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door but I
also was enraged by my clumsiness.
    I
realistically walked in that town until I was completely exhausted. I saw
everything I could have seen had I been a tourist walking through the streets
of a city. And there was no difference whatsoever between that dream walk and
any walk I had actually taken on the streets of a city I visited for the first
time.
    "I
think you went a bit too far," don Juan said after listening to my
account. "All that was required was your awareness of falling asleep. What
you've done is equivalent to bringing a wall down just to squash a mosquito
sitting on it."
    "Do
you mean, don Juan, that I flubbed it?"
    "No.
But apparently you're trying to repeat something you did before. When I made
your assemblage point shift and you and I ended up in that mysterious city, you
were not asleep. You were dreaming , but not asleep, meaning that your
assemblage point didn't reach that position through a normal dream. I forced it
to shift.
    "You
certainly can reach the same position through dreaming , but I wouldn't
advise you to do that at this time."
    "Is it
dangerous?"
    "And
how! dreaming has to be a very sober affair. No false movement can be
afforded. Dreaming is a process of awakening, of gaming control. Our dreaming
attention must be systematically exercised, for it is the door to the
second attention."
    "What's
the difference between the dreaming attention and the second
attention?"
    "The
second attention is like an ocean, and the dreaming attention is like a
river feeding into it. The second attention is the condition of being aware of
total worlds, total like our world is total, while the dreaming attention is
the condition of being aware of the items of our dreams."
    He heavily
stressed that the dreaming attention is the key to every movement in the
sorcerers' world. He said that among the multitude of items in our dreams,
there exist real energetic interferences, things that have been put in our
dreams extraneously, by an alien force. To be able to find them and follow them
is sorcery.
    The
emphasis he put on those statements was so pronounced that I had to ask him to
explain them. He hesitated for a moment before answering.
    "Dreams
are, if not a door, a hatch into other worlds," he began. "As such,
dreams are a two-way street. Our awareness goes through that hatch into other
realms, and those other realms send scouts into our dreams."
    "What
are those scouts?"
    "Energy
charges that get mixed with the items of our normal dreams. They are bursts of
foreign energy that come into our dreams, and we interpret them as items
familiar or unfamiliar to us."
    "I am
sorry, don Juan, but I can't make heads or tails out of your explanation."
    "You
can't because you're insisting on thinking about dreams in terms known to you:
what occurs to us during sleep. And I am insisting on giving you another
version: a hatch into other realms of perception. Through that hatch, currents
of unfamiliar energy seep in. Then the mind or the brain or whatever takes
those currents of energy and turns them into parts of our dreams."
    He paused,
obviously to give my mind time to take in what he was telling me.
    "Sorcerers
are aware of those currents of foreign energy," he continued. "They
notice them and strive to isolate them from the normal items of their
dreams."
    "Why
do they isolate them, don Juan?"
    "Because
they come from other realms. If we follow them to their source, they serve us
as guides into areas of such mystery that sorcerers shiver at the mere mention
of such a possibility." "How do sorcerers isolate them from the
normal items of their dreams?"
    "By
the exercise and control of their dreaming attention . At one moment, our dreaming attention discovers them among the items of a dream and focuses
on them, then the total dream collapses, leaving only the foreign energy."
    Don Juan
refused to explain the topic any further. He went back to discussing my dreaming experience and said that, all in all, he had to take my