“The Art of Dreaming” according to Carlos Castaneda

For Carlos Castaneda, life is a dream, or a sequence of dreams. But his definition of dreaming goes far beyond what we normally think of. For Castaneda, dreams are a door or a hatch opening to other worlds and leading us to apprehending the totality of ourselves.

Carlos Castaneda’s collection of literary work, which comprised twelve books in total, can be divided into four phases.

The first phase includes the four books written during don Juan Matus’ lifetime. These recount Castaneda’s thirteen years, from 1960 to 1973, wandering the deserts, towns and mountains of Mexico and Arizona with don Juan and don Genaro. This phase ended with Castaneda jumping off the cliff while Matus disappeared from the world. These four books were written as straightforward narrative accounts. Castaneda had adventures, took notes, and wrote what happened to him.

The second phase was the next four books. Written after don Juan’s disappearance, roughly between 1975 and 1990, these told the story of Castaneda’s return to Mexico, his reunion with the remaining apprentices, and his efforts for over a decade to figure out and remember the events and lessons from his time with don Juan. The topic of these four books was the process of discovering the second attention and recovering the memories left there. Recovering memories from the second attention opened Castaneda to the totality of himself, which imparted new meaning to his previous life.

The Art of Dreaming, published in 1993, 20 years after Matus’ disappearance, is the third phase. In this book, Castaneda described his final adventures and misadventures with Juan Matus in the second attention, remembered through the practice of dreaming. These events ended with a transition to the fourth phase of his life and work, when he moved back to Los Angeles, and wrote his last three books.

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Here is the list of all of Castaneda’s books:

Castaneda, Carlos. 1968. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

Castaneda, Carlos. 1971. A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan

Castaneda, Carlos. 1972. Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan

Castaneda, Carlos. 1974. Tales of Power

Castaneda, Carlos. 1977. The Second Ring of Power

Castaneda, Carlos. 1981. The Eagle’s Gift

Castaneda, Carlos. 1984. The Fire from Within

Castaneda, Carlos. 1987. The Power of Silence

Castaneda, Carlos. 1993. The Art of Dreaming

Castaneda, Carlos. 1998. Magical Passes

Castaneda, Carlos. 1998. The Wheel of Time

Castaneda, Carlos. 1999. The Active Side of Infinity

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In don Juan’s philosophy, there are two basic types of sorcerers: dreamers and stalkers. Sorcery is defined as the ability to move the assemblage point. What is the assemblage point?

Each individual sentient being, whether it has an organism or not, has a cocoon made of energy. There are sentient beings without organisms, according to Castaneda, in fact they far outnumber the organic cohort in variety.

An individual human is a spherical cocoon the size of the human body with arms and legs extended.

Universal filaments of energy exist which have awareness and intent, and in fact comprise the basic essence of the universe, its intent. These countless filaments come from infinity and pass through the cocoon’s skin, through the inside of the cocoon and out the other side, and onward to the universe again to infinity. The cocoon defines and encloses filaments that pass through itself and then extend outward to infinity in countless directions.

The energy inside and outside of the cocoons is the same; they are the same strands. Humans are made by and directly connected to universal strands of energy that extend out to infinity in all directions.

Every living being’s cocoon contains universal strands of awareness that it uses for perception. Each cocoon is filled with billions of universal strings of aware energy, which comprise only an infinitesimally small part of the total strings of the entire universe. A single cocoon, though small in comparison to the whole, still contains countless billions of strings of aware energy inside itself.

Only a small portion of those enclosed strings are used. Every living being has a feature in its cocoon which selects some emanations to use for perception while disregarding others. This feature is the point where every sentient being is connected to the universe, directly connected to the spirit and intention of the universe.

Humans have an orb of bright energy about the size of a tennis ball located on the surface of the cocoon, about an arm’s length behind the right shoulder. This ball of energy is the agent which selects emanations passing through our cocoons to use for perception. It’s called the assemblage point because it’s the point where perception is assembled.

Only a small portion of the total number of emanations inside the cocoon is selected, while the rest are ignored. If the assemblage point moves around on the surface or the inside of the cocoon it selects whatever encased universal emanations it falls on. Those internal strands of awareness are then connected to the same strands outside the cocoon stretching to infinity, and this is how perception occurs.

