The first gate
Dreaming, as Carlos Castaneda’s books indicate, is another obligatory shamanic practice that no warrior-sorcerer could sidestep. Dreaming is a special way of controlling sleep; mastery over it began with becoming aware of the moment when one is falling asleep, which was achieved “by sustaining the sight of whatever one is looking at in a dream”. To put it more simply, there was a trick that helped to enter into dreaming – you had to look at your hands in the dream.
Surprise and curiosity that motivated me were so strong, that I was able to accomplish this already on the second or third night after having read about it. I just suddenly remembered that I needed to look at my hands and brought the palms of my hands with the fingers spread out to my eyes. The reality of what was happening simply astonished me: the hands were indeed my own, I could recognize them as I was examining them! I was able to think as well, which enabled me to recall how one needed to act in dreaming, so when the hands started to become blurry, I was able to shift my gaze in time to the objects around me, moreover, I was able to recall that there mustn’t be too many such objects, which had to be used for shifting the focus of my gaze, not more than three or four items. I chose an electric socket and some pieces of furniture. I was acting as if I was not asleep, completely consciously, consistently, not missing a thing. I made sure to shift my gaze as soon as the sight of the hands or the items around me would start to become blurry. I tried to keep my balance on the sense of time, without letting my gaze linger on any one item for too long, so as not to be carried away and not let the picture become completely blurred, while at the same time trying to examine each object more closely. In fact, I was simply trying to hold on to dreaming. For some time I was shifting my gaze from my palms to the socket, to the furniture, and then again to the palms, until I fell into deep sleep.
After such a swift encounter with dreaming, I concluded that it was an easy task, but nothing of the sort: no matter how much I intended to recall my hands every time before going to sleep, I had to wait four months, before I finally managed to repeat it. I was trying desperately, but was not able to get into dreaming more frequently than once in a few months. I was not content with rare successes, I wanted to achieve the ability to enter into dreaming with such ease, as though I had been doing it all my life. I had to think of something.
I often had a recurring dream in which I was doing pulls-ups on a horizontal bar, raising my eyes to the bar. I could see my hands in my peripheral vision, but could not remember to shift my attention to them. I was doing pull-ups and counting; there were many of them, over 30, and after a while the number would approach 100. The dream was boring, it did not change, it did not transition into another dream – I was just doing pull-ups and counting, getting tired of the counting, but not of the pull-ups: they were easy, I was almost flying up to the bar without feeling my own weight or any exhaustion. The main thing that I understood from this dream was that I was dreaming about the same thing that I was doing regularly in my waking life, which meant that what was needed was to make the presence of hands more predominant in the waking life. I started studying palmistry, having told as many of my friends about it as possible, which provided me with a huge number of hands in front of my nose. In my spare time I was doing embroidery.
The difficulty of becoming aware of oneself in sleep made me draw a parallel with one event that had taken place earlier. I had once read in a Chinese treatise on martial arts that if a fighter kept his attention focused on the point just below the navel, he would not miss a single punch. That was very timely, and I immediately took it on board. But I could not even imagine that such an, on the face of it, simple instruction would turn out to be impossible to put into practice! The difficulty was not in keeping the attention focused, but in the impossibility of remembering that I intended to keep something focused somewhere! So having read and gotten enthusiastic about finding a cool mental technique that could become a wonderful complement to my physical training, I completely forgot about it! Having then recalled it only after some time, I was very much surprised by how I could forget about something that was so relevant to the most important thing in my life. Such slackitude was not at all typical of me, and that made me rather wary: something was wrong here. In trying to figure out what it was, I discovered lots about myself that was new. It took me several months to start remembering about the technique during the day rather than once every week or even two weeks, as before. Now, whenever I was packing my bag, the thought about the navel would somehow appear in my head all by itself, and I would make a mental note to remember it no matter what during the sparring match! Then this thought would imperceptibly disappear without a trace only to reappear later in the evening when I would be unpacking my bag hanging up my uniform and gloves to dry. Still, there was some progress: the intention to remember had firmly taken root in me! What had to be done now was to watch for the moment when the thought about the navel disappeared from my head, which demanded a presence and alertness of the kind that I did not possess, so it was necessary to cultivate them.
