The fourth topic on the priority list of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico was dreaming, the art of breaking the parameters of normal perception. For those sorcerers and the members of their modern lineages, to travel in the unknown was indeed the driving force of sorcery. The two arts on which they based their journeys were two tremendously sophisticated lines of activity: the art of dreaming and the art of stalking. The art of stalking was for don Juan the other side of the coin, in relation to the art of dreaming.
To make the two arts explicit to me, he first presented what he said was the cornerstone of sorcery: the possibility of perceiving energy directly, as it flows in the universe. For don Juan, and other sorcerers like him, what transforms an average man into a sorcerer is the act of canceling out the effect of our interpretation system and perceiving energy directly. Don Juan explained that human beings appear as luminous spheres when they are perceived directly as energy. He referred to seeing energy directly as the articulation point of sorcery. He assured me that everything sorcerers do rotates around it, or originates from it, and that the two main currents of activity stemming from seeing energy directly are the art of dreaming and the art of stalking.
Another issue that he elucidated at length was the assemblage point. He said that when sorcerers are capable of seeing human beings as luminous spheres, they also see, the epicenter of sorcery: a point the size of a tennis ball, more intensely luminous than the rest of the luminous sphere. Don Juan called it the assemblage point, and said that it is precisely there, on that point, that perception is assembled. “The art of dreaming,” he said to me once, “consists of purposely displacing the assemblage point from its habitual position. The art of stalking consists in volitionally making it stay fixed on the new position to which it has been displaced”.
Don Juan described the art of dreaming as the possibility to use normal dreams as a bona fide entrance for human awareness into other realms of perceiving. He made a significant differentiation in Spanish, between two verbs; one was to dream, *soñar*, and the other was *ensoñar*, which is to dream the way sorcerers dream.
Don Juan explained that the art of dreaming originated in a very casual observation that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico made when they saw people that were asleep. They noticed that during sleep the assemblage point is displaced in a very natural, easy way from its habitual position. Correlating their seeing with the reports of the people that had been asleep, they realized that the greater the observed displacement of the assemblage point, the more astounding the reports of things and scenes experienced in dreams. Those sorcerers avidly looked for opportunities to displace their own assemblage points, and they ended up using psychotropic plants to accomplish this. In the midst of this failure, they discovered one thing of great value. The sorcerers of ancient times called it dreaming attention, or the capacity that practitioners acquire to maintain their awareness unwaveringly on the items of their dreams.
Through discipline, they succeeded in developing their dreaming attention to an extraordinary degree. They were able to focus it on any element of their dreams, and found out, in this fashion, that there were two kinds of dreams. One was the dreams that we are all familiar with. The other kind of dreams, they called energy-generating dreams. Don Juan said that those sorcerers of ancient times found themselves in dreams that were not dreams, but actual visitations made in a dream-like state to bona fide places other than this world. Their visions of such places, were, however, too fleeting. They attributed this flaw to the fact that their assemblage points could not be held, for any considerable time, fixed at the position to which they had been displaced. Their attempts to remedy the situation resulted in the other high art of sorcery: the art of stalking. Don Juan said that in mapping human beings as luminous spheres, those sorcerers at ancient times discovered six hundred spots in the total luminous sphere which give, as a result, if the assemblage point happened to be fixed at any of them, the entrance into a total new world.
(Carlos Castaneda, Silent Knowledge)