Perception is a magical process that happens when strands of universal energy passing through our human cocoons are selected and then lit up by our assemblage point. The assemblage point connects, aligns and lights up the internal and external parts of those selected strings of energy which extend out to infinity. The result is perception. We learn where to place our assemblage point and, therefore, what to perceive, from our parents and caretakers, starting from the moment of birth.

We can say a human being has an assemblage point. It may be more correct to say that the universe has untold trillions of assemblage points. We are what we are, and live in our world because of the position of our assemblage point in the universe of aware energy.

The assemblage point exists inside a cocoon, in a universe of aware energy. By selecting and combining strands of aware emanations, an assemblage point simultaneously assembles a world and also an aware being in that world. The particular nature of that world and of that being is determined by the selection of energy strands and the degree and intensity of awareness. The intention that makes the assemblage point assemble perception comes from the universe outside the cocoon.

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In Castaneda’s philosophy, there are two basic types of sorcerers: dreamers and stalkers. Again, sorcery is defined as the ability to move the assemblage point. Moving the assemblage point entails the release of untold powers.

Dreamer sorcerers achieve the ability to use their assemblage point through becoming aware of the natural movement of the assemblage point while dreaming, and then stabilizing their awareness at new positions discovered.

Stalker sorcerers achieve the ability to use their assemblage point by modifying their behavior systematically until the new behavior causes the assemblage point to move.

Castaneda was a dreamer, and The Art of Dreaming is his most complete description of his speciality.

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During our early life, we learn to immobilize our assemblage point at a position demonstrated and taught to us by our elders. Later in life, we rarely, if ever, allow it to move from its prescribed and agreed position. Normally, we are likely to fix it more precisely on one spot as we accumulate information during our life, which sharpens and hardens our focus.

Rarely, the assemblage point can be moved by illness or shock or other extreme emotions; if so, this results in extreme fear and disorientation, forcing us to quickly return to our accustomed position.

It’s impossible to move the assemblage point by a conscious command, but it does move naturally during sleep and dreaming. According to Matus, the ancient sorcerers developed techniques to take advantage of that natural movement of the assemblage point to develop our perceptual abilities beyond their normal capacities.

Matus said that we can encounter the other self and bring it closer to our normal awareness through an enhanced type of dreaming. He taught this to Castaneda, who described the learning curve he had to navigate to become proficient. Juan Matus said dreaming was the only teaching method developed and prescribed by the ancient sorcerers to learn to use the second attention and reach the other self.

He warned, however, that dreaming was ‘the most dangerous facet of the sorcerers’ knowledge … sheer dread, a veritable nightmare’. The path of dreaming led to ultimate tests for explorers of consciousness. The world of dreaming is a ‘two-way hatch’ between our world and other worlds.

Earlier in his training Castaneda discovered that every seemingly casual walk in the desert, or encounter with a merchant or stranger in a city market, could instantly morph into a matter of life or death. When he was with don Juan Matus, the world was filled with unknown power.

While learning dreaming Castaneda faced dangers that were ‘enhanced a hundredfold’, once the belief had been irrevocably shattered that dreaming is just something that happens while we sleep.

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Dreaming is the only time in our normal lives when our assemblage point detaches from its fixed position and moves to other positions. Matus’ philosophy suggests that this is the meaning of, and reason for, sleep itself.

Why must we sleep and dream? Why can’t we just close our eyes and rest our bodies? Why must we go into a partly unconscious state to fully rest? Is it because what we are resting is the unconscious autonomic system that holds our assemblage point in place and keeps our awareness focussed? Maintaining our normal steady state of consciousness requires a major effort. Without realizing, we are fully engaged in this effort during all our waking hours. We need to lapse into some form of semi-conscious sleep state to rest from that effort. We don’t really rest until the assemblage point is temporarily released from its fixation. After that we are refreshed and can start again. Without real sleep, we go insane.

Once our jabbering thoughts quieten down, we sleep. Our assemblage point releases and reverts to its natural condition where it moves fluidly. As the assemblage point moves, it aligns different groups of emanations of awareness from the universe, and we dream. We are conscious of some of our dreams but not always, and sometimes we remember them but mostly we don’t.

As the assemblage point moves deeper into dreaming, it shifts further away from our normal thoughts and language. We enter the area of silent knowledge, where things are experienced and known without language. Sometimes, we get stuck in a gap between language and silence, and want to speak or yell but only noise comes out. As we later awaken from that state language reasserts itself. Our thoughts using language restart and the dream disappears from awareness because it’s beyond the scope of language. If we don’t note the dream quickly using words it’s forgotten. We forget we have dreamed, or remember we dreamed but forget about what.