In the meantime, not relying anymore on either memory or presence, I started to resort to all kinds of tricks: tying knots on my boxing handwraps, sticking the hook & loop on my gloves in a funny way, tying my socks together, – in sum doing everything that might help me to recall the intention to keep my attention focused on the navel. In essence, I had to keep the attention focused in order to learn to keep the attention focused! But the total extent of unconsciousness simply astonished me: once – when I was just beginning to use all these tricks – I came home and suddenly remembered how I had untied the knot on the handwrap during training that day in a leisurely fashion without giving it any attention! I had untied it, wrapped it around my hand, and that was it – nothing rang a bell! After that time, I became more attentive and was able to recall the purpose of those knots when I was putting on the handwraps, but as soon as the gong was heard, and my eyes met with those of my opponent, which did not express anything except the intention to accomplish the task, all thoughts would completely vanish from my head!
And so, I was going to practice dreaming, that is, to learn how to be aware of myself during sleep without being aware in my ordinary waking state. But if I couldn’t remember myself even when fully conscious, then what about the state of sleep, in which I, in a sense, did not exist? The solution was obvious: until there was total presence in daily life, there was no use even thinking about awareness in sleep. All that I could do in such a situation was to thoroughly clean up my life and to continue with the intention of dreaming.
I was still very rarely reminded to look at my hands in sleep. Nevertheless, with every next instance of dreaming my actions were becoming more and more precise, and I was even exercising some initiative in them. For example, I found my own criterion for dreaming. The thing is that the reality of dreaming and the awareness of actions there is such that it is impossible to distinguish it from the waking state of ordinary daily life. That is, when you are dreaming, you don’t know that you are only dreaming! Don Juan explained to Castaneda that the criterion for distinguishing dreaming from waking reality was sustaining the sight of a particular dream item, such as the hands: in dreaming the would become blurred. Since I was the hands quite rarely, I found another way of telling where I was: I was trying to carefully open my eyes, but not in order to open them, but merely to feel whether the eyelids would respond to my attempt or not. If the eyelids trembled, then it meant that I was not asleep; if the eyelids remained still, and it was impossible to open the eyes, then it meant that I was dreaming.
The attention and care with which I was examining the dream items were such that once I was able to discover a substitution. Having brought the hands to my face as usual, I was already about to shift my gaze to the surrounding items, when I suddenly saw that the lines on the palms were not mine! That time I put a stop to dreaming, thinking that since the hands were not mine, it was a dream, and that there was no use kidding myself that I was dreaming, I had to just sleep. And I fell into deep sleep.
I had tried all manner of subterfuge to recall the hands more often during sleep. I was looking for ways to trick myself, to destroy the control that existed inside, to disable the safety lock that was not letting me into the unknown. When all tricks that were meant for men were exhausted, I turned to the tricks that were used by women-warriors. But I did not practice this novelty for long – it seemed to me that it was even more difficult to get into dreaming that way, – and I soon returned to previous activities. Either way, the frequency of remembering the hands in sleep did not change, and later I stopped seeing them altogether.
***
During the period when my worldview started to collapse, my dreams also changed. The common factor in all these dreams was close examination of the items in the surroundings. Attention was so focused and stable, that the dream narrative unfolded sequentially, without any jumping over, without deviating from the overall logic; the setting remained unchanged, in accordance with the narrative; there were no abnormal transformations or disappearances. So, if the action was taking place on a railway platform, then the poles along the rails, the platform gates, and the signposts remained in their places, even if I was leaving the platform multiple times, and entering the railway station building or going into the city. This enabled me to find my bearings, to get to know the territory, and to choose the right direction.
I was now examining something every night. This examination was so thorough and detailed that I thought that these dreams were thus rubbing my nose into my own undying nitpicking, urging me to give some attention to it and to part with it. For example, I dreamed that I was in a tall building that was still in the process of construction, and in which only the walls, the roof slabs, and the flights of stairs had been erected, and that I had a sachet in my pocket with some unauthorized medication, which I needed to get rid of immediately, because the building was surrounded by people in uniform who were scouring the location. I had to find a safe place, where it would not be found, and I had very little time. I was meticulously examining every staircase landing and every wall in search of an alcove, a crack or a dark corner, but on every floor I would encounter people, whose presence was preventing me from carrying out my intention, and I had to scrutinize every face carefully to determine whether it was a construction worker or an undercover agent in disguise.
