The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

SIX. The Endless Dream

I had my first lucid dream at the age of seventeen without realizing it. As I was not prepared for such an important event, I felt a profound terror and thought I was immersed in an anomaly. In the first part of the dream I was in a cinema in which an animated film was being shown. There was a landscape of large rocks in the film that gradually became softer and softer until they became dark rivulets that seeped out of the screen and into the room. I then saw that I was sitting in the middle of the vast cinema as the only spectator. I knew beyond doubt that I was dreaming, which is to say that I woke up in the dream. This knowledge that everything I saw was unreal, that my own flesh did not exist, that this lava of molten rocks swallowing row after row of seats was pure illusion, was distressing to me. Despite the fact that it was a dream, the danger frightened me. I wanted to run but I thought, “If I go through that door, I will go into another world and will never be able to return to my own; perhaps I will die.” Then I panicked! My only hope of salvation was to wake up. I found it impossible. As impossible as if at this moment you were to lift your eyes from this book and tell yourself, “I’m dreaming, I must wake up.” I felt trapped in a monstrous world that was trying not to let me go. I made an immense effort to get out of the dream, I felt paralyzed, I could not move my arms or legs, and the lava was coming toward my seat. It would soon bury me. I continued desperately trying to wake myself up. I ascended from the depths to my real body, which was sleeping stretched out on the surface like an ocean liner. I reintegrated myself into my body and woke up drenched in sweat, my heart beating rapidly. I felt that this dream was a sickness, though in reality it was a gift. Thereafter, I felt threatened every night when I went to bed. I was afraid that the dream world would swallow me forever.

This fear prompted me to read books about dreams, their mechanisms, their qualities, and how to interpret them. There are different kinds of dreams: sexual, harrowing, pleasant, and also therapeutic. In ancient times the sick would visit the temple hoping to dream with a goddess who would cure them. Dreams were considered prophetic. Freud gave them the role of revealing our psychic residue, our frustrated desires, our amoral impulses, systematically attributing symbolic meaning to certain images. According to Jung explaining the events in dreams was not important; the focus should be on continuing to live through them in a waking state by means of analysis in order to see where they would lead us, what message they were giving us. However, all these interpretative methods consider the dream as something we receive with the goal of getting it to act in the rational world. They are symbols, not realities. A patient says often enough, “I had a dream,” but never, “I visited a dream.” The next stage, situated beyond rational interpretation, is to enter the lucid dream in which we know we are dreaming; this knowledge gives us the ability to work not only with the content of the dream but also with our own mysterious identity.

When André Breton recommended that I read Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger, written by Hervey de Saint-Denys in 1867, I understood the essential part of the question: we all act as victims of dreams, as passive dreamers, believing that we cannot intervene in them. We often see hints that we are dreaming, but out of fear or ignorance we immediately flee from this sensation and remain trapped in the dream world. Hervey de Saint-Denys explained his method for controlling dreams: he did not have a very extraordinary goal, he did not suggest delving into the deep mysteries of being, he simply wished to “drive away unpleasant images and encourage happy illusions.”

After reading this book I put my fear aside and leapt into the adventure of taming my nightmares as a first step in the conquest of the dream world. A lucid dream is not achieved by will. One must start by hunting for it. To do this one must prepare by not drinking alcohol or other stimulants such as tea, coffee, or drugs; by eating lightly; by not exposing oneself to a barrage of images on film or TV; and by convincing oneself that it is possible in the midst of a dream to realize that one is dreaming and search for an element, a gesture, something that indicates that one is not acting in the world we call “real.” At first, when I could not distinguish well between the two worlds, in order to ask myself, “Am I awake or dreaming?” I would lean forward with both hands in the air, as if placing them on an invisible table, and give a shove. If I floated up, it was because I was dreaming. I would turn around in the air and try, until I succeeded, not to see myself fly but to feel myself fly. Then I would start to work on my dream. This is not to say that this is the only method; every lucid dreamer must find his own method. It is my belief that, given the vast number of neurons that make up our brain, we know everything but do not realize that we do. We need something to reveal it to us. I am reminded of the tale of the lion that having lost his parents was adopted by a sheep that raised him as part of the herd. He grew up peaceful, timid, communicating in little meows. One day an old lion hunted down one of the sheep and began devouring it while keeping the terrified young lion trapped underneath one of his paws.

“Stop shaking, my little friend, and eat a tasty meal with me.”

The young lion vomited at the idea of devouring raw meat, yet he felt himself seized by a strange anxiety. He could not stop trembling, but not from fear. An unknown energy was shaking his body. The old lion brought him to the edge of a gently flowing stream.

“Look at your reflection and tell me, Do you see a sheep?” The young lion shook his head. “What do you see?”

“I see a lion.”

“That’s what you are!”

The young lion gave a thunderous roar for the first time in his life, and then began to devour the herbivore’s remains.

Such an activity does not occur to us until we know we can have lucid dreams. But once the idea is revealed we can begin, first slowly and then with greater and greater frequency, to think about it during the day and to prepare for the night. The dreamer has a memory, he can remember what he decided to do while awake, and success is very likely. I proceeded slowly for years, with inexhaustible patience, until I conquered the world of dreams. I do not use the word conquer in the sense of winning a battle or a territory. For me, conquering means to live in the fullness of the dream world, which has no limits. In this conquest there are difficulties and also traps into which one can fall, remaining without progress for years. Drought periods may occur, during which the subconscious refuses to provide us with dream lucidity. We can dream unceasingly, all night long, and awake without remembering any of it. Patience. Faith. Suddenly, like a flower opening up, we will once again find ourselves lucid, living in this other world. These dreams teach us, they show us at what level of consciousness we have arrived, and they give us the joy of living.