If we train ourselves we can gradually become more conscious of our dreams as we dream them, and of the transitions into and back from dreams. We can also train ourselves to remember more. This is often prescribed during various types of psychotherapy or hypnotherapy, to recover feelings, images and symbols that can be used to understand and improve our everyday behavior. However, according to Castaneda, this type of psychological analysis of dreams has limited value. It keeps us trapped in our world of self-reflection. He says it’s possible to use our dreams to go beyond that.

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Most of us are usually unaware of the process of falling asleep. We’re not aware of our dreams starting and finishing, and then we wake up abruptly and forget everything, or almost everything. To make use of dreaming, Matus first taught Castaneda a three-step process. He taught him to be aware of the transition of falling asleep and entering a dream; then showed him how to hold the images in his dream steady; and finally trained him to remember the dream when he woke up. These three steps make up what Matus called ‘crossing the first gate of dreaming’.

While awake we are in the first attention. While sleeping and dreaming we go into what Matus called ‘dreaming attention’. This is an intermediate step to the second attention, and belongs to the realm of awareness after the first gate of dreaming opens. It’s like a river that leads to an ocean, which is the much larger second attention. After passing the first gate, we are in a river leading to the second gate of dreaming. Beyond that second gate is the ocean, the full-on second attention.

The first attention normally must not be allowed to be aware of the second attention or even dreaming attention. Becoming cognizant of awareness being handed over from waking consciousness to dreaming must be done from the dreaming attention, not the first attention. There are no prescribed procedures that can be designed by the first attention to do this. It is simply intended — consistently and repeatedly. The dreaming attention will achieve it gradually through consistent practice.

In normal dreams we usually encounter many disconnected images which aren’t necessarily assembled into a coherent world. We also don’t consciously enter the dream and become aware that we are in it before something happens. Matus taught Castaneda to pause upon entering a dream, to arrange his attention, and to assemble the world inside that dream. This was done by consciously moving his attention from item to item in the dream.

With repeated practice, a dreamer can focus on items in a dreamed world the same way we focus on items in our awake world. He can learn to allow all the items in a dream to arrange themselves into a world by glancing from item to item quickly. Without doing this, the dreaming attention tends to gape at anything. If we focus intensely on one thing, that object, which is only energy, will morph into something else. The dreaming attention needs to learn to serve the function of a beckoner, just as our first attention does. It needs to invite or summon the world in front of it to gather itself into an orderly world.

After passing the first gate of dreaming by learning these processes, it’s possible to enter a dream and hold the images steady in the same way we hold images of our normal world. While doing this, it’s possible to discover our operative self in the dream, which Castaneda calls the ‘energy body’. This is a ‘ghostlike counterpart of the physical body’.

The energy body is the other self, or the double. It’s in the second and larger part of our total awareness, which is divided by the two-step process of perception that creates our everyday awareness. Dreaming is the practical way of reaching the double. The other self, or the energy body, is composed, as we are in normal awareness, of energy. But it lacks the agreement to have mass and to be tethered to our normal physical world.

Castaneda said it took him two years of constant practice to pass the first gate of dreaming, at which point he became aware of falling asleep, could hold images in dreams, and his consciousness could enter his energy body. After that, his dreaming practice involved further training to develop and use the energy body. It must be perfected to the point that it has some control over the dreaming attention, to make it stop and return to normal awareness when needed.

Developing and using the dreaming ability depends ultimately on how we use our energy during our waking hours. We have a fixed amount of energy available to us in our luminous being. At any given time, at whatever level we’re acting and perceiving, we are always expending all of our available energy. We arrange all of our energy to maintain our world and identity by keeping our assemblage point steadily fixed in one position, through our thoughts, habits and doings. We don’t have extra energy, unless we re-arrange our habits and thoughts, and get rid of unnecessary items.

To have the energy available for developing our dreaming body and exploring realms made accessible while dreaming, we must free up energy normally used to deal with our normal, engulfing daily world. If our normal awareness is overloaded with routines, heavy emotions and fears about the self, then when we dream our freedom will be curtailed by symbols of those fears and concerns. We won’t have the energy needed to cultivate awareness and volition in dreams.

