as I took big gulps of air. I was
veritably choking. Peals of laughter came out of him, like ocean waves. I
forcefully pulled away and walked toward the plaza. He followed me.
"I never imagined you were going to get so upset," he said, as new
waves of laughter shook his body.
"Why didn't you tell me that the tenant is a woman?"
"That sorcerer in there is the death defier," he said solemnly. "For
such a sorcerer, so versed in the shifts of the assemblage point, to be a
man or a woman is a matter of choice or convenience. This is the first part
of the lesson in dreaming I said you were going to get. And the death defier
is the mysterious visitor who's going to guide you through it."
He held his sides as laughter made him cough. I was speechless. Then a
sudden fury possessed me. I was not mad at don Juan or myself or anyone in
particular. It was a cold fury, which made me feel as if my chest and all my
neck muscles were going to explode.
"Let's go back to the church," I shouted, and I didn't recognize my own
voice.
"Now, now," he said softly. "You don't have to jump into the fire just
like that. Think. Deliberate. Measure things up. Cool that mind of yours.
Never in your life have you been put to such a test. You need calmness now.
"I can't tell you what to do," he continued. "I can only, like any
other nagual, put you in front of your challenge, after telling you, in
quite oblique terms, everything that is pertinent. This is another of the
nagual's maneuvers: to say everything without saying it or to ask without
asking."
I wanted to get it over with quickly. But don Juan said that a moment's
pause would restore whatever was left of my self-assurance. My knees were
about to give in. Solicitously, don Juan made me sit down on the curb. He
sat next to me.
"The first part of the dreaming lesson in question is that maleness and
femaleness are not final states but are the result of a specific act of
positioning the assemblage point," he said. "And this act is, naturally, a
matter of volition and training. Since it was a subject close to the old
sorcerers' hearts, they are the only ones who can shed light on it."
Perhaps because it was the only rational thing to do, I began to argue
with don Juan. "I can't accept or believe what you are saying," I said. I
felt heat rising to my face.
"But you saw the woman," don Juan retorted. "Do you think that all of
this is a trick?"
"I don't know what to think."
"That being in the church is a real woman," he said forcefully. "Why
should that be so disturbing to you? The fact that she was born a man
attests only to the power of the old sorcerers' machinations. This shouldn't
surprise you. You have already embodied all the principles of sorcery."
My insides were about to burst with tension. In an accusing tone, don
Juan said that I was just being argumentative. With forced patience but real
pomposity, I explained to him the biological foundation of maleness and
femaleness.
"I understand all that," he said. "And you're right in what you're
saying. Your flaw is to try to make your assessments universal."
"What we're talking about are basic principles," I shouted. "They'll be
pertinent to man here or in any other place in the universe."
"True. True," he said in a quiet voice. "Everything you say is true as
long as our assemblage point remains on its habitual position. But the
moment it is displaced beyond certain boundaries and our daily world is no
longer in function, none of the principles you cherish has the total value
you're talking about.
"Your mistake is to forget that the death defier has transcended those
boundaries thousands upon thousands of times. It doesn't take a genius to
realize that the tenant is no longer bound by the same forces that bind you
now."
I told him that my quarrel, if it could be called a quarrel, was not
with him but with accepting the practical side of sorcery, which, up to that
moment, had been so farfetched that it had never posed a real problem to me.
I reiterated that, as a dreamer, it was within my experience to attest that
in dreaming anything is possible. I reminded him that he himself had
sponsored and cultivated this conviction, together with the ultimate
necessity for soundness of mind. What he was proposing as the tenant's case
was not sane. It was a subject only for dreaming, certainly not for the
daily world. I let him know that to me it was an abhorrent and untenable
proposition.
"Why this violent reaction?" he asked with a smile.
His question caught me off guard. I felt embarrassed. "I think it
threatens me at the core," I admitted. And I meant it. To think that the
woman in the church was a man was somehow nauseating to me.
A thought played in my mind: perhaps the tenant is a transvestite. I
queried don Juan, in earnest, about this possibility. He laughed so hard he
seemed about to get ill.
"That's too mundane a possibility," he said. "Maybe your old friends
would do such a thing. Your new ones are more resourceful and less
masturbatory. I repeat. That being in the church is a woman. It is a she.
And she has all the organs and attributes of a female." He smiled
maliciously "You've always been attracted to women, haven't you? It seems
that this situation has been tailored just for you."
His mirth was so intense and childlike that it was contagious. We both
laughed. He, with total abandon. I, with total apprehension.
I came to a decision then. I stood up and said out loud that I had no
desire to deal with the tenant in any form or shape. My choice was to bypass
all this business and go back to don Juan's house and then home.
Don Juan said that my decision was perfectly all right with him, and we
started back to his house. My thoughts raced wildly. Am I doing the right
thing? Am I running away out of fear? Of course, I immediately rationalized
my decision as the right and unavoidable one. After all, I assured myself, I
was not interested in acquisitions, and the tenant's gifts were like
acquiring property. Then doubt and curiosity hit me. There were so many
questions I could have asked the death defier.
My heart began to pound so intensely I felt it beating against my
stomach. The pounding suddenly changed into the emissary's voice. It broke
its promise not to interfere and said that an incredible force was
accelerating my heart beat in order to drive me back to the church; to walk
toward don Juan's house was to walk toward my death.
I stopped walking and hurriedly confronted don Juan with the emissary's
words. "Is this true?" I asked.
"I am afraid it is," he admitted sheepishly.
"Why didn't you tell me yourself, don Juan? Were you going to let me
die because you think I am a coward?" I asked in a furious mood.
"You were not going to die just like that. Your energy body has endless
resources. And it had never occurred to me to think you're a coward. I
respect your decisions, and I don't give a damn about what motivates them.
"You are at the end of the road, just like me. So be a true nagual.
Don't be ashamed of what you are. If you were a coward, I think you would
have died of fright years ago. But if you're too afraid to meet the death
defier, then die rather than face him. There is no shame in that."
"Let's go back to the church," I said, as calmly as I could. "Now we're
getting to the crux of the matter!" don Juan exclaimed. "But first, let's go
back to the park and sit down on a bench and carefully consider your
options. We can spare the time; besides, it's too early for the business at
hand."
We walked back to the park and immediately found an unoccupied bench
and sat down.
"You have to understand that only you, yourself, can make the decision
to meet or not to meet the tenant or to accept or reject his gifts of
power," don Juan said. "But your decision has to be voiced to the woman in
the church, face to face and alone; otherwise it won't be valid."
Don Juan said that the tenant's gifts were extraordinary but that the
price for them was tremendous. And that he himself did not approve of
either, the gifts or the price.
"Before you make your real decision," don Juan continued, "you have to
know all the details of our transactions with that sorcerer."
"I'd rather not hear about this anymore, don Juan," I pleaded.
"It's your duty to know," he said. "How else are you going to make up
your mind?"
"Don't you think that the less I know about the tenant the better off
I'll be?"
"No. This is not a matter of hiding until the danger is over. This is
the moment of truth. Everything you've done and experienced in the
sorcerers' world has channeled you to this spot. I didn't want to say it,
because I knew your energy body was going to tell you, but there is no way
to get out of this appointment. Not even by dying. Do you understand?" He
shook me by the shoulders. "Do you understand?" he repeated.
I understood so well that I asked him if it would be possible for him
to make me change levels of awareness in order to alleviate my fear and
discomfort. He nearly made me jump with the explosion of his no.
"You must face the death defier in coldness and with ultimate
premeditation," he went on. "And you can't do this by proxy."
Don Juan calmly began to repeat everything he had already told me about
the death defier. As he talked, I realized that part of my confusion was the
result of his use of words. He rendered "death defier" in Spanish as el
desafiante de la muerte, and "tenant" as el inquilino, both of which
automatically denote a male. But in describing the relationship between the
tenant and the naguals of his line, don Juan kept on mixing the
Spanish-language male and female gender denotation, creating a great
confusion in me.
He said that the tenant was supposed to pay for the energy he took from
the naguals of our lineage, but that whatever he paid has bound those
sorcerers for generations. As payment for the energy taken from all those
naguals, the woman in the church taught them exactly what to do to displace
their assemblage point to some specific positions, which she herself had
chosen. In other words, she bound every one of those men with a gift of
power consisting of a preselected, specific position of the assemblage point
and all its implications. "What do you mean by 'all its implications,' don
Juan?"
"I mean the negative results of those gifts. The woman in the church
knows only of indulging. There is no frugality, no temperance in that woman.
For instance, she taught the nagual Julian how to arrange his assemblage
point to be, just like her, a woman. Teaching this to my benefactor, who was
an incurable voluptuary, was like giving booze to a drunkard."
"But isn't it up to each one of us to be responsible for what we do?"
"Yes, indeed. However, some of us have more difficulty than others in
being responsible. To augment that difficulty deliberately, as that woman
does, is to put too much unnecessary pressure on us."
"How do you know the woman in the church does this deliberately?"
"She has done it to every one of the naguals of my line. If we look at
ourselves fairly and squarely, we have to admit that the death defier has
made us, with his gifts, into a line of very indulging, dependent
sorcerers."
I could not overlook his inconsistency of language usage any longer,
and I complained to him. "You have to speak about that sorcerer as either a
male or a female, but not as both," I said harshly. "I'm too stiff, and your
arbitrary use of gender makes me all the more uneasy."
"I am very uneasy myself," he confessed. "But the truth is that the
death defier is both: male and female. I've never been able to take that
sorcerer's change with grace. I was sure you would feel the same way, having
seen him as a man first."
