discussed seeing in my normal awareness and in the second attention as
well. Although I was incapable of experiencing it myself, I thought I had
understood the idea of directly perceiving energy. In that dream, looking at
those two strange apparitions, I realized that I was seeing the energy
essence of something unbelievable.
    I remained
very calm. I did not move. The most remarkable thing to me was that they didn't
dissolve or change into something else. They were cohesive beings that retained
their candlelike shape. Something in them was forcing something in me to hold
the view of their shape. I knew it because something was telling me that if I
did not move, they would not move either.
    It all came
to an end, at a given moment, when I woke up with a fright. I was immediately
besieged by fears. A deep preoccupation took hold of me. It was not
psychological worry but rather a bodily sense of anguish, sadness with no
apparent foundation.
    The two
strange shapes appeared to me from then on in every one of my dreaming sessions. Eventually, it was as if I dreamt only to encounter them. They never
attempted to move toward me or to interfere with me in any way. They just stood
there, immobile, in front of me, for as long as my dream lasted. Not only did I
never make any effort to change my dreams but I even forgot the original quest
of my dreaming practices.
    When I
finally discussed with don Juan what was happening to me, I had spent months
solely viewing the two shapes.
    "You
are stuck at a dangerous crossroad," don Juan said. "It isn't right
to chase these beings away, but it isn't right either to let them stay. For the
time being, their presence is a hindrance to your dreaming ."
    "What
can I do, don Juan?"
    "Face
them, right now, in the world of daily life, and tell them to come back later,
when you have more dreaming power."
    "How
do I face them?"
    "It's
not simple, but it can be done. It requires only that you have enough guts,
which of course you do."
    Without
waiting for me to tell him that I had no guts at all, he took me to the hills.
He lived then in northern Mexico, and he had given me the total impression he
was a solitary sorcerer, an old man forgotten by everybody and completely
outside the main current of human affairs. I had surmised, however, that he was
intelligent beyond measure. And because of this I was willing to comply with
what I half-believed were mere eccentricities.
    The
cunningness of sorcerers, cultivated through the ages, was don Juan's
trademark. He made sure that I understood all I could in my normal awareness
and, at the same time, he made sure that I entered into the second attention,
where I understood or at least passionately listened to everything he taught
me. In this fashion, he divided me in two. In my normal consciousness, I could
not understand why or how I was more than willing to take his eccentricities
seriously. In the second attention, it all made sense to me.
    His
contention was that the second attention is available to all of us, but, by
willfully holding on to our half-cocked rationality, some of us more fiercely
than others, keep the second attention at arm's length. His idea was that dreaming brings down the barriers
that surround and insulate the second attention. The day he took me to the
hills of the Sonoran desert to meet the inorganic beings, I was in my normal
state of awareness. Yet somehow I knew I had to do something that was certainly
going to be unbelievable.
    It had
rained lightly in the desert. The red dirt was still wet, and as I walked it
got clumped up in the rubber soles of my shoes. I had to step on rocks to
remove the heavy chunks of dirt. We walked in an easterly direction,