Energy must be freed up using the recapitulation technique. When a dreamer finds himself unable to progress further, he must return to the recapitulation, the extreme form of psychoanalysis Castaneda prescribed. He must unearth more life memories where his energy has been lost and foreign energy has been left inside his luminous being. Eventually, he will eject enough foreign filaments and recover enough of his own lost energy to proceed again.

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Passing through the first gate of dreaming seems safe and harmless. In this area, though, we become aware of the astounding fact that we can have awareness in the world of our dreaming attention. We can encounter our energy body and learn to exercise it. According to Matus, we then gradually become aware that among the multitude of items in our dreams ‘there exist real and energetic interferences, things that have been put in our dreams extraneously by an alien force’. Those alien forces are there to interact with us.

Matus said ‘dreams are, if not a door, a hatch into other worlds … dreams are a two-way street’. Our awareness can go through that hatch into other realms, and visitors and emissaries from other realms can come through the hatch to meet us in the dreaming attention.

Dreamers are still relatively safe in the area just beyond the first gate of dreaming, but it’s an area filled with scouts and explorers from the next area, which is the full second attention. They come to meet us for the same reason we are there making ourselves available to them. We are all travelers and explorers in a universe that wants to know itself. We are the means by which the universe knows itself.

In our usual fragmented, half-remembered dreams, there are many elements that are simply images and memories from our daily life. There are also items that seem irrational or out of place, but when we look deeper and analyze them we see they are symbolic of things from our waking life. This is the area where psychoanalysts work. But in our normal dreams there are also many random items that make no sense and do not relate to our normal life, even symbolically.

We are usually unaware, but during dreams we are bombarded by visitors from the unknown. These onslaughts come from the next realm that dreamers can enter beyond the second gate. It’s a dimension full of various other energetic beings. Some are entities that also inhabit our earth; others visit from further away. They do not physically come to us, but they can project their energy bodies into our dream attention and appear to us, just as we can go into our energy bodies and appear to them in their dream attention.

These scouts are perpetually curious about us. Like us, they are in search of more awareness and energy. When we dream, we enter a world where alien entities can reveal themselves to us. They send explorers to look for dreamers who are developing their awareness, and we are doing the same.

When focussing on evolving our dreaming attention, we expose our intent and our newly enhanced awareness to them, showing it off, making it accessible to them near their realm, like bait.

The alien entities cannot be the first to initiate an encounter with us while we are in dreaming attention. We are still protected by our walls of perception. It’s only when we initiate contact that they are then able to engage and interact with us. They encourage us to accompany them into their world in the second attention. It’s solely up to us whether we want to follow them or dismiss them.

After the first gate of dreaming attention, but before the second gate, we are still protected by our normal barriers. Until we pass through the second gate, we can still believe that we are ‘only dreaming’, albeit in an enhanced form. Even in this intermediate realm, though, there is a danger of being suddenly shocked. A foreign awareness could frighten us into an abrupt wakening, and then follow us into our daily world ‘through the channel of fear’. It’s possible for foreign energy to enter our world and be stranded, intruding in our life; it’s also possible for our energy body to enter their realm and get trapped or lost.

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Becoming adept at the basic techniques of dreaming is arduous; it took Castaneda more than two years of continual practice to reach and then cross the first gate. But crossing the second gate of dreaming, into the vast and dangerous area beyond, can be simple. We just need to have the conscious intention to do it and state it aloud in our dream, or we can lie down in dreaming attention and fall asleep again with the intent of dreaming onward from there.

Crossing the second gate of dreaming implies the ability to change dreams without waking up, which means falling asleep into one dream and waking up from another. This can also be done by following a scout from dream attention to second attention by expressing the intention to do so.

By crossing this boundary the dreamer enters a more vast and dangerous kind of attention. In this realm, the dreamer learns about the rules and customs of sorcery dreaming. He encounters fateful challenges to his sobriety and unavoidable tests of his intent and focus. He doesn’t always realize where he is, or what he’s doing, or what the stakes are.

According to Castaneda, the area beyond the second gate of dreaming is the realm where we first begin to encounter the other kinds of sentient beings that share our planet.

About two-thirds of the energy inside the human cocoon belongs to the realm of the unknown. The other third is energy and awareness that we can access, the ‘human band’. The energy inside the human band is organized into 48 bundles. We use only two of these for our normal first attention, in order to perceive all the animate and inanimate objects in our world.