Don Juan reminded me of a time, years before, when he took me to meet
the death defier and I met a man, a strange Indian who was not old but not
young either and was very slightly built. I remember mostly his strange
accent and his use of one odd metaphor when describing things he allegedly
had seen. He said, mis ojos se pasearon, my eyes walked on. For instance, he
said, "My eyes walked on the helmets of the Spanish conquerors."
The event was so fleeting in my mind that I had always thought the
meeting had lasted only a few minutes. Don Juan later told me that I had
been gone with the death defier for a whole day.
"The reason I was trying to find out from you earlier whether you knew
what was going on," don Juan continued, "was because I thought that years
ago you had made an appointment with the death defier yourself."
"You were giving me undue credit, don Juan. In this instance, I really
don't know whether I am coming or going. But what gave you the idea that I
knew?"
"The death defier seemed to have taken a liking to you. And that meant
to me that he might have already given you a gift of power, although you
didn't remember it. Or he might have set up your appointment with him, as a
woman. I even suspected she had given you precise directions."
Don Juan remarked that the death defier, being definitely a creature of
ritual habits, always met the naguals of his line first as a man, as it had
happened with the nagual Sebastian, and subsequently as a woman.
"Why do you call the death defier's gifts, gifts of power? And why the
mystery?" I asked. "You yourself can displace your assemblage point to
whatever spot you want, isn't that so?"
"They are called gifts of power because they are products of the
specialized knowledge of the sorcerers of antiquity," he said. "The mystery
about the gifts is that no one on this earth, with the exception of the
death defier, can give us a sample of that knowledge. And, of course, I can
displace my assemblage point to whatever spot I want, inside or outside
man's energy shape. But what I can't do, and only the death defier can, is
to know what to do with my energy body in each one of those spots in order
to get total perception, total cohesion."
He explained, then, that modern-day sorcerers do not know the details
of the thousands upon thousands of possible positions of the assemblage
point.
"What do you mean by details?" I asked.
"Particular ways of treating the energy body in order to maintain the
assemblage point fixed on specific positions," he replied.
He took himself as an example. He said that the death defier's gift of
power to him had been the position of the assemblage point of a crow and the
procedures to manipulate his energy body to get the total perception of a
crow. Don Juan explained that total perception, total cohesion was what the
old sorcerers sought at any cost, and that, in the case of his own gift of
power, total perception came to him by means of a deliberate process he had
to learn, step by step, as one learns to work a very complex machine.
Don Juan further explained that most of the shifts modern-day sorcerers
experience are mild shifts within a thin bundle of energetic luminous
filaments inside the luminous egg, a bundle called the band of man, or the
purely human aspect of the universe's energy. Beyond that band, but still
within the luminous egg, lies the realm of the grand shifts. When the
assemblage point shifts to any spot on that area, perception is still
comprehensible to us, but extremely detailed procedures are required for
perception to be total.
"The inorganic beings tricked you and Carol Tiggs in your last journey
by helping you two to get total cohesion on a grand shift," don Juan said.
"They displaced your assemblage points to the farthest possible spot, then
helped you perceive there as if you were in your daily world. A nearly
impossible thing. To do that type of perceiving a sorcerer needs pragmatic
knowledge, or influential friends.
"Your friends would have betrayed you in the end and left you and Carol
to fend for yourselves and learn pragmatic measures in order to survive in
that world. You two would have ended filled to the brim with pragmatic
procedures, just like those most knowledgeable old sorcerers. "Every grand
shift has different inner workings," he continued, "which modern sorcerers
could learn if they knew how to fixate the assemblage point long enough at
any grand shift. Only the sorcerers of ancient times had the specific
knowledge required to do this."
Don Juan went on to say that the knowledge of specific procedures
involved in shifts was not available to the eight naguals who preceded the
nagual Sebastian, and that the tenant showed the nagual Sebastian how to
achieve total perception on ten new positions of the assemblage point. The
nagual Santisteban received seven, the nagual Lujan fifty, the nagual
Rosendo six, the nagual Elias four, the nagual Julian sixteen, and he was
shown two; that made a total of ninety-five specific positions of the
assemblage point that his lineage knew about. He said that if I asked him
whether he considered this an advantage to his lineage, he would have to say
no, because the weight of those gifts put them closer to the old sorcerers'
mood.
"Now it's your turn to meet the tenant," he continued. "Perhaps the
gifts he will give you will offset our total balance and our lineage will
plunge into the darkness that finished off the old sorcerers."
"This is so horribly serious, it's sickening," I said. "I most
sincerely sympathize with you," he retorted with a serious expression. "I
know it's no consolation to you if I say that this is the toughest trial of
a modern nagual. To face something so old and mysterious as the tenant is
not awe-inspiring but revolting. At least it was to me, and still is."
"Why do I have to continue with it, don Juan?"
"Because, without knowing it, you accepted the death defier challenge.
I drew an acceptance from you in the course of your apprenticeship, in the
same manner my teacher drew one from me, surreptitiously.
"I went through the same horror, only a little more brutally than you."
He began to chuckle. "The nagual Julian was given to playing horrendous
jokes. He told me that there was a very beautiful and passionate widow who
was madly in love with me. The nagual used to take me to church often, and I
had seen the woman staring at me. I thought she was a good-looking woman.
And I was a horny young man. When the nagual said that she liked me, I fell
for it. My awakening was very rude."
I had to fight not to laugh at don Juan's gesture of lost innocence.
Then the idea of his predicament hit me, as being not funny but ghastly.
"Are you sure, don Juan, that that woman is the tenant?" I asked,
hoping that perhaps it was a mistake or a bad joke.
"I am very, very sure," he said. "Besides, even if I were so dumb as to
forget the tenant, my seeing can't fail me."
"Do you mean, don Juan, that the tenant has a different type of
energy?"
"No, not a different type of energy, but certainly different energy
features than a normal person."
"Are you absolutely sure, don Juan, that that woman is the tenant?" I
insisted, driven by a strange revulsion and fear.
"That woman is the tenant!" don Juan exclaimed in a voice that admitted
no doubts.
We remained quiet. I waited for the next move in the midst of a panic
beyond description.
"I have already said to you that to be a natural man or a natural woman
is a matter of positioning the assemblage point," don Juan said. "By natural
I mean someone who was born either male or female. To a seer, the shiniest
part of the assemblage point faces outward, in the case of females and
inward, in the case of males. The tenant's assemblage point was originally
facing inward, but he changed it by twisting it around and making his
egglike energy shape look like a shell that has curled up on itself."
12. THE WOMAN IN THE CHURCH
Don Juan and I sat in silence. I had run out of questions, and he
seemed to have said to me all that was pertinent. It could not have been
more than seven o'clock, but the plaza was unusually deserted. It was a warm
night. In the evenings, in that town, people usually meandered around the
plaza until ten or eleven.
I took a moment to reconsider what was happening to me. My time with
don Juan was coming to an end. He and his party were going to fulfill the
sorcerers' dream of leaving this world and entering into inconceivable
dimensions. On this basis of my limited success in dreaming, I believed that
the claims were not illusory but extremely sober, although contrary to
reason. They were seeking to perceive the unknown, and they had made it.
Don Juan was right in saying that, by inducing a systematic
displacement of the assemblage point, dreaming liberates perception,
enlarging the scope of what can be perceived. For the sorcerers of his
party, dreaming had not only opened the doors of other perceivable worlds
but prepared them for entering into those realms in full awareness.
Dreaming, for them, had become ineffable, unprecedented, something whose
nature and scope could only be alluded to, as when don Juan said that it is
the gateway to the light and to the darkness of the universe.
There was only one thing pending for them: my encounter with the death
defier. I regretted that don Juan had not given me notice so that I could
prepare myself better. But he was a nagual who did everything of importance
on the spur of the moment, without any warning.
For a moment, I seemed to be doing fine, sitting with don Juan in that
park, waiting for things to develop. But then my emotional stability
suffered a downward swing and, in the twinkling of an eye, I was in the
midst of a dark despair. I was assailed by petty considerations about my
safety, my goals, my hopes in the world, my worries. Upon examination,
however, I had to admit that perhaps the only true worry I had was about my
three cohorts in don Juan's world. Yet, if I thought it out, even that was
no real worry to me. Don Juan had taught them to be the kind of sorceresses
who always knew what to do, and, most important, he had prepared them always
to know what to do with what they knew.
Having had all the possible worldly reasons for feeling anguish
stripped off me a long time ago, all I had been left with was concern for
myself. And I gave myself to it shamelessly. One last indulging for the
road: the fear of dying at the hands of the death defier. I became so afraid
that I got sick to my stomach. I tried to apologize, but don Juan laughed.
"You're not in any way unique at barfing out of fear," he said. "When I
met the death defier, I wet my pants. Believe me."
I waited in silence for a long, unbearable moment. "Are you ready?" he
asked. I said yes. And he added, standing up, "Let's go then and find out
how you are going to stand up in the firing line."
He led the way back to the church. To the best of my ability, all I
remember of that walk, to this day, is that he had to drag me bodily the
whole way. I do not remember arriving at the church or entering it. The next
thing I knew, I was kneeling on a long, worn-out wooden pew next to the
woman I had seen earlier. She was smiling at me. Desperately, I looked
around, trying to spot don Juan, but he was nowhere in sight. I would have
flown like a bat out of hell had the woman not restrained me by grabbing my
arm.
"Why should you be so afraid of poor little me?" the woman asked me in
English.
I stayed glued to the spot where I was kneeling. What had taken me
entirely and instantaneously was her voice. I cannot describe what it was
about its raspy sound that called out the most recondite memories in me. It
was as if I had always known that voice.