In another dream I was standing in front of a wall-mounted shelving unit with several shelves, the lowest of which was located at the level of my shin, while the highest was just above the crown of my head. The shelves were lined with many small items. The one that was just in front of my eyes had scent-bottles, lipstick, a small jewel-box, lots of metal jewelry – rings, small chains, earrings, a bracelet, – two bottles of beer, a smoking pipe, some other items. I was lifting each one, wiping the dust underneath it with a damp piece of cloth, and placing it back. I was doing all this very carefully to avoid pushing off the other items. And so I was wiping all of the shelves in this fashion. My meticulousness irritated me, but I could do nothing about it. The whole horror of the situation was that the tedium did not end there – a thought suddenly occurred to me: “That’s how well I was able to do the job when I was sober. But how would I perform it after some beer?” I then drank both bottles and, for the sake of experimenting, proceeded to wipe underneath each item all over again, carefully lifting it and placing it back.
I could not understand why these dreams of meticulousness were so insistent. I was getting tired of them, or rather, my attention was getting tired, even though the “me” who was acting in those dreams was not in the least irritated by the monotony of what was happening, taking it all in stride. Also, there was a feeling in these dreams that I had a difficulty interpreting. I would say that some kind of resistance was felt.
I was having these dreams every night for one and a half years, but then there was a break of several months, during which I slept soundly, getting some good rest. I was about to breathe a sigh of relief, thinking that the dreams were finally over, but then they returned, as if nothing had happened, to haunt me again every night.
I was wondering: “To what do I owe such dreams? How did I get them?”, “What do I have to understand, what do I have to see in them?”, and “Why is it that the hands don’t appear in front of my eyes with the same frequency and meticulousness?” At a certain moment I stopped fighting with these dreams, partly because I got used to them, and partly because it was pointless anyway. And later one of such dreary dreams of meticulousness made me reconsider my attitude towards them altogether.
I started feeling pain in my shoulder. I had once injured it, but it did not bother me, except that its range of motion was perhaps a bit smaller than that of the other shoulder. In ordinary life it did not hinder me in any way. Starting from late summer, however, the pain in the shoulder inexorably began to grow more intense, and, while in the beginning it was possible to ignore it, after four months I had to stop with my training, and a bit later still, the shoulder was aching even without any exertion, simply when the arm was hanging down in a relaxed way. When I was lying with my hands behind my head, I could not even put the elbow of the injured arm on the floor; I had to put a pillow under it, so that it would be a bit higher and there would be no tension in the shoulder muscles that caused the pain. I was trying to recall when and where exactly I might have injured it, but apart from an awkward throw of a frisbee-disc at the beach, nothing came to mind. That time the shoulder had received a jolt on the joint, causing sharp pain, but after a couple of days the pain passed, and I felt as usual. I was puzzled by two points. First, I wasn’t able to localize the pain, couldn’t understand what was aching or where exactly; sometimes it seemed that the joint itself was aching, but at other times it seemed like it was the tendons. Pain when lifting the arm in front of me or twisting pointed to the muscles.
Second, the pain was intensifying instead of diminishing with the passage of time, as it always happened with contusions, pulled muscles, or dislocation. This resembled neither the first, nor the second, nor the third, and I thought that the pain was caused by a pinched nerve. I chose a set of exercises for stretching the spine and began to do them.
The pain indeed started to diminish, but not to the extent that would enable me to resume training. At least the shoulder no longer ached when the arm was relaxed. I continued with the exercises. One day – the shoulder had been aching for almost one full year – I had one of those dreams of meticulousness, which were frequent during that time.
I was in a gymnasium with several racks with barbells. Boxers who liked to pump iron after the main training would come there; but at that time there was nobody, except one friend of mine. I said hello to him and approached one of the racks with the least heavy bar. The friend asked me something, but I did not reply. I was going to lift the bar at different angles in order to locate the pain. I was pressing from the chest, from behind the head, lifted the bar in front of me on outstretched arms and carefully watched, when, with which movement, and at which angle the pain would appear. The pain did not appear. I repeated again and again, I remembered that the pain had always been there whenever I had been doing presses, but this time it did not appear. As usual, the dream was a long one, I was thorough in my movements, carefully observing the surroundings and my own sensations. Having failed to find the pain in the end, I woke up.