I had to first overcome the nightmares: my dreams were populated by menaces, shadows, murderous persecutions, disgusting events and objects, ambiguous sexual relations that excited me while also making me feel guilty. Here, I was a character inferior to my level of consciousness in the real world, capable of misdeeds that I would never have allowed myself to perpetrate while awake. I repeated many times, like a litany, “It is I who dream, just as it is I who am awake, and not a perverse and vulnerable child. The dreams happen in me; they are part of me. All that appears is myself. These monsters are aspects of me that have not been resolved. They are not my enemies. The subconscious is my ally. I must confront the terrible images and transform them.” I often had the same nightmare: I was in a desert, and a psychic entity determined to destroy me would come from the horizon as a huge cloud of negativity. I would wake up screaming and soaked in sweat. Now, tired of this undignified flight, I decided to offer myself in sacrifice. At the climax of the dream, in a state of lucid terror, I said, “Enough, I will stop wanting to wake up! Abomination, destroy me!” The entity approached threateningly. I stood still, calm. Then, the immense threat dissolved. I woke up for a few seconds, then peacefully went back to sleep. I realized it was I myself who had fed my terrors. I now knew that what terrifies us loses all its power in the moment that we stop fighting it. I began a long period during which whenever I had dreams, instead of running I would face my enemies and ask them what they wanted to tell me. Gradually, the images transformed before me and began to offer me presents: sometimes a ring, other times a golden sphere or a pair of keys. I now understood that just as every devil is a fallen angel, every angel is also a demon that has risen.

Once I became used to not being afraid, to turning threats into useful messages and monsters into allies, I was able to embark on further quests. Finding myself in unknown places I would rise up in the air in order to see that I was dreaming, then explore those places in search of spiritual treasures. Sometimes I met with obstacles such as a large wall, an insurmountable mountain, or a stormy sea. I had to give up a few times, but then I achieved the power of passing through matter. No obstacle could stop me then. For example, I jumped into the raging sea, ready to drown. I sank, but soon, down in the water, I found a tunnel that led me to the beach. I traveled through the inside of a mountain to its top; once there, I threw myself into the air, fell down, crashed on the ground, and immediately found myself standing looking at the broken body of someone who was not me. I realized that for the brain, death does not exist. Every time I killed myself or an enemy killed me, there was an immediate reincarnation.

Once I had conquered matter I began to encounter mysterious, threatening, mocking characters that I did not dare to approach, like gods who held secrets that I was unworthy of knowing. I said, “Just as I challenged the nightmares, I must also confront the sublime beings, speak to them without being disturbed by their mockery, establish contact with them, learn those secrets that I think are forbidden to me. But in order to achieve that, I must first convince myself that I am strong, that I rule this dimension, that I am the master, that I am a magician.” When I woke up within a dream I asked for things. For example, I want a thousand lions parading on the street. My desire was not realized immediately. A short time passed, then I saw the lions parading. “I want to go to Africa and see elephants.” I went to Africa and saw elephants, and from there moved to the North Pole, among polar bears and penguins. Other times there were circus shows, operas, visits to cities full of baroque skyscrapers. I visited enormous battles from olden times and museums where I saw hundreds of paintings and sculptures. Once I acquired this power of transformation I was tempted to create erotic experiences. I created sensual women, half human and half beast, organized orgies, became a woman to let myself be possessed, grew a colossal phallus, visited an oriental harem, gave lashes with a whip, tied up schoolgirls. But when I surrendered to pleasure, the dream inevitably absorbed me and turned into a nightmare. Once desire seized hold of me, it made me lose the lucidity, and events escaped my control. I would forget that I was dreaming. The same was true for wealth. Once I became entrapped by a fascination with money, my dream ceased to be lucid. Every time I tried to satisfy my passions, I forgot that I was dreaming. Finally, I realized that in life, just as in dreams, it is necessary to distance oneself and control identification in order to stay lucid. I discovered that in addition to my sexual and monetary fascinations I was drawn like a magnet by the desire to acquire fame, be applauded, dominate the multitudes. I banished these temptations from my dreams.

I returned to working on my levitation and realized that every time I rose up in the air I became proud and vain: I was performing a feat that others could not achieve; I was worthy of admiration. I overcame this problem. I transformed it into something normal, useful, that was of service to me not only for traveling the world but also for leaving it. I began by ascending. I felt enormous terror. It was the same feeling I had experienced in my first lucid dream, in which I did not dare to leave the cinema in which I was shut. I felt that a vital link tied me to planet Earth. I woke up with my heart hammering. Many times during the day I imagined my body floating up through the stratosphere into the depths of the cosmos. At night, dreaming, I achieved what I had desired. I overcame the fear of death, the sensation of weight and of drowning, and I began to travel between the stars with the speed of a comet.

It was an unforgettable experience to move through that calm vastness, where the great masses of planets and the incandescent stars move in an orderly dance, knowing that I was invulnerable, discarnate, a pure and conscious form. It is difficult to explain in words: the cosmos somehow enclosed me, like an oyster with its pearl, as if I were a precious thing; it cared for me as if I were a flame that must not go out; I represented the consciousness that matter had taken millions of years to create. The cosmos was my mother, singing a lullaby to make me grow. The words that I could utter were not mine, but were the voices of those stars. The feeling of floating in infinite space, surrounded by their complete love, made me awaken filled with happiness.

I do not pretend to claim that this initiatory process of lucid dreaming can take place in a short amount of time. In my case, these dreams did not depend on my will; they presented themselves to me amidst the multitude of ordinary dreams as genuine gifts. Sometimes I spent a whole year without having these sorts of experiences. Nor did they happen in the order in which I have described them; sometimes I investigated one type of dream reality, sometimes another, to then return and continue with the first. No rational order exists in the world of dreams, and cause and effect are abolished. Sometimes an effect appears first, and this effect is followed by its cause. Suddenly, everything exists simultaneously, and time acquires a single dimension that is not necessarily the present as reason conceives it. There is no world, but simultaneity of dimensions. What reason calls life here has another meaning there. I determined, as I wandered awake among my dreams, to enter the dimension of the dead.