Six other bands out of the 48 belong to a realm of sentient beings that share the earth with us, and partially share our perceived world. Some of these beings hover in our dreams, seeking contact with us.

These beings also have energetic cases of energy with assemblage points. Our cases are spherical, and our energy level shines much more brightly. Their energy cases are long and candle-shaped, and shine more dimly. They see more than we do, as their longer shape touches more varieties of universal energy than our sphere does, but they see with a dimmer light.

The total population of these inorganic beings is less than the total number of organic beings we normally perceive in our two customary bands. But the variety of types is higher because they occupy six bands to our two. They differ from us in that they have awareness but they don’t have organisms. Their life span is infinitely longer than ours; Matus believed their remaining life spans match the earth’s. Their energy level is much lower. They have already been alive for eons, and will live eons longer, while our lives are much shorter, but much more intense.

They live a stationary existence, like trees rooted to one place for an unimaginably long time. In their first attention, these beings without organic bodies and processes live as stationary objects. Because they are stationary in their first attention, like prisoners, they have overdeveloped their second attentions, which they are experts at using. They have energy bodies like we do, which are also not tethered to the world of their first attention.

Of the 48 bundles of aware energy in our cocoons, only two belong to our normal world, while six belong to the world of these inorganic beings. Their world’s awareness is partially connected to ours, like a one-way sound-proof mirror. They look at us, envying our energy level, but they can’t contact us on their own volition. We are normally completely unaware of them, although we sometimes sense their presence.

Beyond the six bands that compose the inorganic partner beings’ world, there are another forty bundles which, combined, contain at least another 600 worlds. For human explorers of awareness to visit those many worlds, they must first pass through the inorganic beings’ world, getting a boost of energy from that realm needed for further travels in awareness.

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Once we attempt to enter the second attention we are compelled to interact with these beings. If we follow them to their world, they appear to us ‘very much like a giant sponge’:

‘The first thing it did was to push me through a huge cavern or opening into the physical mass I had been facing. Once I was inside that mass, I realized that the inside was as homogeneously porous as the outside but much softer looking, as if the roughness had been sanded down. What I was facing was a structure that looked something like the enlarged picture of a beehive. There were countless geometric-shaped tunnels going in every direction … The tunnels seemed to be alive and conscious; they sizzled.’

The inorganic beings are immobile, but have awareness that is much more sophisticated than ours because they are much older. Being immobile and infinitely experienced, they seek to influence things that move around them, and they covet the higher energy levels of humans.

When a dreamer is in the dreaming attention, he is in the realm where the inorganic entities of our earth operate in their second attention. They use their energy bodies to create projections when dreamers appear in that realm. The inorganic beings seek out dreamers and basically try to capture them. They cannot force a dreamer to do anything, and they can’t lie. But they can read many of the dreamer’s innermost feelings, and create images and projections to entice or frighten.

They get our attention by projecting images into our dreaming attention because they want to interact with us. They are motivated to interact with us, and when we become dreamers in another realm we are also bidding for enhanced awareness. We become avidly social, seeking out individuals and groups of foreign awareness.

Compared to them, we are like small children with lots of energy but no sophistication. They know we are vulnerable, and with their vast knowledge and long history of life on our planet they can easily manipulate us through curiosity, pleasure or fear. They want to entice us to enter their world and voluntarily take up residence there.

The decision to stay in that world must be voluntarily made by the dreamer. Once made, it is irreversible, and the dreamer can be imprisoned in that world. That means he dies in his normal awareness and becomes an inorganic disembodied being living an infinitely long life in that realm.

Don Juan called the inorganic beings, and the way our awareness interacts with theirs, diabolical. But there was nothing he could do to help Castaneda make his decision about what to do in their realm. As a dreamer, Castaneda needed their instruction to develop his dreaming practices and their energy for further travels in awareness in the more exciting and perilous areas beyond their realm. He had to decide on his own to either accept or reject the offer of safe asylum they make to all dreamers.

Making it even more diabolical, dreamers are taught and helped by the inorganic beings. As soon as a dreamer develops some proficiency, he encounters a ‘dreaming voice’ which informs and teaches him. This voice comes from an inorganic being, and is very helpful, informative, and honest. Since ancient times this voice of dreaming has taught humans the way to navigate in the second attention.