I remained there immobile, mesmerized by that sound. She asked me
something else in English, but I could not make out what she was saying. She
smiled at me, knowingly. "It's all right," she whispered in Spanish. She was
kneeling to my right. "I understand real fear. I live with it."
I was about to talk to her when I heard the emissary's voice in my ear.
"It's the voice of Hermelinda, your wet nurse," it said. The only thing I
had ever known about Hermelinda was the story I was told of her being
accidentally killed by a runaway truck. That the woman's voice would stir
such deep, old memories was shocking to me. I experienced a momentary
agonizing anxiety. "I am your wet nurse!" the woman exclaimed softly. "How
extraordinary! Do you want my breast?" Laughter convulsed her body.
I made a supreme effort to remain calm, yet I knew that I was quickly
losing ground and in no time at all was going to take leave of my senses.
"Don't mind my joking," the woman said in a low voice. "The truth is
that I like you very much. You are bustling with energy. And we are going to
get along fine."
Two older men knelt down right in front of us. One of them turned
curiously to look at us. She paid no attention to him and kept on whispering
in my ear.
"Let me hold your hand," she pleaded. But her plea was like a command.
I surrendered my hand to her, unable to say no. "Thank you. Thank you for
your confidence and your trust in me," she whispered.
The sound of her voice was driving me mad. Its raspiness was so exotic,
so utterly feminine. Not under any circumstances would I have taken it for a
man's voice laboring to sound womanly. It was a raspy voice, but not a
throaty or harsh-sounding one. It was more like the sound of bare feet
softly walking on gravel.
I made a tremendous effort to break an invisible sheet of energy that
seemed to have enveloped me. I thought I succeeded. I stood up, ready to
leave, and I would have had not the woman also stood up and whispered in my
ear, "Don't run away. There is so much I have to tell you."
I automatically sat down, stopped by curiosity. Strangely, my anxiety
was suddenly gone, and so was my fear. I even had enough presence to ask the
woman, "Are you really a woman?" She chuckled softly, like a young girl.
Then she voiced a convoluted sentence. "If you dare to think that I would
transform myself into a fearsome man and cause you harm, you are gravely
mistaken," she said, accentuating even more that strange, mesmeric voice.
"You are my benefactor. I am your servant, as I have been the servant of all
the naguals who preceded you."
Gathering all the energy I could, I spoke my mind to her. "You are
welcome to my energy," I said. "It's a gift from me to you, but I don't want
any gifts of power from you. And I really mean this."
"I can't take your energy for free," she whispered. "I pay for what I
get, that's the deal. It's foolish to give your energy for free."
"I've been a fool all my life. Believe me," I said. "I can surely
afford to make you a gift. I have no problem with it. You need the energy,
take it. But I don't need to be saddled with unnecessaries. I have nothing
and I love it." "Perhaps," she said pensively.
Aggressively, I asked her whether she meant that perhaps she would take
my energy or that she did not believe I had nothing and loved it.
She giggled with delight and said that she might take my energy since I
was so generously offering it but that she had to make a payment. She had to
give me a thing of similar value.
As I heard her speak, I became aware that she spoke Spanish with a most
extravagant foreign accent. She added an extra phoneme to the middle
syllable of every word. Never in my life had I heard anyone speak like that.
"Your accent is quite extraordinary," I said. "Where is it from?"
"From nearly eternity," she said and sighed. We had begun to connect. I
understood why she sighed. She was the closest thing to permanent, while I
was temporary. That was my advantage. The death defier had worked herself
into a corner, and I was free.
I examined her closely. She seemed to be between thirty-five and forty
years old. She was a dark, thoroughly Indian woman, almost husky, but not
fat or even hefty. I could see that the skin of her forearms and hands was
smooth, the muscles, firm and youthful. I judged that she was five feet, six
or seven inches tall. She wore a long dress, a black shawl, and guaraches.
In her kneeling position, I could also see her smooth heels and part of her
powerful calves. Her midsection was lean. She had big breasts that she could
not or perhaps did not want to hide under her shawl. Her hair was jet black
and tied in a long braid. She was not beautiful, but she was not homely
either. Her features were in no way outstanding. I felt that she could not
possibly have attracted anybody's attention, except for her eyes, which she
kept low, hidden beneath downcast eyelids. Her eyes were magnificent, clear,
peaceful. Apart from don Juan's, I had never seen eyes more brilliant, more
alive.
Her eyes put me completely at ease. Eyes like that could not be
malevolent. I had a surge of trust and optimism and the feeling that I had
known her all my life. But I was also very conscious of something else: my
emotional instability. It had always plagued me in don Juan's world, forcing
me to be like a yo-yo. I had moments of total trust and insight only to be
followed by abject doubts and distrust. This event was not going to be
different. My suspicious mind suddenly came up with the warning thought that
I was falling under the woman's spell.
"You learned Spanish late in life, didn't you?" I said, just to get out
from under my thoughts and to avoid her reading them.
"Only yesterday," she retorted and broke into a crystalline laughter,
her small, strangely white teeth, shining like a row of pearls.
People turned to look at us. I lowered my forehead as if in deep
prayer. The woman moved closer to me. "Is there a place where we could
talk?" I asked. "We are talking here," she said. "I have talked here with
all the naguals of your line. If you whisper, no one will know we are
talking."
I was dying to ask her about her age. But a sobering memory came to my
rescue. I remembered a friend of mine who for years had been setting up all
kinds of traps to make me confess my age to him. I detested his petty
concern, and now I was about to engage in the same behavior. I dropped it
instantly.
I wanted to tell her about it, just to keep the conversation going. She
seemed to know what was going through my mind. She squeezed my arm in a
friendly gesture, as if to say that we had shared a thought.
"Instead of giving me a gift, can you tell me something that would help
me in my way?" I asked her.
She shook her head. "No," she whispered. "We are extremely different.
More different than I believed possible."
She got up and slid sideways out of the pew. She deftly genuflected as
she faced the main altar. She crossed herself and signaled me to follow her
to a large side altar to our left.
We knelt in front of a life-size crucifix. Before I had time to say
anything, she spoke. "I've been alive for a very, very long time," she said.
"The reason I have had this long life is that I control the shifts and
movements of my assemblage point. Also, I don't stay here in your world too
long. I have to save the energy I get from the naguals of your line." "What
is it like to exist in other worlds?" I asked. "It's like in your dreaming,
except that I have more mobility. And I can stay longer anywhere I want.
Just like if you would stay as long as you wanted in any of your dreams."
"When you are in this world, are you pinned down to this area alone?"
"No. I go everywhere I want." "Do you always go as a woman?"
"I've been a woman longer than a man. Definitely, I like it much
better. I think I've nearly forgotten how to be a man. I am all female!"
She took my hand and made me touch her crotch. My heart was pounding in
my throat. She was indeed a female.
"I can't just take your energy," she said, changing the subject. "We
have to strike another kind of agreement."
Another wave of mundane reasoning hit me then. I wanted to ask her
where she lived when she was in this world. I did not need to voice my
question to get an answer.
"You're much, much younger than I," she said, "and you already have
difficulty telling people where you live. And even if you take them to the
house you own or pay rent on, that's not where you live."
"There are so many things I want to ask you, but all I do is think
stupid thoughts," I said.
"You don't need to ask me anything," she went on. "You already know
what I know. All you needed was a jolt in order to claim what you already
know. I am giving you that jolt."
Not only did I think stupid thoughts but I was in a state of such
suggestibility that no sooner had she finished saying that I knew what she
knew than I felt I knew everything, and I no longer needed to ask any more
questions. Laughingly, I told her about my gullibility.
"You're not gullible," she assured me with authority. "You know
everything, because you're now totally in the second attention. Look
around!"
For a moment, I could not focus my sight. It was exactly as if water
had gotten into my eyes. When I arranged my view, I knew that something
portentous had happened. The church was different, darker, more ominous, and
somehow harder. I stood up and took a couple of steps toward the nave. What
caught my eye were the pews; they were made not out of lumber but out of
thin, twisted poles. These were homemade pews, set inside a magnificent
stone building. Also, the light in the church was different. It was
yellowish, and its dim glow cast the blackest shadows I had ever seen. It
came from the candles of the many altars. I had an insight about how well
candlelight mixed with the massive stone walls and ornaments of a colonial
church.
The woman was staring at me; the brightness of her eyes was most
remarkable. I knew then that I was dreaming and she was directing the dream.
But I was not afraid of her or of the dream. I moved away from the side
altar and looked again at the nave of the church. There were people kneeling
in prayer there.
Lots of them, strangely small, dark, hard people. I could see their
bowed heads all the way to the foot of the main altar. The ones who were
close to me stared at me, obviously, in disapproval. I was gaping at them
and at everything else. I could not hear any noise, though. People moved,
but there was no sound.
"I can't hear anything," I said to the woman, and my voice boomed,
echoing as if the church were a hollow shell.
Nearly all the heads turned to look at me. The woman pulled me back
into the darkness of the side altar.
"You will hear if you don't listen with your ears," she said. "Listen
with your dreaming attention."
It appeared that all I needed was her insinuation. I was suddenly
flooded by the droning sound of a multitude in prayer. I was instantly swept
up by it. I found it the most exquisite sound I had ever heard. I wanted to
rave about it to the woman, but she was not by my side. I looked for her.
She had nearly reached the door. She turned there to signal me to follow
her. I caught up with her at the portico. The streetlights were gone. The
only illumination was moonlight. The facade of the church was also
different; it was unfinished. Square blocks of limestone lay everywhere.