After crossing a furious ocean in a small boat, I landed on the island where the door to the realm of the dead is to be found. There were lines of applicants, eager to enter. A gloomy doorman palpated them and decided who did or did not deserve to cross the final threshold. Those he refused were devastated at having to continue living. The doorman touched me and declared me dead. As soon as I passed through the door, I found myself in a landscape of green hills. The dead people — relatives, friends, celebrities — did not approach me, but looked at me kindly, as if expecting me to do something that would show them my good intentions. I threw empty envelopes in the air, which came down filled with treats and precious objects. It was a gift to the deceased. I woke up very happy, saying to myself, “Now I know that in my next lucid dream, I can converse with them. They have accepted me.”

I can affirm to all who have not had these experiences that in some region of the brain, if it really is the abode of the spirit, a dimension exists where the dead people we have loved — as well as those we are concerned with but did not know, and for that reason cannot love — are alive, continue to develop, and take immense pleasure in communicating with us. One might respond that this survival is pure illusion and that only I exist in my psychic world. This is true, and yet not true. On the one hand human brains can be interconnected, and on the other hand they can be connected to the universe, which in turn may be connected to other universes. My memory is not only my own; it also forms part of the cosmic memory. And somewhere in that memory, the dead continue to live.

I dreamed of Bernadette Landru, the mother of my son Brontis: she loved me; I never loved her. She went with the newborn to Africa, and from there when he was six years old she sent him to me. I took care of him from then on. Her love for me turned into hate; she followed her own path. Her great intelligence led her into politics, to the most extreme communism. She was a leader. In 1983 the plane departing from Spain that was meant to take her to a revolutionary congress in Colombia, along with other distinguished Marxist intellectuals such as Jorge Ibargüengoitia, Manuel Scorza, and others, exploded during takeoff. Even today, I believe it was not an accident but a crime perpetrated by the CIA. I lamented that she perished so violently without having had the opportunity to engage in a confrontation, which for the sake of Brontis might have led us to a friendly reconciliation. Thanks to a lucid dream, I was able to meet with her in the dimension of the dead. It was in a small village similar to those in the north of France. We sat on a bench in a public square and began to talk. For the first time, I saw her calm, amiable, and full of friendship. We finally clarified that loving someone passionately does not make it obligatory for that person to reciprocate. We also clarified that although Brontis had had an absent, irresponsible father for the first six years of his life, I had settled that debt by taking care of him for the rest of his childhood and adolescence. Finally, we embraced as friends. She said to me, “Politically, I always considered you useless because you lived in your mental island, separate from the misery of the world. Now that you have decided that only art is worthwhile for healing others, I can help you. Politics is my specialty. Consult with me whenever you want.” Today, before taking a position on world events that seem serious to me, I consult with Bernadette.

In that same dimension I find myself in the company of Teresa, my paternal grandmother, whom I never had the opportunity to know due to family quarrels. She is a small woman, thickset, with a wide forehead. In the dream I know that in reality we do not know each other, that we have not been together even once. I ask her, “How is it possible that you, my grandmother, never held me in your arms?” I realize this is an immoderate thing to say and rectify it with, “Rather, how is it, Grandmother, that I, your grandson, never gave you a kiss?” I suggest that I kiss her now and she accepts. We hug and kiss. I wake up with a clear memory of the dream, happy to have recovered this family archetype.

Thanks to these lucid dreams I can meet again with Denisse, my first wife, a delicate, intelligent woman, affected by madness. When I settled her in a home for the mentally ill in Canada, her home country, she began to build a table with twenty legs. She also watered a dry plant in a flowerpot by the window of her room. One day, a green leaf grew on the dry stalk. To Denisse it seemed that this plant, which had appeared dead, wanted to thank her for her care. “I finally understood what love is: being grateful to someone else for existing. ” Along with her I also saw Enrique Lihn, who was still writing and giving lectures; Topor, who having passed through this mystery of death that had prevented him from appreciating life was now drawing images full of happiness; and my son Teo, on July 14, 2000, who would have been thirty, in the midst of his incomparable vital euphoria, having left this world at age twenty-four. In this dimension, he knew his grandmother, Sara Felicidad.

When I threw my address book into the sea, I cut off my family tree at the roots. I never saw my mother again. One night, shortly after I turned fifty, she appeared in my dream. I first heard her voice, which I thought I had forgotten, singing lightly. “Come in, do not be afraid.” I realized that I was in a hospital. I opened the door and saw her, very tranquil, reclining in her bed. I sat by her, and we talked for a long time, trying to resolve our problems. She explained to me why she had been so locked up in herself, and I explained my silence for all those years. Finally, we hugged like we never had before. Then she stretched, closed her eyes, and murmured, “Now I can die in peace.” I woke up sad, convinced that this meeting was prophetic: my mother was dying. I immediately wrote a letter to my sister, whose address I had thanks to the poet Allen Ginsberg, whom I had chanced to meet in Paris (he had been expelled from Cuba for saying in a radio interview that he had dreamed of making love to Che Guevara), and mailed it to Peru, where Raquel lived with my mother. I wrote, “Raquel, I do not know if Sara Felicidad is still in a condition to read my letter. However, even if it seems that she cannot hear, read the words I write to her. Her soul will capture them.” The letter arrived two days after my mother’s death. I kept a copy of it:

Cast of my Opéra Panique, ou l’éloge de la quotidienneté (Paris, 2001). From left to right, back row: Edwin Gerard, Jade Jodorowsky, Adan J., Brontis J., Valérie Crouzet, Marianne Costa, Kazán, Cristobal J., and Marie Riva; front row: Damián J., Rebeca J., Alma J., Alejandro J., Dante J., and Iris J. Photo: Alberto García Alix.

