Setting up Dreaming

 

Choose a topic for dreaming

Each warrior has his own way of dreaming. Each way is different. The only thing which we all have in common is that we play tricks in order to force ourselves to abandon the quest. The counter-measure is to persist in spite of all the barriers and disappointments.

The sorcerers’ explanation of how to select a topic for dreaming is that a warrior chooses the topic by deliberately holding an image in his mind while he shuts off his internal dialogue. If he is capable of not talking to himself for a moment and then holds the image or the thought of what he wants in dreaming, even if only for an instant, then the desired topic will come to him. I am sure than you have done this before, even though you are unaware of this fact.

Find your hands in dreaming

The purpose of dreaming is control and power. I’m going to remind you of all the techniques you must practice. First you must focus your gaze on your hands as the starting point. Then shift your gaze to other items and look at them in brief glances. Focus your gaze on as many things as you can. Remember that if you only glance briefly the images do not shift. Then go back to your hands.

Every time you look at your hands you renew the power needed for dreaming, so in the beginning don’t look at too many things. Four items will suffice every time. Later on you may enlarge the scope until you can cover all you want, but as soon as the images begin to shift and you feel you are losing control, go back to your hands.

When you feel you can gaze at things indefinitely, you will be ready for a new technique. I’m going to teach you this new technique now, but I expect you to put it to use only when you are ready.

Learn to travel

The next step in setting up dreaming is to learn to travel. The same way you have learned to look at your hands you can will yourself to move, to go places. First you have to establish a place you want to go to. Pick a well-known spot—perhaps your school, or a park, a friend’s house—then, will yourself to go there. This technique is very difficult. You must perform two tasks: you must will yourself to go to the specific locale; and then, when you have mastered that technique, you have to learn to control the exact time of your traveling.

You should try willing yourself to go to a specific place in dreaming while you take a nap during the daytime and find out if you can actually visualize the chosen place as it is at the time you are dreaming. What the person experiences dreaming must be congruent with the time of day that the dream takes place; otherwise the visions you might have are not dreaming but ordinary dreams. If you are dreaming at night, the visions of the place must be at night.

In order to help yourself you should pick a specific object that belongs to the place you want to go and focus your attention on it until that object has a place in your memory. It is easier to travel in dreaming when you can focus on a place of power. Focus your attention on any object there and then find it in dreaming. From the specific object you recall, you must go back to your hands and then to another object and so on.

Erasing personal history

It is best to erase all personal history because that makes us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people. To erase one’s personal history is to finish it off. First, one must have the desire to drop them and then one must proceed harmoniously to chop them off, little by little.

You have to renew your personal history telling your parents, your relatives and friends everything that you do. On the other hand, if you have no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with your acts. And above all no one pins you down with their thoughts.

Little by little, you must create a fog around yourself. You must erase everything around you until nothing can be considered a known thing, until there is nothing certain nor real. You must start erasing yourself.

Begin with simple things, such as not revealing what you really do. Then, you must abandon everyone who knows you really well. Thus, you create a fog around yourself.

Once people know you, you are an affair taken for granted and from that moment on you won’t be able to break the tie of their thoughts. I personally like the ultimate freedom of being unknown.

No one knows me with steadfast certainty, the way people know you, for instance. The circumstance of me knowing that I am a Yaqui Indian for example does not make it a personal history. It is only after another person knows this that such a fact becomes personal history.

Lies are only lies if you have a personal history. When we do not have personal history, nothing anyone ever says can be considered a lie. Your problem is that you have to explain everything to everyone, obligatorily, and at the same time you want to conserve your urges, the novelty of what you do. Well, since you can’t get all excited after explaining all the new things that you do, you lie in order to carry on.

From now on you must simply show people whatever you care to show them, but without ever telling exactly how you’ve done it. You see, we only have two alternatives; we either take everything for sure and real, or we don’t. If we follow the first, we end up bored to death with ourselves and with the world. If we follow the second and erase personal history, we create a fog around us, a very exciting and mysterious state in which nobody knows where the rabbit will pop out, not even us.

When nothing is for sure we remain alert, perennially on our toes. It is more exciting to not know which bush the rabbit is hiding behind than to behave as though we know everything.