There were no houses or buildings around the church. In the moonlight the
scene was eerie.
"Where are we going?" I asked her.
"Nowhere," she replied. "We simply came out here to have more space,
more privacy. Here we can talk our little heads off."
She urged me to sit down on a quarried, half-chiseled piece of
limestone. "The second attention has endless treasures to be discovered,"
she began. "The initial position in which the dreamer places his body is of
key importance. And right there is the secret of the ancient sorcerers, who
were already ancient in my time. Think about it."
She sat so close to me that I felt the heat of her body. She put an arm
around my shoulder and pressed me against her bosom. Her body had a most
peculiar fragrance; it reminded me of trees or sage. It was not that she was
wearing perfume; her whole being seemed to exude that characteristic odor of
pine forests. Also the heat of her body was not like mine or like that of
anyone else I knew. Hers was a cool, mentholated heat, even, balanced. The
thought that came to my mind was that her heat would press on relentlessly
but knew no hurry.
She began then to whisper in my left ear. She said that the gifts she
had given to the naguals of my line had to do with what the old sorcerers
used to call, the twin positions. That is to say, the initial position in
which a dreamer holds his physical body to begin dreaming is mirrored by the
position in which he holds his energy body, in dreams, to fixate his
assemblage point on any spot of his choosing. The two positions make a unit,
she said, and it took the old sorcerers thousands of years to find out the
perfect relationship between any two positions. She commented, with a
giggle, that the sorcerers of today will never have the time or the
disposition to do all that work, and that the men and women of my line were
indeed lucky to have her to give them such gifts. Her laughter had a most
remarkable, crystalline sound.
I had not quite understood her explanation of the twin positions.
Boldly, I told her that I did not want to practice those things but only
know about them as intellectual possibilities. "What exactly do you want to
know?" she asked softly. "Explain to me what you mean by the twin positions,
or the initial position in which a dreamer holds his body to start
dreaming." I said.
"How do you lie down to start your dreaming?" she asked. "Any which
way. I don't have a pattern. Don Juan never stressed this point." "Well, I
do stress it," she said and stood up. She changed positions. She sat down to
my right and whispered in my other ear that, in accordance with what she
knew, the position in which one places the body is of utmost importance. She
proposed a way of testing this by performing an extremely delicate but
simple exercise.
"Start your dreaming by lying on your right side, with your knees a bit
bent," she said. "The discipline is to maintain that position and fall
asleep in it. In dreaming, then, the exercise is to dream that you lie down
in exactly the same position and fall asleep again." "What does that do?" I
asked.
"It makes the assemblage point stay put, and I mean really stay put, in
whatever position it is at the instant of that second falling asleep." "What
are the results of this exercise?" "Total perception. I am sure your
teachers have already told you that my gifts are gifts of total perception."
"Yes. But I think I am not clear about what total perception means," I
lied.
She ignored me and went on to tell me that the four variations of the
exercise were to fall asleep lying on the right side, the left, the back,
and the stomach. Then in dreaming the exercise was to dream of falling
asleep a second time in the same position as the dreaming had been started.
She promised me extraordinary results, which she said were not possible to
foretell.
She abruptly changed the subject and asked me, "What's the gift you
want for yourself?" "No gift for me. I've told you that already." "I insist.
I must offer you a gift, and you must accept it. That is our agreement."
"Our agreement is that we give you energy. So take it from me. This one
is on me. My gift to you."
The woman seemed dumbfounded. And I persisted in telling her it was all
right with me that she took my energy. I even told her that I liked her
immensely. Naturally, I meant it. There was something supremely sad and, at
the same time, supremely appealing about her.
"Let's go back inside the church," she muttered. "If you really want to
make me a gift," I said, "take me for a stroll in this town, in the
moonlight."
She shook her head affirmatively. "Provided that you don't say a word,"
she said.
"Why not?" I asked, but I already knew the answer. "Because we are
dreaming," she said. "I'll be taking you deeper into my dream."
She explained that as long as we stayed in the church, I had enough
energy to think and converse, but that beyond the boundaries of that church
it was a different situation. "Why is that?" I asked daringly.
In a most serious tone, which not only increased her eeriness but
terrified me, the woman said, "Because there is no out there. This is a
dream. You are at the fourth gate of dreaming, dreaming my dream."
She told me that her art was to be capable of projecting her intent,
and that everything I saw around me was her intent. She said in a whisper
that the church and the town were the results of her intent; they did not
exist, yet they did. She added, looking into my eyes, that this is one of
the mysteries of intending in the second attention the twin positions of
dreaming. It can be done, but it cannot be explained or comprehended.
She told me then that she came from a line of sorcerers who knew how to
move about in the second attention by projecting their intent. Her story was
that the sorcerers of her line practiced the art of projecting their
thoughts in dreaming in order to accomplish the truthful reproduction of any
object or structure or landmark or scenery of their choice.
She said that the sorcerers of her line used to start by gazing at a
simple object and memorizing every detail of it. They would then close their
eyes and visualize the object and correct their visualization against the
true object until they could see it, in its completeness, with their eyes
shut. The next thing in their developing scheme was to dream with the object
and create in the dream, from the point of view of their own perception, a
total materialization of the object. This act, the woman said, was called
the first step to total perception.
From a simple object, those sorcerers went on to take more and more
complex items. Their final aim was for all of them together to visualize a
total world, then dream that world and thus re-create a totally veritable
realm where they could exist.
"When any of the sorcerers of my line were able to do that," the woman
went on, "they could easily pull anyone into their intent, into their dream.
This is what I am doing to you now, and what I did to all the naguals of
your line."
The woman giggled. "You better believe it," she said, as if I did not.
"Whole populations disappeared dreaming like that. This is the reason I said
to you that this church and this town are one of the mysteries of intending
in the second attention."
"You say that whole populations disappeared that way. How was it
possible?" I asked.
"They visualized and then re-created in dreaming the same scenery," she
replied. "You've never visualized anything, so it's very dangerous for you
to go into my dream."
She warned me, then, that to cross the fourth gate and travel to places
that exist only in someone else's intent was perilous, since every item in
such a dream had to be an ultimately personal item.
"Do you still want to go?" she asked.
I said yes. Then she told me more about the twin positions. The essence
of her explanation was that if I were, for instance, dreaming of my hometown
and my dream had started when I lay down on my right side, I could very
easily stay in the town of my dream if I would lie on my right side, in the
dream, and dream that I had fallen asleep. The second dream not only would
necessarily be a dream of my hometown, but would be the most concrete dream
one can imagine.
She was confident that in my dreaming training I had gotten countless
dreams of great concreteness, but she assured me that every one of them had
to be a fluke. For the only way to have absolute control of dreams was to
use the technique of the twin positions.
"And don't ask me why," she added. "It just happens. Like everything
else."
She made me stand up and admonished me again not to talk or stray from
her. She took my hand gently, as if I were a child, and headed toward a
clump of dark silhouettes of houses. We were on a cobbled street. Hard river
rocks had been pounded edgewise into the dirt. Uneven pressure had created
uneven surfaces. It seemed that the cobblers had followed the contours of
the ground without bothering to level it.
The houses were big, whitewashed, one-story, dusty buildings with tiled
roofs. There were people meandering quietly. Dark shadows inside the houses
gave me the feeling of curious but frightened neighbors gossiping behind
doors. I could also see the flat mountains around the town.
Contrary to what had happened to me all along in my dreaming, my mental
processes were unimpaired. My thoughts were not pushed away by the force of
the events in the dream. And my mental calculations told me I was in the
dream version of the town where don Juan lived, but at a different time. My
curiosity was at its peak. I was actually with the death defier in her
dream. But was it a dream? She herself had said it was a dream. I wanted to
watch everything, to be superalert. I wanted to test everything by seeing
energy. I felt embarrassed, but the woman tightened her grip on my hand as
if to signal me that she agreed with me.
Still feeling absurdly bashful, I automatically stated out loud my
intent to see. In my dreaming practices, I had been using all along the
phrase "I want to see energy." Sometimes, I had to say it over and over
until I got results. This time, in the woman's dream town, as I began to
repeat it in my usual manner, the woman began to laugh. Her laughter was
like don Juan's: a deep, abandoned belly laugh.
"What's so funny?" I asked, somehow contaminated by her mirth.
"Juan Matus doesn't like the old sorcerers in general and me in
particular," the woman said between fits of laughter. "All we have to do, in
order to see in our dreams, is to point with our little finger at the item
we want to see. To make you yell in my dream is his way to send me his
message. You have to admit that he's really clever." She paused for a
moment, then said in the tone of a revelation, "Of course, to yell like an
asshole works too."
The sorcerers' sense of humor bewildered me beyond measure. She laughed
so hard she seemed to be unable to proceed with our walk. I felt stupid.
When she calmed down and was perfectly poised again, she politely told me
that I could point at anything I wanted in her dream, including herself.
I pointed at a house with the little finger of my left hand. There was
no energy in that house. The house was like any other item of a regular
dream. I pointed at everything around me with the same result.
"Point at me," she urged me. "You must corroborate that this is the
method dreamers follow in order to see."
She was thoroughly right. That was the method. The instant I pointed my
finger at her, she was a blob of energy. A very peculiar blob of energy, I
may add. Her energetic shape was exactly as don Juan had described it; it
looked like an enormous seashell, curled inwardly along a cleavage that ran
its length.
"I am the only energy-generating being in this dream," she said. "So
the proper thing for you to do is just watch everything."