Don Juan tried to teach Castaneda how to deal with the seemingly invaluable information given by the inorganic voice. In fact, the voice can only disclose information which the dreamer already has stored in his second attention. We’re drawn to the inorganic beings because of their ‘superb consciousness’. They seem to know our innermost thoughts and needs because they are vastly older and more experienced. At the same time, they have an ulterior motive in relating to us.

Every dreamer must pass through this realm and make an individual and final decision in response to the inorganic world’s appeal. Once a dreamer decides, completely on his own volition, to reject their appeal he is then free to travel on to the exciting but dangerous second attention. If he ever voices his desire to stay in their realm and live an infinitely long life, he enters a safe, closed world; his decision is final, and he can never leave.

The ultimate appeal of the inorganic beings is that their world is like a refuge for humans who travel outside the first attention. The worlds beyond the inorganic realm are even more predatory and hostile to us than our own is. Gains in awareness are only achieved after life-or-death struggles in unknown realms. Our partner world of the inorganic beings is a safe place.

In fact, our partner world, always there next to us behind its one-way mirror, is the ultimate home of the ancient sorcerers. According to Matus, the sorcerers of antiquity became overly involved with the inorganic beings and the dreaming voice. They assumed those beings were working in their interest, helping them wield power over their fellow humans.

It was the inorganic beings and their projections that originally taught mankind about the assemblage point and how to manipulate it, through their relationship with the ancient sorcerers. The ancient sorcerers mistook those projections to be helpers or protectors, and referred to them as their allies. Ultimately, Matus told Castaneda, ‘every sorcerer of antiquity fell, inescapably, prey to the inorganic beings. The inorganic beings, after capturing them, gave them power to be the intermediaries between our world and their realm, which people called the netherworld.’

Don Juan Matus told Castaneda that after years of exploration beyond the allies’ realm he now felt revulsion toward both the ancient sorcerers and the inorganic beings, who he called ‘our first cousins’. ‘The energy from our first cousins is a drag,’ said don Juan. ‘They are as fucked up as we are.’

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Castaneda knew that if he was to be one of the “new seers” and not simply a ‘sorcerer of high adventure’ he had to first retrace the steps taken by the ancient sorcerers, but then at a certain point take a different path to seek freedom. Matus warned him repeatedly that he saw that Castaneda had tremendous affinity with the old sorcerers and the inorganic beings. In the end, despite Matus’ warnings, Castaneda succumbed to the lure of the inorganic beings’ world and was taken captive.

Castaneda carried on a long courtship with this netherworld, which he kept secret from Matus. Finally, Castaneda was baited with the image of an imprisoned, helpless and innocent child, also called the ‘blue scout’. Taking the bait, Castaneda disappeared into that world to rescue the phantom child. That should’ve been the end of his story, but Don Juan and his cohorts found and rescued him, and brought him back to Mexico, with the blue scout catching a ride along with him.

Castaneda was then totally spent of energy, and had to rest in bed for months, while Matus and the other sorcerers debriefed him and helped him recover. They were shocked to hear his story; according to don Juan and his companions, Castaneda somehow visited an area of the inorganic realm known about since ancient times, but never visited before by any of them. Not only that but none of the ancient sorcerers’ stories mentioned going to that area either. Castaneda’s story of his capture and rescue in the 20th century was now part of the ancient sorcerers’ folklore.

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The next step in Castaneda’s training was to cross the third gate of dreaming. This involved merging two realities: the dreaming reality and the reality of the daily world. The moment of falling asleep usually acts as the effective barrier between awake awareness and dreaming awareness. Our waking awareness is normal and predictable, while dreaming is unusual and not predictable. Normally, it’s quite rare for someone to find himself in a state where he isn’t sure if he’s awake or in a dream.

After years of training, though, Castaneda’s dreaming body could now move about at will. He shifted worlds repeatedly in dreaming, and eventually found that items from his dreams came into his daily world. He was in a position where he didn’t always know whether he was in normal awareness, in a normal dream, or in a dangerous and unknown dreamed world.

With scouts from other realms stalking him, ready to whisk him off to unknown realms, and inorganic beings trying to suck him back to their world, it became imperative for Castaneda to always know what he was confronting. He had to know whether any being he met was just a neighbor from down the street or an unknown power from another realm likely to attack him for no reason, as any of us might kill an insect scurrying across the floor.

