Beginning of The Art of Dreaming.

            

The human species spend a whole lot of time in a sleep, but they don't think that sleep can become another tool for awakening their hidden facilities and capabilities. And yet the fascination with sleep and what we see in dreams is endless. It's a source of the most of our question marks. In sleep we are most surely to encounter the nagual, or the form of consciousness which is outside of the known.
Although inspired by sleep, the dreaming as a way did not start in the sleep, simply because the imagination needed to propel the adepts of those far away days required a scientific mind of courage and resolve.

Dreaming and Sleeping are not the same. When you sleep you may see dreams, and some of them may even be more realistic than the others, but dreaming begins with setting up of the intent to dream. In general, the term "dreaming" is misleading because it leads one to think that he may need to fall asleep in order to start dreaming. But from my experience, dreaming is done best when you are well rested. Try lying down and turning off the internal dialogue  - a key to entering the state of inner silence. Listen to what is going on without actually trying to fall asleep. As you listen, you will eventually find queues that will help you at immersing yourself into a dream. I don't know, your approach may be totally different, but I think it is better to do this than falling asleep and think you are practicing the art of dreaming.

                                     

The first official task that was given to Carlos was to see his hands in a dream. He felt that it was another task in which it was completely impossible for him to succeed, and yet after a while he succeeded. It happened unexpectedly, despite all the seemingly fruitless efforts on his part.

Don Juan specifically told Carlos that the hands were what I randomly call a random point of capture - they are just easy to find. And I would like to reiterate - finding the hands in the dream is finding a point of capture for your dreaming body. As for the hands themselves - they do not in and of themselves carry any magical mana or something, that will transport the dreamer into some magical realm like a sort of power object. To find the hands is to find a point of reference and begin the process of awakening within the dream, thus initiating the forging process for the dreaming body. Anything else could also serve as a point of capture. Feet perhaps, or some objects that are related to you. In my case, there passed a long time before I saw the hands, and yet I have experienced plenty of other things that I could not discard simply because they did not revolve around seeing the hands.

Dreaming does not stop when you are awake as dreaming is not being sleepy or asleep. Try sitting there comfortably, preferably with a straight back, relaxed, and start breathing deeply. Keep your eyes half-closed and don't look at anything in particular. You may notice after a while that you are getting the same rest as you would if you were asleep. This is important because a dreamer seeks these deeply relaxed states in order to open new avenues of awareness to put it in a more poetic  language which Carlos' esteemed mentor loved so much. New avenues of awareness are the pathways by which the assemblage point moves. By training your assemblage point you are opening and digging the canals by which the assemblage point will travel. Think about a drone in a completely alien territory. Its mission is to map out that territory. At first all is in complete darkness, and seems absolutely alien and scary to the brave pioneers. But as the mapping out continues, more and more territory comes in the range of vision, and becomes less scary. That doesn't mean that there aren't any challenges, but at least it becomes visible which is a good thing.

The beginning of a dreaming practice was different for me from what was outlined in the book. And if I would rigidly stick to the book, there would be no progress in view whatsoever, because I would constantly have to fit into one particular conceptual framework. I think that goes against the major premise: that we are looking for freedom here. So, always thinking in terms of freedom made me realize that it has to start here and now, and not then and later, when I have more time and more resources...

So dreaming is not like that, all static and rigid and compartmentalized into the techniques and practices and all kinds of weird stuff. It is more like the stuff the myths are made of. When the dreaming body activates, it starts using all your facilities, all your intellect and imagination, your understanding and the lack of it, and thus you may receive information about your particular kind of dreaming, which may or may not be different from the one outlined in the books. The only thing that I found similar in that sense is that one does need to experience awakening within a dream.

Dreamers are strange cats. They seem to be a little different, a little detached from the every day concerns, may be even weird. I think their practices, which have to do with moving assemblage point into the unknowable territories strongly contribute to that. But let us not be mistaken - dreaming and stalking unite, when we talk about the path of the warriors as such. That is because they are both needed to shake and than produce a shift of the assemblage point. There is no one without the other, as if there wouldn't be any art of stalking, which is basically grounding, the assemblage point would keep on shifting erratically, further and further into the unknown spheres and that is quite dangerous if you think about it. The "sorcerers of antiquity" though, those psychonaught priests of the Great Out There were willing to take ANY risks, and so we hear of their unspeakable accomplishments. A modern dreamer, for the sake of sanity has to have discipline and forbearance, which are some of the prerequisite young shoots that may bloom into a beautiful tree of impeccability. And that is something that stays with you.