At that moment I was struck, for the first time, by the immensity of
don Juan's joke. He had actually contrived to have me learn to yell in my
dreaming so that I could yell in the privacy of the death defier's dream. I
found that touch so funny that laughter spilled out of me in suffocating
waves.
"Let's continue our walk," the woman said softly when I had no more
laughter in me.
There were only two streets that intersected; each had three blocks of
houses. We walked the length of both streets, not once but four times. I
looked at everything and listened with my dreaming attention for any noises.
There were very few, only dogs barking in the distance, or people speaking
in whispers as we went by.
The dogs barking brought me an unknown and profound longing. I had to
stop walking. I sought relief by leaning my shoulder against a wall. The
contact with the wall was shocking to me, not because the wall was unusual
but because what I had leaned on was a solid wall, like any other wall I had
ever touched. I felt it with my free hand. I ran my fingers on its rough
surface. It was indeed a wall!
Its stunning realness put an immediate end to my longing and renewed my
interest in watching everything. I was looking, specifically, for features
that could be correlated with the town of my day. However, no matter how
intently I observed, I had no success. There was a plaza in that town, but
it was in front of the church, facing the portico.
In the moonlight the mountains around the town were clearly visible and
almost recognizable. I tried to orient myself, observing the moon and the
stars, as if I were in the consensual reality of everyday life. It was a
waning moon, perhaps a day after full. It was high over the horizon. It must
have been between eight and nine in the evening. I could see Orion to the
right of the moon; its two main stars, Betelgeuse and Rigel, were on a
horizontal straight line with the moon. I estimated it to be early December.
My time was May. In May, Orion is nowhere in sight at that time. I gazed at
the moon as long as I could. Nothing shifted. It was the moon as far as I
could tell. The disparity in time got me very excited.
As I reexamined the southern horizon, I thought I could distinguish the
bell-like peak visible from don Juan's patio. I tried next to figure out
where his house might have been. For one instant I thought I found it. I
became so enthralled that I pulled my hand out of the woman's grip.
Instantly, a tremendous anxiety possessed me. I knew that I had to go back
to the church, because if I did not I would simply drop dead on the spot I
turned around and bolted for the church. The woman quickly grabbed my hand
and followed me.
As we approached the church at a running pace, I became aware that the
town in that dreaming was behind the church. Had I taken this into
consideration, orientation might have been possible. As it was, I had no
more dreaming attention. I focused all of it on the architectural and
ornamental details on the back of the church. I had never seen that part of
the building in the world of everyday life, and I thought that if I could
record its features in my memory, I could check them later against the
details of the real church.
That was the plan I concocted on the spur of the moment. Something
inside me, however, scorned my efforts at validation. During all my
apprenticeship, I had been plagued by the need for objectivity, which had
forced me to check and recheck everything about don Juan's world. Yet it was
not validation per se that was always at stake but the need to use this
drive for objectivity as a crutch to give me protection at the moments of
most intense cognitive disruption; when it was time to check what I had
validated, I never went through with it.
Inside the church, the woman and I knelt in front of the small altar on
the left side, where we had been, and the next instant, I woke up in the
well-illuminated church of my day.
The woman crossed herself and stood up. I did the same automatically.
She took my arm and began to walk toward the door.
"Wait, wait," I said and was surprised that I could talk. I could not
think clearly, yet I wanted to ask her a convoluted question. What I wanted
to know was how anyone could have the energy to visualize every detail of a
whole town.
Smiling, the woman answered my unvoiced question; she said that she was
very good at visualizing because after a lifetime of doing it, she had many,
many lifetimes to perfect it. She added that the town I had visited and the
church where we had talked were examples of her recent visualizations. The
church was the same church where Sebastian had been a sexton. She had given
herself the task of memorizing every detail of every corner of that church
and that town, for that matter, out of a need to survive.
She ended her talk with a most disturbing afterthought. "Since you know
quite a bit about this town, even though you've never tried to visualize
it," she said, "you are now helping me to intend it. I bet you won't believe
me if I tell you that this town you are looking at now doesn't really exist,
outside your intent and mine."
She peered at me and laughed at my sense of horror, for I had just
fully realized what she was saying. "Are we still dreaming?" I asked,
astonished.
"We are," she said. "But this dreaming is more real than the other,
because you're helping me. It is not possible to explain it beyond saying
that it is happening. Like everything else." She pointed all around her.
"There is no way to tell how it happens, but it does. Remember always what
I've told you: this is the mystery of intending in the second attention."
She gently pulled me closer to her. "Let's stroll to the plaza of this
dream," she said. "But perhaps I should fix myself a little bit so you'll be
more at ease."
I looked at her uncomprehendingly as she expertly changed her
appearance. She did this with very simple, mundane maneuvers. She undid her
long skirt, revealing the very average midcalf skirt she was wearing
underneath. She then twisted her long braid into a chignon and changed from
her guaraches into inch-heel shoes she had in a small cloth sack.
She turned over her reversible black shawl to reveal a beige stole. She
looked like a typical middle-class Mexican woman from the city, perhaps on a
visit to that town.
She took my arm with a woman's aplomb and led the way to the plaza.
"What happened to your tongue?" she said in English. "Did the cat eat
it?"
I was totally engrossed in the unthinkable possibility that I was still
in a dream; what is more, I was beginning to believe that if it were true, I
ran the risk of never waking up.
In a nonchalant tone that I could not recognize as mine, I said, "I
didn't realize until now that you spoke in English to me before. Where did
you learn it?"
"In the world out there. I speak many languages." She paused and
scrutinized me. "I've had plenty of time to learn them. Since we're going to
spend a lot of time together, I'll teach you my own language sometime." She
giggled, no doubt at my look of despair.
I stopped walking. "Are we going to spend a lot of time together?" I
asked, betraying my feelings.
"Of course," she replied in a joyful tone. "You are, and I should say
very generously, going to give me your energy, for free. You said that
yourself, didn't you?" I was aghast.
"What's the problem?" the woman asked, shifting back into Spanish.
"Don't tell me that you regret your decision. We are sorcerers. It's too
late to change your mind. You are not afraid, are you?"
I was again more than terrified, but, if I had been put on the spot to
describe what terrified me, I would not have known. I was certainly not
afraid of being with the death defier in another dream or of losing my mind
or even my life. Was I afraid of evil? I asked myself. But the thought of
evil could not withstand examination. As a result of all those years on the
sorcerers' path, I knew without the shadow of a doubt that in the universe
only energy exists; evil is merely a concatenation of the human mind,
overwhelmed by the fixation of the assemblage point on its habitual
position. Logically, there was really nothing for me to be afraid of. I knew
that, but I also knew that my real weakness was to lack the fluidity to fix
my assemblage point instantly on any new position to which it was displaced.
The contact with the death defier was displacing my assemblage point at a
tremendous rate, and I did not have the prowess to keep up with the push.
The end result was a vague pseudo-sensation of fearing that I might not be
able to wake up.
"There is no problem," I said. "Let's continue our dream walk."
She linked her arm with mine, and we reached the park in silence. It
was not at all a forced silence. But my mind was running in circles. How
strange, I thought; only a while ago I had walked with don Juan from the
park to the church, in the midst of the most terrifying normal fear. Now I
was walking back from the church to the park with the object of my fear, and
I was more terrified than ever, but in a different, more mature, more deadly
manner.
To fend off my worries, I began to look around. If this was a dream, as
I believed it was, there was a way to prove or disprove it. I pointed my
finger at the houses, at the church, at the pavement in the street. I
pointed at people. I pointed at everything. Daringly, I even grabbed a
couple of people, whom I seemed to scare considerably. I felt their mass.
They were as real as anything I consider real, except that they did not
generate energy. Nothing in that town generated energy. Everything seemed
real and normal, yet it was a dream.
I turned to the woman, who was holding on to my arm, and questioned her
about it.
"We are dreaming," she said in her raspy voice and giggled. "But how
can people and things around us to be so real, so three-dimensional?"
"The mystery of intending in the second attention!" she exclaimed
reverently. "Those people out there are so real that they even have
thoughts."
That was the last stroke. I did not want to question anything else. I
wanted to abandon myself to that dream. A considerable jolt on my arm
brought me back to the moment. We had reached the plaza. The woman had
stopped walking and was pulling me to sit down on a bench. I knew I was in
trouble when I did not feel the bench underneath me as I sat down. I began
to spin. I thought I was ascending. I caught a most fleeting glimpse of the
park, as if I were looking at it from above.
"This is it!" I yelled. I thought I was dying. The spinning ascension
turned into a twirling descent into blackness.
15. FLYING ON THE WINGS OF INTENT
"Make an effort, nagual," a woman's voice urged me. "Don't sink.
Surface, surface. Use your dream-techniques!"
My mind began to work. I thought it was the voice of an English
speaker, and I also thought that if I were to use dreaming techniques, I had
to find a point of departure to energize myself.
"Open your eyes," the voice said. "Open them now. Use the first thing
you see as a point of departure."
I made a supreme effort and opened my eyes. I saw trees and blue sky.
It was daytime! A blurry face was peering at me. But I could not focus my
eyes. I thought that it was the woman in the church looking at me.
"Use my face," the voice said. It was a familiar voice, but I could not
identify it. "Make my face your home base; then look at everything," the
voice went on.
My ears were clearing up, and so were my eyes. I gazed at the woman's
face, then at the trees in the park, at the wrought-iron bench, at people
walking by, and back again at her face.