Some may say we are stranded in our world of daily life, with our assemblage point so fiercely attached to one place that we’re unable to remember that we came from somewhere else with a purpose. Similarly, dreamers and sorcerers can wander into worlds and forget where they came from and why. Matus told stories of some cohorts who went into other dark and frightening worlds and became stranded, seemingly for decades, and then returned to this world where they learned they had in fact been gone for only a few days. Like Castaneda in the world of the inorganic beings, dreamers can fall, intentionally or accidentally, into many situations, even some that are worse than death.

There are dark images throughout Castaneda’s work of sorcerers and would-be sorcerers who became trapped in prolonged or endless misery. This came about either through their own selfish quests or because they were victimized by others.

According to Juan Matus, sorcerers through the ages have attempted to discover ways to prolong life and extend their awareness, with some of the ghoulish results described by Castaneda. Few of those depicted seem like positive achievements, and most appear worse than death. Various types of failed ‘death defiers’ appear in Castaneda’s work.

These dangerous and confusing currents built up momentum as Castaneda approached the fourth gate of dreaming, which led to the last episode in The Art of Dreaming. This would be the final apprenticeship story Castaneda recounted in Mexico.

After passing the fourth gate of dreaming, the energy body can travel to specific pre-selected places, either in a real world or in the intent of others. In other words, it is possible to be sent to a place by someone else. Matus said that traveling to a place defined by someone else’s intent is both the most difficult and dangerous dreaming exercise. It was also ‘by far, the old sorcerers’ predilection’.

Matus revealed that one of the favorite pastimes of the primitive old sorcerers was to effectively sell their apprentices into slavery in another realm in exchange for power or energy. By the time the apprentice reached the point where he could travel in someone else’s intent, his teacher could then manipulate him into a realm that the teacher knew about and leave him there, stranded in the unknown. The ancient sorcerers were known to move entire groups of people into other worlds.

In another pivotal event of Castaneda’s apprenticeship, he met an old sorcerer who had lived for untold ages, perhaps thousands of years. This old sorcerer was known as ‘the death defier’. Like all ancient sorcerers, he had been trapped in the inorganic beings’ world, but somehow found a way to escape and retain his prolonged existence as an inorganic being without being confined as a prisoner in their realm. He escaped by changing his gender to female. According to Castaneda, in the second attention, the universe is predominantly female, and because of its rarity the male element is valued. But gender is a position of the assemblage point, so a male sorcerer can conceivably change to female by finding the right position.

This ancient sorcerer became part of don Juan’s lineage by returning to the same church in Mexico in each generation of sorcerers to compel the lead sorcerer to trade: energy for the death defier in exchange for knowledge for the sorcerer and his cohorts. Over thousands of years this sorcerer from antiquity had witnessed ancient times on earth, as well as faraway reaches of the universe, so she had many secrets to reveal.

As leader of the new generation, Castaneda was required to meet the ancient sorcerer, known also as ‘the woman in the church’. In a gesture of false generosity, he declined to receive any gifts from her. He said he only wanted to be taken for a walk in don Juan’s town as it was 300 years ago when the death defier first contacted their lineage.

Because she had spent almost an eternity living in that area, she had a clear image of the town square, church, streets and houses as they were hundreds of years ago. Once Castaneda crossed the fourth gate of dreaming, he could take a walk with her in that town as it existed in her memory, so he did. (In an early book, don Juan did this to Castaneda, bringing him to the place in his memory where Castaneda expected to find his parked car.)

On the return trip from the past image of the town, the woman took her gift, the exchange she was still entitled to, from Castaneda without announcing it. She brought him on a side visit to another place. She tricked Castaneda into believing she had simply returned him to the real town they started from in normal awareness, when, in fact, she was still escorting him around in her own memory. In this state, she managed to bring one of Castaneda’s new cohorts, a woman named Carol Tiggs, into the dream with them and then effectively kidnap her.

Assuming he had been gone for two days and one night, Castaneda woke from this adventure and found don Juan and his cohorts waiting for him. They somberly informed him he had been missing for nine days, not two. When he told his story, they concluded that the death defier managed to take Carol away with her to join in her destiny — hopefully to go into the third attention with don Juan Matus and his party.

Castaneda was told that he again had managed to delve into realms of dreaming and sorcery previously unfamiliar to Matus and his lineage. Castaneda had added yet another unprecedented chapter from modern times into the accounts of the ancient sorcerers of Mexico.