The Art of Dreaming

The seers of don Juan’s line first noticed that our perception shifts much more fluidly when we are sleeping—a time when the assemblage point moves naturally—but chaotically; and so they made the effort to bring order and purpose to that movement through a whole set of practices designed to help one open doors of awareness in one’s sleeping hours—starting with being aware when one is in a dream, and holding one’s attention on the items of that dream—and recognizing that one can act in that dream. And so, as our teachers pointed out, dreaming is a key part of moving past the habit of feeling like a victim, or believing that ‘someone is doing something to us,’ awake or asleep. We don’t have to, for example, be chased by a pack of dogs, or coworkers, or what have you, in our dreams—we can turn and ask them to stop. We don’t have to long wistfully to know what are the contents of that fascinating book with the golden cover sitting on the table. We can walk over to it, open the cover and start reading.  If we are trained in mathematics, we can find solutions to complex equations—as Einstein did in his dreams. We can continue working on the essay, or the piece of music, or the architectural design, or the relationships we are working on in our waking hours; we can find inspiration and solutions and insight for an infinite number of things.
So the answer to how one’s sleeping dreams can affect one’s waking life is both individual and unlimited—each one ultimately finds that answer for herself or himself.
This leads us to a key parallel step in one’s daily awareness: To be aware that in waking life, one is also in a dream—a position of the assemblage point—and that just as one can act in dreams of night, one can also act in dreams of day. So we can look at: What kind of dreams are we living in our days? Dreams of joy? Struggle? Fear? Love?
Our teachers told us that there is a constant interplay between our waking and sleeping awareness, and that whatever kinds of dreams you are living in one state, you will be living those kinds of dreams in the other.
It’s all a question of where we put our attention. Because we have this marvelous inherent ability to choose the focus of our attention, we have a tremendous influence on our own experience. Modern physics, starting with Werner Heisenberg, and just about any discipline involving awareness, is now making a similar statement.
As some of you may have heard, our teachers encouraged us to be scientists of perception: Don’t take our word for it, they said—go investigate, find it out for yourself in your own experience. Find out if a shift of attention results in a shift of experience. You are more than capable of doing that.