In spite of the fact that her face changed every time I gazed at her, I
began to experience a minimum of control. When I was more in possession of
my faculties, I realized that a woman was sitting on the bench, holding my
head on her lap. And she was not the woman in the church; she was Carol
Tiggs. "What are you doing here?" I gasped. My fright and surprise were so
intense that I wanted to jump up and run, but my body was not ruled at all
by my mental awareness. Anguishing moments followed, in which I tried
desperately but uselessly to get up. The world around me was too clear for
me to believe I was still dreaming, yet my impaired motor control made me
suspect that this was really a dream. Besides, Carol's presence was too
abrupt; there were no antecedents to justify it.
Cautiously, I attempted to will myself to get up, as I had done
hundreds of times in dreaming, but nothing happened. If I ever needed to be
objective, this was the time. As carefully as I could, I began to look at
everything within my field of vision with one eye first. I repeated the
process with the other eye. I took the consistency between the images of my
two eyes as an indication that I was in the consensual reality of everyday
life.
Next, I examined Carol. I noticed at that moment that I could move my
arms. It was only my lower body that was veritably paralyzed. I touched
Carol's face and hands; I embraced her. She was solid and, I believed, the
real Carol Tiggs. My relief was enormous, because for a moment I'd had the
dark suspicion that she was the death defier masquerading as Carol.
With utmost care, Carol helped me to sit up on the bench. I had been
sprawled on my back, half on the bench and half on the ground. I noticed
then something totally out of the norm. I was wearing faded blue Levi's and
worn brown leather boots. I also had on a Levi's jacket and a denim shirt.
"Wait a minute," I said to Carol. "Look at me! Are these my clothes? Am
I myself?"
Carol laughed and shook me by the shoulders, the way she always did to
denote camaraderie, manliness, that she was one of the boys.
"I'm looking at your beautiful self," she said in her funny forced
falsetto. "Oh massa, who else could it possibly be?"
"How in the hell can I be wearing Levi's and boots?" I insisted. "I
don't own any."
"Those are my clothes you are wearing. I found you naked!" "Where?
When?"
"Around the church, about an hour ago. I came to the plaza here to look
for you. The nagual sent me to see if I could find you. I brought the
clothes, just in case."
I told her that I felt terribly vulnerable and embarrassed to have
wandered around without my clothes.
"Strangely enough, there was no one around," she assured me, but I felt
she was saying it just to ease my discomfort. Her playful smile told me so.
"I must have been with the death defier all last night, maybe even
longer," I said. "What day is it today?"
"Don't worry about dates," she said, laughing. "When you are more
centered, you'll count the days yourself."
"Don't humor me, Carol Tiggs. What day is it today?" My voice was a
gruff, no-nonsense voice that did not seem to belong to me.
"It's the day after the big fiesta," she said and slapped me gently on
my shoulder. "We all have been looking for you since last night." "But what
am I doing here?"
"I took you to the hotel across the plaza. I couldn't carry you all the
way to the nagual's house; you ran out of the room a few minutes ago, and we
ended up here." "Why didn't you ask the nagual for help?" "Because this is
an affair that concerns only you and me. We must solve it together."
That shut me up. She made perfect sense to me. I asked her one more
nagging question. "What did I say when you found me?"
"You said that you had been so deeply into the second attention and for
such a long time that you were not quite rational yet. All you wanted to do
was to fall asleep." "When did I lose my motor control?"
"Only a moment ago. You'll get it back. You yourself know that it is
quite normal, when you enter into the second attention and receive a
considerable energy jolt, to lose control of your speech or of your limbs."
"And when did you lose your lisping, Carol?" I caught her totally by
surprise. She peered at me and broke into a hearty laugh. "I've been working
on it for a long time," she confessed. "I think that it's terribly annoying
to hear a grown woman lisping. Besides, you hate it."
Admitting that I detested her lisping was not difficult. Don Juan and I
had tried to cure her, but we had concluded she was not interested in
getting cured. Her lisping made her extremely cute to everyone, and don
Juan's feelings were that she loved it and was not going to give it up.
Hearing her speak without lisping was tremendously rewarding and exciting to
me. It proved to me that she was capable of radical changes on her own, a
thing neither don Juan nor I was ever sure about.
"What else did the nagual say to you when he sent you to look for me?"
I asked.
"He said you were having a bout with the death defier." In a
confidential tone, I revealed to Carol that the death defier was a woman.
Nonchalantly, she said that she knew it.
"How can you know it?" I shouted. "No one has ever known this, apart
from don Juan. Did he tell you that himself?"
"Of course he did," she replied, unperturbed by my shouting. "What you
have overlooked is that I also met the woman in the church. I met her before
you did. We amiably chatted in the church for quite a while."
I believed Carol was telling me the truth. What she was describing was
very much what don Juan would do. He would in all likelihood send Carol as a
scout in order to draw conclusions.
"When did you see the death defier?" I asked. "A couple of weeks ago,"
she replied in a matter-of-fact tone. "It was no great event for me. I had
no energy to give her, or at least not the energy that woman wants."
"Why did you see her then? Is dealing with the nagual woman also part
of the death defier's and sorcerers' agreement?"
"I saw her because the nagual said that you and I are interchangeable,
and for no other reason. Our energy bodies have merged many times. Don't you
remember? The woman and I talked about the ease with which we merge. I
stayed with her maybe three or four hours, until the nagual came in and got
me out."
"Did you stay in the church all that time?" I asked, because I could
hardly believe that they had knelt in there for three or four hours only
talking about the merging of our energy bodies.
"She took me into another facet of her intent," Carol conceded after a
moment's thought. "She made me see how she actually escaped her captors."
Carol related then a most intriguing story. She said that according to
what the woman in the church had made her see, every sorcerer of antiquity
fell, inescapably, prey to the inorganic beings. The inorganic beings, after
capturing them, gave them power to be the intermediaries between our world
and their realm, which people called the netherworld.
The death defier was unavoidably caught in the nets of the inorganic
beings. Carol estimated that he spent perhaps thousands of years as a
captive, until the moment he was capable of transforming himself into a
woman. He had clearly seen this as his way out of that world the day he
found out that the inorganic beings regard the female principle as
imperishable. They believe that the female principle has such a pliability
and its scope is so vast that its members are impervious to traps and setups
and can hardly be held captive. The death defier's transformation was so
complete and so detailed that she was instantly spewed out of the inorganic
beings' realm.
"Did she tell you that the inorganic beings are still after her?" I
asked.
"Naturally they are after her," Carol assured me. "The woman told me
she has to fend off her pursuers every moment of her life." "What can they
do to her?"
"Realize she was a man and pull her back to captivity, I suppose. I
think she fears them more than you can think it's possible to fear
anything."
Nonchalantly, Carol told me that the woman in the church was thoroughly
aware of my run-in with the inorganic beings and that she also knew about
the blue scout.
"She knows everything about you and me," Carol continued. "And not
because I told her anything, but because she is part of our lives and our
lineage. She mentioned that she had always followed all of us, you and me in
particular."
Carol related to me the instances that the woman knew in which Carol
and I had acted together. As she spoke, I began to experience a unique
nostalgia for the very person who was in front of me: Carol Tiggs. I wished
desperately to embrace her. I reached out to her, but I lost my balance and
fell off the bench.
Carol helped me up from the pavement and anxiously examined my legs and
the pupils of my eyes, my neck and my lower back. She said that I was still
suffering from an energetic jolt.
She propped my head on her bosom and caressed me as if I were a
malingering child she was humoring.
After a while I did feel better; I even began to regain my motor
control.
"How do you like the clothes I am wearing?" Carol asked me all of a
sudden. "Am I overdressed for the occasion? Do I look all right to you?"
Carol was always exquisitely dressed. If there was anything certain
about her, it was her impeccable taste in clothes. In fact, as long as I had
known her, it had been a running joke between don Juan and the rest of us
that her only virtue was her expertise at buying beautiful clothes and
wearing them with grace and style.
I found her question very odd and made a comment. "Why would you be
insecure about your appearance? It has never bothered you before. Are you
trying to impress someone?" "I'm trying to impress you, of course," she
said. "But this is not the time," I protested. "What's going on with the
death defier is the important matter, not your appearance."
"You'd be surprised how important my appearance is." She laughed. "My
appearance is a matter of life or death for both of us."
"What are you talking about? You remind me of the nagual setting up my
meeting with the death defier. He nearly drove me nuts with his mysterious
talk."
"Was his mysterious talk justified?" Carol asked with a deadly serious
expression. "It most certainly was," I admitted.
"So is my appearance. Humor me. How do you find me? Appealing,
unappealing, attractive, average, disgusting, overpowering, bossy?"
I thought for a moment and made my assessment. I found Carol very
appealing. This was quite strange to me. I had never consciously thought
about her appeal. "I find you divinely beautiful," I said. "In fact, you're
downright stunning." "Then this must be the right appearance." She sighed.
I was trying to figure out her meanings, when she spoke again. She
asked, "What was your time with the death defier like?"
I succinctly told her about my experience, mainly about the first
dream. I said that I believed the death defier had made me see that town,
but at another time in the past.
"But that's not possible," she blurted out. "There is no past or future
in the universe. There is only the moment."
"I know that it was the past," I said. "It was the same church, but a
different town."
"Think for a moment," she insisted. "In the universe there is only
energy, and energy has only a here and now, an endless and ever-present here
and now." "So what do you think happened to me, Carol?" "With the death
defier's help, you crossed the fourth gate of dreaming," she said. "The
woman in the church took you into her dream, into her intent. She took you
into her visualization of this town. Obviously, she visualized it in the
past, and that visualization is still intact in her. As her present
visualization of this town must be there too."