Dear Sara Felicidad:

I regret not being beside you in these difficult moments. If fate so wills, we will see each other once again before the great final voyage. We were born in tragic circumstances and remain marked for life. The pain we felt and the mistakes we made mostly originated from the world that other human beings created around us. It took me years to realize that the pain we had in this family that you tried to build was the result of our lack of roots, of our race that, having been so much persecuted, is foreign in all places. If there was anything negative between us, I have forgiven it. And if I committed the sin of ingratitude toward you, I beg you to forgive me. We did what we could in order to survive. But I want you to be assured: your essential being, your great strength, your unbreakable will, your fighting spirit, your royal pride, your sense of justice, your overflowing emotion, your appreciation for the written word, all these things have been a valuable legacy for me and have become part of my being, for which I am infinitely grateful. I remember from those days the importance you gave to the shape of the eyes, hands, and ears; how you hated canned food and artificial light; your love of flowers, your generosity in sharing food, your fundamental desire for order and cleanliness, your moral sense, your ability to work for hours and hours, your heart full of ideals. Yes, you suffered a great deal in this world, and I understand why. A few days ago, I had a dream about you. You were ill. But you looked calm. We talked as we have never done. We decided to stay in contact, you and I. I understood that you had received very little love during your time on Earth. I expressed my love as your son and blessed you that you might cease to suffer. You were exactly the mother I needed in order to set me on the path of spiritual development that was necessary for me. The truth is that without you, I would have gotten lost along the way. And now I want to tell you that I am by your side, that I am accompanying you, and that I know you will finally know the happiness that your name indicates. Trust in the will of the Mystery, surrender to its designs. Miracles exist. All this is a dream, and the awakening will be magnificent.

Your son forever.

In the dimension of the dead, they live by the energy of memory. Those whom we are forgetting pass like faded silhouettes, almost transparent; they appear in more distant places each time. Those whom we remember appear clearly, close to us, they speak, there is a grateful joy in them. But in the dark there are silhouettes of ancestors who lived centuries ago. It is because we did not know them that they fade away. If we merely move toward the areas where they are, they will appear more clearly and will speak to us in languages that we may not know, always with great affection. Those not familiar with this experience may have noticed that relatives and friends consider it very important for us to prove to them that they are not forgotten by celebrating birthdays, sending postcards while on a trip, calling them on the telephone. We know that, to the extent that others remember us, we are alive. If they forget us, we feel that we die. It is exactly the same in the world of dreams. If the unconscious is collective and time is eternal, one can say that every being who has been born and died is engraved in this cosmic memory that every individual carries. I would dare to say that every dead person waits in the dream dimension for an infinite consciousness to finally remember him or her. At the end of time, when our spirit achieves its maximum development and spans the entirety of Time, no being, no matter how insignificant it may seem, will be forgotten.

I also explored the dimension of the myths, where ancient gods live along with magical animals, heroes, saints, cosmic virgins, powerful archetypes. Before being accepted by them we must overcome a series of obstacles that are, in fact, initiatory trials. They present themselves in malignant form, attacking us, mocking us, or seeming insensitive, asleep, indifferent. Jung, in his autobiography, writes that he had a dream in which he found a sleeping Buddha in a cave, his inner god. He did not dare to wake him up. However, if we keep calm, if we do not run away, if we act with faith, if we are brave and dare to face them or awaken them, the monsters turn into angels, abysses become palaces, flames become caresses, the Buddha does not reduce us to ashes with his gaze when he opens his eyes. On the contrary, the Buddha communicates all the love in the world to us; we obtain allies who can be invoked in any sort of danger. Lucid dreaming teaches us that we are never alone at any moment; that individual action is illusory. Thought, trapped in the net of rationality, tries to reject the treasures of the dream world. But it is constantly besieged by forces coming from the depths of the collective memory; in real life, the dethroned gods have become clowns, film stars, football legends, political heroes, mysterious multimillionaires. We want to make them into powerful allies, but they have no consistency: they disintegrate very quickly into oblivion. In the dream dimension we encounter real entities with ancient roots. I could often see the arcana of the Tarot there, embodied in persons, animals, objects, or heavenly bodies; the symbols are living entities that speak and convey their wisdom. At first, when I tried to contact the divine beings without being prepared for it, I had a dream:

I had set up a round table in the living room of my house to dine with the gods and converse with them as equals. The first to arrive, despite his not being a deity, was Confucius, an imposing and enigmatic Chinese man, tranquil and immutable. As soon as we sat down, a young Hindu man with blue skin appeared wearing brilliant clothes and jewelry, elegant and powerful: he was Maitreya. Then, right in front of me sat Jesus Christ, a giant three meters high, so powerful that I began to get nervous. Another being emerged behind him: Moses, even taller, even stronger, with a severity that truly terrified me. I felt that behind the prophet, the incommensurable figure of Jehovah began to take shape. The room filled with such incomprehensible energy that I panicked. How did I, so weak and ignorant, dare to try to converse with these gods as equals? I tried to wake up. Confucius slowly disintegrated. As Moses and Jehovah dissolved into a grim shadow that started to fill the room, imprisoned in the dream world I begged Maitreya and Jesus for forgiveness. They smiled and amalgamated into one being, a gentleman in a leisure suit, like a wise grandfather. Smiling, he offered me a cup of tea. The dark liquid glowed. I awoke with my hair standing on end.

Encounters with divine archetypes are very dangerous if we do not prepare for them in advance. I would not exclude cardiac arrest from the list of possible dangers. I searched in alchemical texts to prepare myself for such a risky encounter. One treatise, the Rosarium philosophorum, written in Latin in the first half of the fourteenth century, inspired me with its enigmatic passages. “The contemplation of the authentic thing that perfects all things is the contemplation by the elect of the pure substance of mercury.” Before attempting to unite the individual self to the universal force, it is necessary to contemplate, feel, and identify with that source, to accept it as one’s essence, to disappear in its infinite extent. This force must act in our intellect as a dissolving agent. When the kind god in my dream offered me some tea, it was to tell me that I am the sugar cube that is to be dissolved in the hot liquid: love. “The work, very natural and perfect, consists of engendering a being similar to what one is oneself.” I understood that for the majority of the time we are not ourselves; we live manipulating ourselves like puppets, presenting a limited caricature to others. We must create the being that resembles who we really are in ourselves like a model, discovering the pattern, the designs and order that it carries like a seed. A tree, in its formation, endeavors to grow in order to become the plant pattern that guides it. The engendering of the similar is not a doubling but a transformation: in order for the natural work to be realized, the self must transform itself into the impersonal pattern “I,” the highest level of perfection. Thus we become the guides of ourselves. “Euclid has advised us not to carry out any operation if the sun and mercury are not united.” The individual I and the impersonal I, the intellect and the subconscious, must act together at all times. It is for this reason that Maitreya and Jesus became one in my dream.