I instantly realized that something had changed. I was lying on my back with my hands behind my head. There was freedom and lightness in the body, I felt as though something positive had happened, but I still did not know what it was. And then I noticed that I was lying in a way that had not been possible for me for a long time – the elbow of the injured arm was quietly hanging down from the pillow, touching the floor (I slept on the floor) and there was no pain in the shoulder! I sat and turned the arm in different directions – still no pain! I lay on my stomach and did some push-ups. An echo of pain could be felt in the shoulder, but I knew that the cause of the pain was no more – it had vanished! Soon after that I resumed my training.
During the period of those dreams of meticulousness I noticed several times that I was sleeping with my eyes open. The dreams in those cases were quite similar. I was examining some rectangular-shaped object and trying to determine what it was. It was something light-grey that was lying at my feet, which sometimes appeared like a small and shallow swimming pool, and sometimes like a carpet that was lying on the floor. I was tilting my head this way and that way in order to inspect the object from different sides, but could not come to a definite conclusion about what I was looking at. At a certain moment that rectangle would turn into a window though which could be seen the grey glimmer of the morning twilight. Relative to me, who was lying in bed, the window was indeed located by my feet, and I would realize that had been looking at it all the time while dreaming. The moment of becoming aware of what it really was that I was looking at was the moment of waking up.
Another time I dreamed that I was sitting in front of a window on a windowsill and talking to someone else, who was in the room. The room was dark, beyond the window was the impenetrable darkness of night and the dark-blue sky. I was looking at the sky and at the stars that dotted it. Then, getting tired of sitting, I went towards the far end of the room to the sofa, lay down on it facing the window, put my hand under my cheek, and continued looking at the window, but suddenly discovered a grey background in the window in place of the blue sky. I was puzzled by this change of color, thinking that perhaps the street-lamp had been turned on somewhere close by, and its light had dispelled the blueness behind the window. The dream ended as in the previous case – I simply discovered myself in exactly the same position facing the window with the grey of morning peeping in though it.
I hand not seen the hands in my dreams for a long time, which I found rather puzzling, but then something else started happening. Every time when I doubted whether I was awake or dreaming, and wanted to determine which of the two it was, I would try to open my eyes, feeling my eyelids move. That meant that I was not asleep, and that what I was observing were merely my own thoughts. That caused a feeling of frustration, all the more so as it started to happen more often, and of surprise – was I really thinking all night long? That would have been very strange, since I had hardly any thoughts in the ordinary waking state, I even had some difficulty to start thinking when it was necessary.
Soon after that I had the following dream. I was standing in an entrance hall in front of a door of an apartment on the fifth floor. I knew that it was a duplex apartment, and that there was another door on the forth floor under me that led into the same apartment. I stood in front of the door for some time, and then went inside. It was like I was being overcautious, suspecting that there was something dangerous and frightening inside.
Having entered the apartment, I immediately found myself in a large, spacious hall. I did not examine the interior closely, but noticed that its colors were mostly black and red, there were carpets on the floor and on the walls, and thick dark blinds on the windows. There were no cupboards, only upholstered furniture and a low coffee-table by the sofa. I felt drawn to into the heart of the apartment, which was where the door on the opposite side of the hall led to. The light in the hall was dim and reddish in color, and emanated from some wall lamps. I was passing through the hall, and the deeper I went into the apartment, the gloomier it got; it even seemed to become smaller, it was hanging over me, closing in, pressing down with its darkness and gloom, which made me feel uneasy, and my heartbeat got faster. The second room was very small, equally black and red, and it too had carpets and upholstered furniture. The carpets were on the floor and on every wall, which created a warm and cosy atmosphere and allayed some of my uneasiness. There were no windows in the room, and a heavy maroon drape that hung on the wall at the other end of the room covered the doorway that led deeper into the house. I could not go there, as the feeling of some unknown threat impelled me to turn back. Besides that, I could feel the presence of some living, but incorporeal entity. I turned around and made my way to the front door.
