Learning to Dream

As time passed and the new seers established their practices, they realized that under the prevailing conditions of life, stalking only moved the assemblage points minimally. For maximum effect, stalking needed an ideal setting; it needed petty tyrants in positions of great authority and power. It became increasingly difficult for the new seers to place themselves in such situations. The task of improvising them or seeking them out became an unbearable burden.

The new seers deemed it imperative to see the Eagle’s emanations in order to find a more suitable way to move the assemblage point. As they tried to see the emanations they were faced with a very serious problem. They found out that there is no way to see them without running a mortal risk, and yet they had to see them. That was the time when they used the old seers’ technique of dreaming as a shield to protect themselves from the deadly blow of the Eagle’s emanations.

And in doing so, they realized that dreaming was in itself the most effective way to move the assemblage point. One of the strictest commands of the new seers was that warriors have to learn dreaming while they are still in their normal state of awareness. Dreaming has to be taught in normal awareness because dreaming is so dangerous and dreamers so vulnerable. It is dangerous because it has inconceivable power; it makes dreamers vulnerable because it leaves them at the mercy of the incomprehensible force of alignment.

The new seers realized that in our normal state of awareness, we have countless defenses that can safeguard us against the force of unusual emanations that subtly become aligned in dreaming

Dreaming, like stalking, began with a simple observation. The old seers became aware that in dreams the assemblage point shifts slightly to the left side in a most natural manner. That point indeed relaxes when man sleeps and all kinds of unusual emanations begin to glow.

The old seers became immediately intrigued with that observation and began to work with that natural shift until they were able to control it. They called that control dreaming, or the art of handling the dreaming body.

There is hardly a way of describing the immensity of their knowledge about dreaming. Very little of it, however, was of any use to the new seers. So when the time of reconstruction came, the new seers took for themselves only the bare essentials of dreaming to aid them in seeing the Eagle’s emanations and to help them move their assemblage points.

Seers, old and new, understand dreaming as being the control of the natural shift that the assemblage point undergoes in sleep. To control that shift does not mean in any way to direct it, but to keep the assemblage point fixed at the position where it naturally moves in sleep, a most difficult maneuver that took the old seers’ enormous effort and concentration to accomplish.

Dreamers have to strike a very subtle balance, for dreams cannot be interfered with, nor can they be commanded by the conscious effort of the dreamer, and yet the shift of the assemblage point must obey the dreamer’s command – a contradiction that cannot be rationalized but must be resolved in practice.

After observing dreamers while they slept, the old seers hit upon the solution of letting dreams follow their natural course. They have seen that in some dreams, the assemblage point of the dreamer would drift considerably deeper into the left side than in other dreams. This observation posed to them the question of whether the content of the dream makes the assemblage point move, or the movement of the assemblage point by itself produces the content of the dream by activating unusual emanations.

They soon realized that the shifting of the assemblage point into the left side is what produces dreams. The farther the movement, the more vivid and bizarre the dream. Inevitably, they attempted to command their dreams, aiming to make their assemblage points move deeper into the left side. Upon trying it, they discovered that when dreams are consciously or semiconsciously manipulated, the assemblage point immediately returns to its usual place, the rational. Since what they wanted was for that point to move, they reached the unavoidable conclusion that interfering with dreams was interfering with the natural shift of the assemblage point.

From there the old seers went on to develop their astounding knowledge on the subject – a knowledge which had a tremendous bearing on what the new seers aspired to do with dreaming, but was of little use to them in its original form.