In Paris, I had the opportunity to meet the alchemist Eugène Canseliet, who published the works of the mysterious Fulcanelli. I remember him telling me, “The athanor is the body. The heart is the flask. The blood is the light. The flesh is the shadow. The blood comes from the heart, which is active, and goes to the flesh, which is passive. The heart is the sun, the body the moon. The positive is in the center. The negative is around the center. The two form unity.” If we think that the universe has a creative center then the individual, who is a miniuniverse, should also have one. After reaching the age of fifty I decided to attempt the highest encounter through lucid dreaming: to see my inner god.

I am at a family dinner with my wife and children. We are eating on the terrace, around a rectangular table. It is nighttime, and the stars are sparkling in the sky. Cristina, the servant who took care of me so well during my childhood, serves us a roast goat kid on a cross-shaped plate.

“I’m dreaming.”

I put my hands out flat in the air, support myself on them, and levitate. I speak from above to my loved ones.

“I am leaving this world.”

They smile knowingly and begin to disappear. A profound grief fills me. This piercing sadness forces me to stay, but Cristina appears waving a pair of pruning shears, with which she snips at the air. “Go! If you rise you are an angel; if you sink you are a demon!”

Relieved, free, I begin to ascend. I see myself floating in the cosmos. The stars shine brighter than ever. I want to exit the cosmic dimension to enter the dimension where my consciousness reigns. Suddenly, all the stars disappear: I find myself in a space that appears to extend into the infinite. This dark void is intermittently traversed with the rhythm of a human heartbeat by circular waves of light, like the ripples that occur in a lake when a stone falls on calm waters. I see the center in the distance. It is a mass of light, like a sun without flames, vibrating, beating, producing iridescent undulations. Its colossal size compared to me, smaller than an atom, fills me with dread. I want to wake up, but I restrain myself.

“This is a dream. Nothing can happen to me.”

“You’re wrong, if the experience is too intense it could cause your death in real life; you might never awaken!”

“Dare to try it! Remember what Ejo Takata said: ‘Intellectual, learn to die!’”

I decide to take the risk, fly speedily toward this tremendous being of light, and throw myself into it. At the moment of sinking into this matter I experience the immeasurable vastness of its power, for the glare is so dense that I can feel it in my skin.

In order to make myself better understood at this point, I should recall a crucial moment that the actors and I experienced during the filming of The Holy Mountain. We had already lost our link to reality after two months of preparation due to having been locked in a house without going outside, sleeping only four hours a night while doing initiatory exercises the rest of the time, plus four months of intense film shooting and traveling all over Mexico. The cinematographic world had taken its place. Possessed by the character of the Master, a sort of hybrid of Gurdjieff and the magician Merlin, I had become a tyrant. I wanted the actors to become enlightened at all costs; we were not making a movie we were filming a sacred experience. And who were these comedians who, also entrapped by illusion, consented to be my disciples? One was a transsexual I had met in a bar in New York; another was a soap opera hunk; then there was my wife, with her neurosis of failure; an American admirer of Hitler; a dishonest millionaire who had been expelled from the stock exchange; a gay man who believed he could converse with birds in Sanskrit; a lesbian dancer; a cabaret comedian; and an African-American woman who, ashamed of her slave ancestors, claimed to be Native American. I was inspired by alchemy in hiring this bunch: the first state of matter is the mud, the magma, the “nigredo.” From this, through successive purifications the philosopher’s stone is born, which transforms base metals into gold.

These people, drawn from the masses and not theatrical artists by any stretch, were supposed to become enlightened monks by the end of the film. Searching for magical sites, we had climbed all the Aztec and Mayan pyramids that had been largely rebuilt for the tourism industry. Thus we arrived at Isla Mujeres and contemplated the magnificent blue and turquoise waters of the Caribbean Sea — at last, something authentic. There, I decided to arrange a fundamental experience: after having all of us shaved, myself included, we went out on a small shrimp boat. After an hour, we were on the high seas. A resplendent blue-green circle surrounded us. The beautiful ocean, with its gigantic but gentle waves, stretched all the way to the horizon. I gathered the actors around me and, in a state of trance, said, “Let us jump and submerge ourselves in the ocean. The individual soul must learn to dissolve in that which has no limits.” I do not know what happened at that moment. They looked at me with childlike eyes, offering me a faith that in fact I did not deserve. I then gave a karate-style scream and jumped, pushing the group into the sea. As soon as we fell, I received an enormous lesson of humility. We had jumped in wearing the costumes of Sufi pilgrims. We had on heavy boots, baggy trousers, sashes at the waist, roomy shirts, and long coats, as well as broad-brimmed hats. The hats were not a problem, they just floated; but the costumes became dangerously heavy as soon as they filled with water. I felt myself sinking into the depths of the sea like a stone, a descent that seemed to last for an eternity. Suddenly the whole sea was pressed against my body, with its incommensurable power, its unfathomable mystery, its monstrous presence. I was trapped in its superhuman belly, feeling smaller than a microbe. Who was I in the midst of this colossal being? I moved as well as I could, not sure that I would be able to save my life; perhaps I would continue sinking into the dark depths. I never thought to pray or beg for help; I had no time. Then the enormous mass of water threw me up to the surface. The dive had lasted only a few seconds, but we came up about fifteen meters from the boat. On land fifteen meters are barely anything, but offshore, such a distance is like kilometers. I had not considered that sharks and other carnivorous creatures might live there. On the boat the fishermen, taking us for crazy gringos, set about improvising a rescue. For our part, trained by those months of initiatory exercises, we waited calmly. The individuals bobbing on the waves became a collective being. The Native American, slapping gently at the water, said that she did not know how to swim. The Nazi, who turned into a champion swimmer, held her by the chin and helped her float. Corkidi, the photographer, completely forgetting that his task was to film transcendental moments such as this, cursed while helping to throw us a lifesaver attached to a long rope. The millionaire, who was closest to the boat, threw the lifesaver to the nearest person, the bird communicator, who reciting a mantra threw it to another, and so on until we were all joined, clinging to the rope. Without this tranquillity, we might all have drowned.