Having found myself in the entrance hall again, I decided to go downstairs and get into the apartment from the fourth floor. I thought that it would be safer and that I would deceive that fearsome presence, circumvent it, and, remaining unnoticed, get a chance to find out what was concealed inside the apartment. I went one floor down, came up to the door, but the remembrance of the terrible fear would not allow me to open the door. I decided to stay clear of the danger and went up one flight of stairs and onto the landing between the fourth and fifth floor. Standing there, I thought to myself: “Well, suppose I entered the apartment from the fourth floor.” The word “thought” here gives a wrong impression of what was going on, it would be more accurate to say that I “released the thought” in the direction of the apartment, as if I was imagining it from the inside. The image drew me in, and I found myself inside the apartment. I was in a hall, much like the hall on the upper floor, but much smaller in size. Slowly, I made my way further into the apartment. The farther I went, the more distinctly I could feel the growing sense of danger. At a certain moment I stopped and was about to turn back, when I suddenly remembered that was merely thinking! I remembered that in reality I was standing in the entrance hall and only imagining that I had entered the apartment! Instantly, I found myself standing on the landing between the floors. Having reassured myself that I was not in any danger, I realized that I could go on imagining that I was inside the apartment, and I instantly found myself there again, on the same spot, where I had stopped earlier. It was as if I had again released the thought, like a ball on a string, and could always pull it back, could bring that “me”, who was in the apartment, back onto the landing. And at the same time, the “me” in the apartment could pull myself, who was standing on the landing, into the apartment, in case I discovered that there was no danger inside. Actually, that was the reason for releasing the thought and letting it go on a reconnaissance mission in the first place, as I was afraid to enter the apartment myself.
I was now acting more boldly – I had understood that I could avoid danger in the blink of an eye: as soon as something frightened me, I would instantly remember that I was standing on the landing between the floors, and would really find myself there; when the danger passed, I would again appear inside the apartment just by imagining being there.
After that incident I came to the following conclusion: a dream was a thought. Not thoughts, but a thought, one thought, which creates the image, and then we examine that image from different sides, and in this way the dream unfolds. A little later, however, I discovered that this conclusion was a bit hasty.
I dreamed that I had to choose a direction where I had to go: straight, right, or left. It would have taken far too long to explore each of them, and so, as in the previous dream, I released the thought to go on a reconnaissance mission: “Suppose I go straight.”
I was able to reconnoiter all three directions, and chose the one that I preferred.
Observing my sensations on that occasion, I started having some doubts that a dream was a thought. Some part of me would separate from myself and proceed to the place that I intended to explore. At any moment I could bring that part of me back, or to get to the place, where it was located, myself. One could say that I was able to split myself into two.
So I ascertained that my visions were not a matter of thinking, but what then? If it was a dream or a case of dreaming, then why when I tried to lift my eyelids, they would start moving, and I could easily open my eyes like I was not asleep? Then again, there were no hands to indicate that I was dreaming. So it seemed that I was not sleeping, but still having a dream. A dream while being awake.
My doubts notwithstanding, that tendency continued, and eventually there came a point, where I lost the borderline between dream and reality altogether (by reality I mean here the state of wakefulness). And if at night I was still sometimes able to sleep as usual, during the day I only needed to close my eyes, and I would instantly start dreaming, without being asleep at the time. I was perplexed. If in order to get into dreaming, one needed to find the hands in the dream, then where was I to look for them, if there was no dream anymore?!!! There was nobody I could ask about it, and indeed I could only get the answers from my own actions, while some hints and pointers could be found where I had originally learned about dreaming. I decided to re-read Castaneda.
I had not opened his particular book on dreaming for several years, for I had decided that there was no point of looking into it until the task of looking at the hands in sleep was accomplished. Now, rereading it once again from the very beginning, I was stunned by my own initial lack of attention. First, I came across Don Juan’s statement, who was explaining to Castaneda: “You were not asleep. You were dreaming, but not asleep.” But there was more. Literally on the following page I found the criterion for crossing the first gate of dreaming. As it happens, mastering the art of dreaming entails the successive opening of the seven gates of dreaming, and “there are two phases to each of the gates. The first is to arrive at the gate; the second is to cross it.” So “we reach that gate the instant we become aware that we’re falling asleep”, and we cross it when we acquire the ability “to sustain the sight of any item of our dreams”!
I was astounded. Those dreams of meticulousness that had initially irritated me were in fact instances of dreaming! Wiping the dust from the shelving unit twice during the whole night – what better demonstration could there be of keeping the attention on the dream items! And there were dozens of such dreams! Damn it, I had already been dreaming for four years, and had crossed the first gate ages ago, but had no idea! And it was all because I got hung up on the idea of seeing the hands in sleep. Why the hell did I decide that I had to be seeing them every night? It was not stated anywhere in the book, I had invented it myself in my urge to convince myself that finding them had to be no accident. The part of me that was acting in the dream knew that the first gate had already been crossed; that explained why I ceased to see the hands in sleep – further progress continued without going back to what had already been traversed.
The second gate
To be continued…