Read The Art of Dreaming for Free Online Page A

you are falling
asleep."
    "How
can I convince myself that I am a dreamer when I am not?"
    "When
you hear that you have to convince yourself, you automatically become more
rational. How can you convince yourself you are a dreamer when you know you are
not? Intending is both: the act of convincing yourself you are indeed a
dreamer, although you have never dreamt before, and the act of being
convinced."
    "Do
you mean I have to tell myself I am a dreamer and try my best to believe it? Is
that it?"
    "No,
it isn't. Intending is much simpler and, at the same time, infinitely more
complex than that. It requires imagination, discipline, and purpose. In this
case, to intend means that you get an unquestionable bodily knowledge that you
are a dreamer. You feel you are a dreamer with all the cells of your
body."
    Don Juan added
in a joking tone that he did not have sufficient energy to make me another loan
for intending and that the thing to do was to reach my energy body on my own.
He assured me that intending the first gate of dreaming was one of the
means discovered by the sorcerers of antiquity for reaching the second
attention and the energy body.
    After
telling me this, he practically threw me out of his house, commanding me not to
come back until I had intended the first gate of dreaming .
    I returned
home, and every night for months I went to sleep intending with all my might to
become aware that I was falling asleep and to see my hands in my dreams. The
other part of the task, to convince myself that I was a dreamer and that I had
reached my energy body, was totally impossible for me.
    Then, one
afternoon while taking a nap, I dreamt I was looking at my hands. The shock was
enough to wake me up. It proved to be a unique dream that could not be
repeated. Weeks went by, and I was unable either to become aware that I was falling
asleep or to find my hands. I began to notice, however, that I was having in my
dreams a vague feeling that there was something I should have been doing but
could not remember. This feeling became so strong that it kept on waking me up
at all hours of the night.
    When I told
don Juan about my futile attempts to cross the first gate of dreaming ,
he gave me some guidelines.
    "To
ask a dreamer to find a determined item in his dreams is a subterfuge," he
said. "The real issue is to become aware that one is falling asleep. And,
strange as it may seem, that doesn't happen by commanding oneself to be aware
that one is falling asleep but by sustaining the sight of whatever one is
looking at in a dream."
    He told me
that dreamers take quick, deliberate glances at everything present in a dream.
If they focus their dreaming attention on something specific, it is only
as a point of departure. From there, dreamers move on to look at other items in
the dream's content, returning to the point of departure as many times as
possible.
    After a
great effort, I indeed found hands in my dreams, but they never were mine. They
were hands that only seemed to belong to me, hands that changed shape, becoming
quite nightmarish at times. The rest of my dreams' content, nonetheless, was
always pleasantly steady. I could almost sustain the view of anything I focused
my attention on.
    It went on
like this for months, until one day when my capacity to dream changed seemingly
by itself. I had done nothing special besides my constant earnest determination
to be aware that I was falling asleep and to find my hands.
    I dreamt I
was visiting my hometown. Not that the town I was dreaming about looked
at all like my hometown, but somehow I had the conviction that it was the place
where I was born. It all began as an ordinary, yet very vivid dream. Then the
light in the dream changed. Images became sharper. The street where I was
walking became noticeably more real than a moment before. My feet began to
hurt. I could feel that things were absurdly hard. For instance, on bumping
into a door, not only did I experience pain on the knee that hit the