We boarded the ship in religious silence. We undressed and wrapped ourselves in towels. We began to shiver. When they recovered the use of their jaws, the actors, as well as the photographer, his assistants, and the shrimpers, began to insult me. Only two remained silent. The comedian, who in the film had the role of a thief, a symbol of the primitive and egotistic Self, had behaved as such in the water: without any concern for the group, he had simply emerged from the depths and swum with all the strength of his well-developed muscles toward the boat. The other silent person was my wife, the only one of the group who had not jumped. She had remained on the deck, watching us, paralyzed or simply disbelieving. Because of this, something between the two of us was cut off forever. In that moment, we realized that our paths were going in different directions. I realized that in order to become my true self I had to cleanse myself of this leprosy that was the fear of abandonment and accept my solitude in order to one day achieve genuine connections with others.

The actors, however, declared that they did not give a damn about becoming enlightened monks and that all they had wanted was to become film stars. The dip in the Caribbean Sea was a mistake that had taught them a lesson: they would never again obey my follies as a director. To begin with, they demanded a good breakfast with orange juice, eggs, toast, cereal, butter, and jam, plus no more improvisation beyond what was in the script. Otherwise they would quit. For me, this was an essential experience. I knew that from then on I would have the courage to face the subconscious without letting myself be invaded by terror, knowing that the ship of my reason would always throw a rope out to save me.

But let us return to the lucid dream. I had just thrown myself into that gigantic being of light, and just like in the Caribbean Sea, I experienced the immensity of its power. But this time, prepared as I was by the previous experience, I did not struggle to come to the surface as if escaping from the jaws of a monster, but let myself slide toward the bottom. I had the sensation of falling slowly while dissolving, as if the light was an acid. Finally, shouting with a mixture of euphoria and peace, I let go of my last crumb of individual consciousness. I was integrated into the center. I exploded into a succession of inconceivable shapes, thousands of them, millions, and they formed worlds that evaporated, oceans of color, words, phrases, conversations in countless languages intermixed like colossal labyrinths, and as time became an eternal instant, palpitating, opening itself into endless possible of futures, I was the creating nucleus, detonating unceasingly, never stopping, never silent, in countless metamorphoses. I was shaken by a kind of violent earthquake, and eight gates opened at my inconceivable extremities, or eight bridges, eight tunnels, eight mouths — what can I call them? And from them, other universes began, also exploding with delirious creations, joining in turn with the other universes until they formed an astral mass like a colossal hive.

How long did this dream last? I do not know. The concept of duration had been abolished. I was lucky, or unlucky, that a torrential rain accompanied by gale force winds assaulted the city that night. The blinds on my windows started banging, making a racket. I woke up thinking that I was still in the dream. It took me a long time to recover my reason. The wall that separated me from the subconscious had partly crumbled. Although I knew I was an individual, in my brain I could still feel the incessant creation of images.

My brain continued to produce worlds; it was an immense hurricane of creative madness. The “I” lived within a multifaceted demented god. Reason was a small boat sailing an infinite ocean, rocked by every storm, traversed by every entity, angelic or demonic, there was no distinction; by every language, living, dead, or as yet uncreated; by the inconceivable multitude of forms; by the absolute dismembering of unity.

After this extreme vision, which in certain ways I used to create my Incal books, I did not dream again for a long time. Lucid dreams started to become a popular topic, first in the United States, then worldwide. There was even an American who tried to sell machines that could produce them. Several books were published, some of them serious, others less so, as in the case of one author who claimed to have magical powers. I read the books avidly. They helped me to understand something fundamental: people who describe their lucid dreams describe things that correspond to their level of consciousness and to their beliefs. If they are Catholic, for example, they see Christ with great emotion. If they have some form of morality, the messages in their dreams will corroborate it. I remembered having a conversation with a psychoanalyst friend who gave me examples of dreams: the patients of Freudian analysts had dreams with sexual symbols in them, Jungians had mandalas and shape shifting, Lacanians had word games, and so on. That is to say, they dream in accordance with their analysts’ theories, which for them have the power of dogma. I realized that something similar happened with lucid dreaming: a pretentious writer will direct her consciousness within the dream like a pretentious person; a mythomaniacal ethnologist will create adventures in his dream world in which he holds the nontransmissible secrets of indigenous magic. I examined my vision of the creative center. When I became one with it, I had eight gates. That is, a double square. Tocopilla! Toco: double square. Pilla: devil consciousness. Was it a coincidence? Had the Quechuas dreamed my same dream? Does the eternal creator, Pillán, communicate with other creators through his eight bridges? Either that or the name of my hometown had influenced my images. Why not nine gates, or ten, or a thousand?

I decided to proceed with the greatest of caution. I had reached the peak of the mountain: I had blended myself into mad universal creation. What more could I want? For what purpose was I trying to modify my dreams? If I wanted to achieve something useful, I would do better to modify the dreamer, the being who is awake, who introduces himself into the dream world in order to try to control it. To do this, I had to undertake some other experiences, following a different path in the dream.