After a long silence she asked me another question. "What else did the
woman do with you?"
I told Carol about the second dream. The dream of the town as it stands
today.
"There you are," she said. "Not only did the woman take you into her
past intent but she further helped you cross the fourth gate by making your
energy body journey to another place that exists today, only in her intent."
Carol paused and asked me whether the woman in the church had explained
to me what intending in the second attention meant.
I did remember her mentioning but not really explaining what it meant
to intend in the second attention. Carol was dealing with concepts don Juan
had never spoken about.
"Where did you get all these novel ideas?" I asked, truly marveling at
how lucid she was.
In a noncommittal tone, Carol assured me that the woman in the church
had explained to her a great deal about those intricacies.
"We are intending in the second attention now," she continued. "The
woman in the church made us fall asleep; you here, and I in Tucson. And then
we fell asleep again in our dream. But you don't remember that part, while I
do. The secret of the twin positions. Remember what the woman told you; the
second dream is intending in the second attention: the only way to cross the
fourth gate of dreaming."
After a long pause, during which I could not articulate one word, she
said, "I think the woman in the church really made you a gift, although you
didn't want to receive one. Her gift was to add her energy to ours in order
to move backward and forward on the here-and-now energy of the universe."
I got extremely excited. Carol's words were precise, apropos. She had
defined for me something I considered undefinable, although I did not know
what it was that she had defined. If I could have moved, I would have leapt
to hug her. She smiled beatifically as I kept on ranting nervously about the
sense her words made to me. I commented rhetorically that don Juan had never
told me anything similar.
"Maybe he doesn't know," Carol said, not offensively but
conciliatorily.
I did not argue with her. I remained quiet for a while, strangely void
of thoughts. Then my thoughts and words erupted out of me like a volcano.
People went around the plaza, staring at us every so often or stopping in
front of us to watch us. And we must have been a sight: Carol Tiggs kissing
and caressing my face while I ranted on and on about her lucidity and my
encounter with the death defier.
When I was able to walk, she guided me across the plaza to the only
hotel in town. She assured me that I did not yet have the energy to go to
don Juan's house but that everybody there knew our whereabouts.
"How would they know our whereabouts?" I asked. "The nagual is a very
crafty old sorcerer," she replied, laughing. "He's the one who told me that
if I found you energetically mangled, I should put you in the hotel rather
than risk crossing the town with you in tow."
Her words and especially her smile made me feel so relieved that I kept
on walking in a state of bliss. We went around the corner to the hotel's
entrance, half a block down the street, right in front of the church. We
went through the bleak lobby, up the cement stairway to the second floor,
directly to an unfriendly room I had never seen before. Carol said that I
had been there; however, I had no recollection of the hotel or the room. I
was so tired, though, that I could not think about it. I just sank into the
bed, face down. All I wanted to do was sleep, yet I was too keyed up. There
were too many loose ends, although everything seemed so orderly. I had a
sudden surge of nervous excitation and sat up.
"I never told you that I hadn't accepted the death defier's gift," I
said, facing Carol. "How did you know I didn't?"
"Oh, but you told me that yourself," she protested as she sat down next
to me. "You were so proud of it. That was the first thing you blurted out
when I found you."
This was the only answer, so far, that did not quite satisfy me. What
she was reporting did not sound like my statement.
"I think you read me wrong," I said. "I just didn't want to get
anything that would deviate me from my goal." "Do you mean you didn't feel
proud of refusing?" "No. I didn't feel anything. I am no longer capable of
feeling anything, except fear."
I stretched my legs and put my head on the pillow. I felt that if I
closed my eyes or did not keep on talking I would be asleep in an instant. I
told Carol how I had argued with don Juan, at the beginning of my
association with him, about his confessed motive for staying on the
warrior's path. He had said that fear kept him going in a straight line, and
that what he feared the most was to lose the nagual, the abstract, the
spirit.
"Compared with losing the nagual, death is nothing," he had said with a
note of true passion in his voice. "My fear of losing the nagual is the only
real thing I have, because without it I would be worse than dead."
I said to Carol that I had immediately contradicted don Juan and
bragged that since I was impervious to fear, if I had to stay within the
confines of one path, the moving force for me had to be love.
Don Juan had retorted that when the real pull comes, fear is the only
worthwhile condition for a warrior. I secretly resented him for what I
thought was his covert narrow-mindedness.
"The wheel has done a full turn," I said to Carol, "and look at me now.
I can swear to you that the only thing that keeps me going is the fear of
losing the nagual."
Carol stared at me with a strange look I had never seen in her. "I dare
to disagree," she said softly. "Fear is nothing compared with affection.
Fear makes you run wildly; love makes you move intelligently."
"What are you saying, Carol Tiggs? Are sorcerers people in love now?"
She did not answer. She lay next to me and put her head on my shoulder.
We stayed there, in that strange, unfriendly room, for a long time, in total
silence.
"I feel what you feel," Carol said abruptly. "Now, try to feel what I
feel. You can do it. But let's do it in the dark."
Carol stretched her arm up and turned off the light above the bed. I
sat up straight in one single motion. A jolt of fright had gone through me
like electricity. As soon as Carol turned off the light, it was nighttime
inside that room. In the middle of great agitation, I asked Carol about it.
"You're not all together yet," she said reassuringly. "You had a bout
of monumental proportions. Going so deeply into the second attention has
left you a little mangled, so to speak. Of course, it's daytime, but your
eyes can't yet adjust properly to the dim light inside this room."
More or less convinced, I lay down again. Carol kept on talking, but I
was not listening. I felt the sheets. They were real sheets. I ran my hands
on the bed. It was a bed! I leaned over and ran the palms of my hands on the
cold tiles of the floor. I got out of bed and checked every item in the room
and in the bathroom. Everything was perfectly normal, perfectly real. I told
Carol that when she turned off the light, I had the clear sensation I was
dreaming.
"Give yourself a break," she said. "Cut this investigatory nonsense and
come to bed and rest."
I opened the curtains of the window to the street. It was day-time
outside, but the moment I closed them it was nighttime inside. Carol begged
me to come back to bed. She feared that I might run away and end up in the
street, as I had done before. She made sense. I went back to bed without
noticing that not even for a second had it entered my mind to point at
things. It was as if that knowledge had been erased from my memory.
The darkness in that hotel room was most extraordinary. It brought me a
delicious sense of peace and harmony. It brought me also a profound sadness,
a longing for human warmth, for companionship. I felt more than bewildered.
Never had anything like this happened to me. I lay in bed, trying to
remember if that longing was something I knew. It was not. The longings I
knew were not for human companionship; they were abstract; they were rather
a sort of sadness for not reaching something undefined.
"I am coming apart," I said to Carol. "I am about to weep for people."
I thought she would understand my statement as being funny. I intended
it as a joke. But she did not say anything; she seemed to agree with me. She
sighed. Being in an unstable state of mind, I became instantly swayed toward
emotionality. I faced her in the darkness and muttered something that in a
more lucid moment would have been quite irrational to me. "I absolutely
adore you," I said.
Talk like that among the sorcerers of don Juan's line was unthinkable.
Carol Tiggs was the nagual woman. Between the two of us, there was no need
for demonstrations of affection. In fact, we did not even know what we felt
for each other. We had been taught by don Juan that among sorcerers there
was no need or time for such feelings.
Carol smiled at me and embraced me. And I was filled with such a
consuming affection for her that I began to weep involuntarily.
"Your energy body is moving forward on the universe's luminous
filaments of energy," she whispered in my ear. "We are being carried by the
death defier's gift of intent."
I had enough energy to understand what she was saying. I even
questioned her about whether she, herself, understood what it all meant. She
hushed me and whispered in my ear. "I do understand; the death defier's gift
to you was the wings of intent. And with them, you and I are dreaming
ourselves in another time. In a time yet to come."
I pushed her away and sat up. The way Carol was voicing those complex
sorcerers' thoughts was unsettling to me. She was not given to take
conceptual thinking seriously. We had always joked among ourselves that she
did not have a philosopher's mind.
"What's the matter with you?" I asked. "Yours is a new development for
me: Carol the sorceress-philosopher. You are talking like don Juan."
"Not yet." She laughed. "But it's coming. It's rolling, and when it
finally hits me, it'll be the easiest thing in the world for me to be a
sorceress-philosopher. You'll see. And no one will be able to explain it
because it will just happen."
An alarm bell rang in my mind. "You're not Carol!" I shouted. "You're
the death defier masquerading as Carol. I knew it."
Carol laughed, undisturbed by my accusation. "Don't be absurd," she
said. "You're going to miss the lesson. I knew that, sooner or later, you
were going to give in to your indulging. Believe me, I am Carol. But we're
doing something we've never done: we are intending in the second attention,
as the sorcerers of antiquity used to do."
I was not convinced, but I had no more energy to pursue my argument,
for something like the great vortexes of my dreaming was beginning to pull
me in. I heard Carol's voice faintly, saying in my ear, "We are dreaming
ourselves. Dream your intent of me. Intend me forward! Intend me forward!"
With great effort, I voiced my innermost thought. "Stay here with me
forever," I said with the slowness of a tape recorder on the blink. She
responded with something incomprehensible. I wanted to laugh at my voice,
but then the vortex swallowed me.
When I woke up, I was alone in the hotel room. I had no idea how long I
had slept. I felt extremely disappointed at not finding Carol by my side. I
hurriedly dressed and went down to the lobby to look for her. Besides, I
wanted to shake off some strange sleepiness that had clung to me.