I observed that remaining conscious during the lucid dream required a considerable effort. Ultimately, the great lesson I learned was less about the extraordinary world I was able to create than about this requirement of lucidity. Without lucidity, nothing was possible. From the moment that I let myself be drawn into events, feeling the emotions they aroused in me, the dream absorbed me, and I lost the clarity. The magic only worked at a distance; what made the game possible was the clarity of the witness, while fusion with events narrowed the field of possibilities. I told myself, “Dreams have a reason for being. As products of universal creation, they are perfect; there is nothing to remove from them or add to them. The spider in itself is not terrible; it is only so to the fly. If I have overcome fear, the dream world does not have to affect me. And if I have conquered vanity and I see sublime images, they should not alter me either. In fact, the person who wakes up in the dream is not a superior being endowed with fabulous powers, it is a consciousness whose role is to become an impassive witness. If one intervenes in dreams, in the beginning one does so to experience an unknown reality, but later vanity can lead one into a trap. The microbe that is conscious of the Caribbean is not the Caribbean. Divinity can be me and continue being itself; I cannot be divinity and continue being myself.” I decided then to set aside my will and surrender to the lucid dream as an observer. I should mention that being the observer does not mean removing oneself from the action, it means to live through it indifferently; if a beast attacks me, I defend myself without fear. If it wins, I let it devour me and observe what it means to be mauled. At the beginning of these new experiences, I found myself in situations where I could kill. I did not. While awake I am not a criminal, so why should I be in the dream? As a result of my work, which extended over several years, many things in my primitive personality were vanquished. By deciding not to intervene in the events in my dreams, I ceased having nightmares altogether. The distressing, disgusting, and perverse images also stopped. It seems that the subconscious, knowing that I was open to all its messages without wishing to defend myself or adulterate it, became my partner.

Whether or not to wake up within a dream becomes a secondary consideration. One reaches a level of consciousness where one knows that one is dreaming in all the dreams that occur. The dream images are experiences that transform us just like events in real life. Indeed, sleep and wakefulness go hand in hand so much that when speaking of them we refer to a single world. One stops searching for detachment, for lucidity, and humbly accepts the blessing. Lucid dreams become happy dreams. But this cannot be achieved all at once; one must pass through different stages. In my case, once I stopped playing the magician and had tamed my nightmares, turning every menace into an ally, into a gift, into positive energy, I began to dream of transforming myself into my own therapist. I healed emotional wounds and alleviated deficiencies. For example:

I am lying naked in my bedroom, just as it is in reality: a room with white walls and curtains. A bed made of boards, a hard mattress, a bedside table, a chair, and a small wardrobe, nothing more. No decorations. My father appears, the same age as me. He is on his bicycle, with a box full of merchandise on the rear fender: women’s underwear, ties, trinkets. He is dressed in a suit copied from a photograph of Stalin. He asks me, with an intense expression of surprise, what I am doing here. I reply, “I am your son, you’re not in Matucana. Now you live in my level of consciousness. Leave that bike behind; you’re not a merchant, you’re a human being. Forget your communist uniform and recognize that you’re worshiping a false hero.”

As I speak, the bicycle disappears, as does his suit. He is naked. I approach him with open arms. He draws back in fear or disgust.

“Calm down, stop being ashamed of your penis. I’ve known it’s small for ages; it doesn’t matter. Filial love exists, and so does paternal love. You were so afraid of turning out gay like your brother you eliminated all physical contact between us. Men don’t touch each other, you said. And throughout my childhood, you never gave me a hug, never kissed me. You made me fear you, nothing more. At the slightest fault, you hit me or yelled at me in rage. It is a mistake to build paternity on a foundation of fear. I want love, not terror, to be what binds me to you. I was a victim as a child, but now that I’m grown I will hold you in my arms and you’ll do the same.” And without fear, I take him in my arms, kiss him, and then rock him like a toddler. And as he quiets down, I feel the surprising strength of his back.

Now he is a hundred years old, and so am I! We are two old men, tough, full of energy. “Love extends life, my father!” I still rock him, boldly, tenderly. “Because you never communicated with me through touch, I also refused all physical contact with my son, Axel Cristóbal.” And now my son appears, the same age as I am in the dream, twenty-six years old. I caress him with great tenderness and ask him to cradle me as I have just cradled my father. He takes me in his arms, weeping with happiness, as do I.

Then I woke up. My son telephoned me and suggested that we have breakfast together. I told him to come and see me. As soon as I opened the door, I embraced him. He was not surprised and returned equal affection, as if we had communicated physically all his life. I explained the dream and asked him if he felt that he could give nurture as well as receiving it.

“Hold me like a child and rock me, whispering a lullaby.”

At first Cristóbal did so timidly, but little by little, he was touched, and we established a contact in which filial and paternal love intermingled indivisibly. Finally, there is prosperity and peace in our relationship.

Naturally, without intending to, I transitioned from these dreams in which I healed myself to some in which I cared for others:

I am flying over the Champs-Élysées Avenue in Paris. Below me, thousands of people are marching, demanding world peace. They carry a cardboard dove a kilometer long with its wings and chest stained with blood. I begin to circle around them to get their attention. The people, astonished, point up at me, seeing me levitate. Then I ask them to join hands and form a chain so that they can fly with me. I gently take one hand and lift. The others, still holding hands, also rise up. I fly through the air, drawing beautiful figures with this human chain. The cardboard dove follows us. Its bloodstains have vanished. I wake up with the feeling of peace and joy that comes from good dreams.

Three days later, while walking with my children along the Champs-Élysées Avenue, I saw an elderly gentleman under the trees near the obelisk whose entire body was covered by sparrows. He was sitting completely still on one of the metal benches put there by the city council with his hand outstretched, holding out a piece of cake. There were birds flitting around tearing off crumbs while others waited their turn, lovingly perched on his head, his shoulders, his legs. There were hundreds of birds. I was surprised to see tourists passing by without paying much attention to what I considered a miracle. Unable to contain my curiosity, I approached the old man. As soon as I got within a couple of meters of him, all the sparrows flew away to take refuge in the tree branches.