At the desk, the manager told me that the American woman who had rented
the room had just left a moment ago. I ran out to the street, hoping to
catch her, but there was no sign of her. It was midday; the sun was shining
in a cloudless sky. It was a bit warm.
I walked to the church. My surprise was genuine but dull at finding out
that I had indeed seen the detail of its architectural structure in that
dream. Uninterestedly, I played my own devil's advocate and gave myself the
benefit of the doubt. Perhaps don Juan and I had examined the back of the
church and I did not remember it. I thought about it. It did not matter. My
validation scheme had no meaning for me anyway. I was too sleepy to care.
From there I slowly walked to don Juan's house, still looking for Carol. I
was sure I was going to find her there, waiting for me. Don Juan received me
as if I had come back from the dead.
He and his companions were in the throes of agitation as they examined
me with undisguised curiosity. "Where have you been?" don Juan demanded. I
could not comprehend the reason for all the fuss. I told him that I had
spent the night with Carol in the hotel by the plaza, because I had no
energy to walk back from the church to their house, but that they already
knew this. "We knew nothing of the sort," he snapped. "Didn't Carol tell you
she was with me?" I asked in the midst of a dull suspicion, which, if I had
not been so exhausted, would have been alarming.
No one answered. They looked at one another, searchingly. I faced don
Juan and told him I was under the impression he had sent Carol to find me.
Don Juan paced the room up and down without saying a word.
"Carol Tiggs hasn't been with us at all," he said. "And you've been
gone for nine days."
My fatigue prevented me from being blasted by those statements. His
tone of voice and the concern the others showed were ample proof that they
were serious. But I was so numb that there was nothing for me to say.
Don Juan asked me to tell them, in all possible detail, what had
transpired between the death defier and me. I was shocked at being able to
remember so much, and at being able to convey all of it in spite of my
fatigue. A moment of levity broke the tension when I told them how hard the
woman had laughed at my inane yelling in her dream, my intent to see.
"Pointing the little finger works better," I said to don Juan, but
without any feeling of recrimination.
Don Juan asked if the woman had any other reaction to my yelling
besides laughing. I had no memory of one, except her mirth and the fact that
she had commented how intensely he disliked her.
"I don't dislike her," don Juan protested. "I just don't like the old
sorcerers' coerciveness."
Addressing everybody, I said that I personally had liked that woman
immensely and unbiasedly. And that I had loved Carol Tiggs as I never
thought I could love anyone. They did not seem to appreciate what I was
saying. They looked at one another as if I had suddenly gone crazy. I wanted
to say more, to explain myself. But don Juan, I believed just to stop me
from babbling idiocies, practically dragged me out of the house and back to
the hotel.
The same manager I had spoken to earlier obligingly listened to our
description of Carol Tiggs, but he flatly denied ever having seen her or me
before. He even called the hotel maids; they corroborated his statements.
"What can the meaning of all this be?" don Juan asked out loud. It
seemed to be a question addressed to himself. He gently ushered me out of
the hotel. "Let's get out of this confounded place," he said.
When we were outside, he ordered me not to turn around to look at the
hotel or at the church across the street, but to keep my head down. I looked
at my shoes and instantly realized I was no longer wearing Carol's clothes
but my own. I could not remember, however, no matter how hard I tried, when
I had changed clothes. I figured that it must have been when I woke up in
the hotel room. I must have put on my own clothes then, although my memory
was blank.
By then we had reached the plaza. Before we crossed it to head off to
don Juan's house, I explained to him about my clothes. He shook his head
rhythmically, listening to every word. Then he sat down on a bench, and, in
a voice that conveyed genuine concern, he warned me that, at the moment, I
had no way of knowing what had transpired in the second attention between
the woman in the church and my energy body. My interaction with the Carol
Tiggs of the hotel had been just the tip of the iceberg.
"It's horrendous to think that you were in the second attention for
nine days," don Juan went on. "Nine days is just a second for the death
defier, but an eternity for us." Before I could protest or explain or say
anything, he stopped me with a comment. "Consider this," he said. "If you
still can't remember all the things I taught you and did with you in the
second attention, imagine how much more difficult it must be to remember
what the death defier taught you and did with you. I only made you change
levels of awareness; the death defier made you change universes."
I felt meek and defeated. Don Juan and his two companions urged me to
make a titanic effort and try to remember when I changed my clothes. I could
not. There was nothing in my mind: no feelings, no memories. Somehow, I was
not totally there with them.
The nervous agitation of don Juan and his two companions reached a
peak. Never had I seen him so discombobulated. There had always been a touch
of fun, of not quite taking himself seriously in everything he did or said
to me. Not this time, though.
Again, I tried to think, bring forth some memory that would shed light
on all this; and again I failed, but I did not feel defeated; an improbable
surge of optimism overtook me. I felt that everything was coming along as it
should.
Don Juan's expressed concern was that he knew nothing about the
dreaming I had done with the woman in the church. To create a dream hotel, a
dream town, a dream Carol Tiggs was to him only a sample of the old
sorcerers' dreaming prowess, the total scope of which defied human
imagination.
Don Juan opened his arms expansively and finally smiled with his usual
delight. "We can only deduce that the woman in the church showed you how to
do it," he said in a slow, deliberate tone. "It's going to be a giant task
for you to make comprehensible an incomprehensible maneuver. It has been a
masterful movement on the chessboard, performed by the death defier as the
woman in the church. She has used Carol's energy body and yours to lift off,
to break away from her moorings. She took you up on your offer of free
energy."
What he was saying had no meaning to me; apparently, it meant a great
deal to his two companions. They became immensely agitated. Addressing them,
don Juan explained that the death defier and the woman in the church were
different expressions of the same energy; the woman in the church was the
more powerful and complex of the two. Upon taking control, she made use of
Carol Tiggs's energy body, in some obscure, ominous fashion congruous with
the old sorcerers' machinations, and created the Carol Tiggs of the hotel, a
Carol Tiggs of sheer intent. Don Juan added that Carol and the woman may
have arrived at some sort of energetic agreement during their meeting.
At that instant, a thought seemed to find its way to don Juan. He
stared at his two companions, unbelievingly. Their eyes darted around, going
from one to the other. I was sure they were not merely looking for
agreement, for they seemed to have realized something in unison.
"All our speculations are useless," don Juan said in a quiet, even
tone. "I believe there is no longer any Carol Tiggs. There isn't any woman
in the church either; both have merged and flown away on the wings of
intent, I believe, forward.
"The reason the Carol Tiggs of the hotel was so worried about her
appearance was because she was the woman in the church, making you dream a
Carol Tiggs of another kind; an infinitely more powerful Carol Tiggs. Don't
you remember what she said? 'Dream your intent of me. Intend me forward."'
"What does this mean, don Juan?" I asked stunned. "It means that the death
defier has seen her total way out. She has caught a ride with you. Your fate
is her fate." "Meaning what, don Juan?" "Meaning that if you reach freedom
so will she." "How is she going to do that?"
"Through Carol Tiggs. But don't worry about Carol." He said this before
I voiced my apprehension. "She's capable of that maneuver and much more."
Immensities were piling up on me. I already felt their crushing weight.
I had a moment of lucidity and asked don Juan, "What is going to be the
outcome of all this?"
He did not answer. He gazed at me, scanning me from head to toe. Then
he slowly and deliberately said, "The death defier's gift consists of
endless dreaming possibilities. One of them was your dream of Carol Tiggs in
another time, in another world; a more vast world, open-ended; a world where
the impossible might even be feasible. The implication was not only that you
will live those possibilities but that one day you will comprehend them."
He stood up, and we started to walk in silence toward his house. My
thoughts began to race wildly. They were not thoughts, actually, but images,
a mixture of memories of the woman in the church and of Carol Tiggs, talking
to me in the darkness in the dream hotel room. A couple of times I was near
to condensing those images into a feeling of my usual self, but I had to
give it up; I had no energy for such a task.
Before we arrived at the house, don Juan stopped walking and faced me.
He again scrutinized me carefully, as if he were looking for signs in my
body. I then felt obliged to set him straight on a subject I believed he was
deadly wrong about.
"I was with the real Carol Tiggs at the hotel," I said. "For a moment,
I myself believed she was the death defier, but after careful evaluation, I
can't hold on to that belief. She was Carol. In some obscure, awesome way
she was at the hotel, as I was there at the hotel myself."
"Of course she was Carol," don Juan agreed. "But not the Carol you and
I know. This one was a dream Carol, I've told you, a Carol made out of pure
intent. You helped the woman in the church spin that dream. Her art was to
make that dream an all-inclusive reality: the art of the old sorcerers, the
most frightening thing there is. I told you that you were going to get the
crowning lesson in dreaming, didn't I?" "What do you think happened to Carol
Tiggs?" I asked.
"Carol Tiggs is gone," he replied. "But someday you will find the new
Carol Tiggs, the one in the dream hotel room." "What do you mean she's
gone?" "She's gone from the world," he said.
I felt a surge of nervousness cut through my solar plexus. I was
awakening. The awareness of myself had started to become familiar to me, but
I was not yet fully in control of it. It had begun, though, to break through
the fog of the dream; it had begun as a mixture of not knowing what was
going on and the foreboding sensation that the incommensurable was just
around the corner.
I must have had an expression of disbelief, because don Juan added in a
forceful tone, "This is dreaming. You should know by now that its
transactions are final. Carol Tiggs is gone." "'But where do you think she
went, don Juan?" "Wherever the sorcerers of antiquity went. I told you that
the death defier's gift was endless dreaming possibilities. You didn't want
anything concrete, so the woman in the church gave you an abstract gift: the
possibility of flying on the wings of intent."