“Excuse me,” I said, “how does this happen?”

The gentleman answered me amiably.

“I come here every year at this time of the season. The birds know me. They pass on the memory of my person through their generations. I make the cake that I offer. I know what they like and what ingredients to use. The arm and hand must be still and the wrist tilted so that they can clearly see the food. And then, when they come, stop thinking and love them very much. Would you like to try?”

I asked my children to sit and wait on a nearby bench. I took the piece of cake, reached my hand out, and stood still. No sparrow dared approach. The kind old man stood beside me and took my hand. Immediately, some of the birds came and landed on my head, shoulders, and arm, while others pecked at the treat. The gentleman let go of me. Immediately the birds fled. He took my hand and asked me to take my son’s hand, and he another hand, so that my children formed a chain. We did. The birds returned and perched fearlessly on our bodies. Every time the old man let go of us, the sparrows fled. I realized that for the birds when their benefactor, full of goodness, took us by the hand, we became part of him. When he let go of us, we went back to being ourselves, frightening humans. I did not want to disrupt the work of this saintly man any longer. I offered him money. He absolutely would not accept. I never saw him again. Thanks to him, I understood certain passages of the Gospels: Jesus blesses children without uttering any prayer, just by putting his hands on them (Matthew 19:13–15). In Mark 16:18, the Messiah commands his apostles, “They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” St. John the Apostle says mysteriously in his first epistle, 1.1, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life.”

There was an amazing coincidence between my lucid dreams and the bird man. In a certain way, the same laws operate in the waking world as in the world of dreams. Someone who has achieved conscious detachment through humility and love in order to be useful to others, communicating his level to them, must not only unite with them spiritually but also physically. The soul can be transmitted through physical contact. This was the beginning of the development of what I later called “initiatory massage.” I told myself, the method by which Jesus touched the children, placing his hands on them and conveying his doctrine without saying a word, was not the method of a doctor. The doctor listens to a biological machine and discovers an illness there; this is not a communication from soul to soul but from body to body. Nor did Jesus act as a soldier, a guard, a warrior, or a master, people who command our bodies by imposing their rules, beating us, terrorizing us, humiliating us, and limiting our freedom. Nor did he act as a seducer, giving the body a purely sexual or emotional significance. He considered those things secondary and made his hands the continuation of his spirit; he transmitted consciousness through physical contact. Was this possible? To do this, he had to defeat the intellectual center that brings about the doctor’s attitude, the sexual center that produces lasciviousness, and the physical center with its animal nature engendering abuses of power.

I concentrated on my hands and felt the power of evolution in them, those millions of years it took for them to become human, emerging from hooves and paws, evolving from the prehensile fingers to the opposable thumb, developing into extremities that not only manipulate instruments and seek food, shelter, and touch, but that can also transmit spiritual energy. Desiring to awaken this sensibility, I had the idea of putting my hands in contact with sacred symbols or beneficent idols. I stood before the Aztec solar calendar in the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. This great granite wheel on which the mysterious wisdom of an ancient civilization is engraved is a mandala with a face in the center surrounded by an inner circle of twenty symbols, with another circle on the edge formed by two serpents with their tails joined together at the top and their human faces forehead to forehead at the bottom. This mandala, today a symbol of the Mexican nation, drew me like a magnet. In the inexplicable dance of reality the room in which the monument was exhibited among other sculptures, also of immense value, was momentarily empty of visitors and the guard was absent, perhaps having gone to relieve himself. I was alone with the calendar. I stepped over the barrier and put my hands on the center, right on the bas-relief face that looks out at the viewer (the faces of the two snakes are presented in profile). As soon as I placed my hands on that surface, a chill ran through my body. I do not claim that the mandala produced it; it may have been a psychological reaction, not caused by the stone. However, wherever it came from, a tremendous energy filled my cells. My vision changed, and I no longer saw this monument as a disc, but as a cone. The apex was the face that was under my hands and the base, a hundred meters distant, was composed of the two serpents that formed the outer circle. That is to say, the stone began at the animal level and rose in twenty rings, each one formed by an encircling symbol, until reaching the angelic/demonic consciousness represented by the forward-facing face. I felt that this face, bright as a sun, looked at me as if I were its mirror. I felt that the body of a serpent was growing behind it. And if I was its reflection, my spirit also had the body of a serpent: two snakes in profile forming a circle, and now two snakes facing forward, this face and I forming another circle because in addition to this union at the top our animal natures were also intermingling at the roots, far down below. This intense experience lasted about five minutes. Then I heard the footsteps of the guard and also a large group of tourists. The room filled with people. I left the museum feeling like a different person.

A statue of the Black Virgin, an idol of the Roma people, is preserved in a small church in the town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue region of France. Once a year during the summer thousands of Roma, coming from all corners of Europe, gather there to pay homage. The saint is paraded, sung to, and prayed to in an impressive public ceremony. After these celebrations, the nomadic people leave and the little church stands empty again. When I visited in the winter, the doors were unlocked. No priest was guarding the place. I approached the Black Virgin, who despite her great importance appeared abandoned. Impressed by her legend, I knelt before her. My first impulse was to ask for something, as all others do. But I held back. I approached her and started to massage her back. One might say that this is a subjective projection — that a piece of carved wood cannot have feelings — but through my hands I perceived the effort this idol made to bear the weight of so many requests. I stroked her back as if she were my mother, filled with a painful tenderness that was gradually transmuted into joy. When I felt that she was restored I joined my hands, which despite the cold winter were full of warmth, and prayed, “Teach me to transmit consciousness through my hands.” Her sweet voice resonated in my mind, “Give life to the stone.” I did not understand the meaning of this sentence. I attributed it to a folly of my imagination.

Months later, during the holiday period, I was invited to give seminars on the Tarot in the south of France. The architect Anti Lovacs had a beautiful property on the slopes of the mountains in Tourrettes-sur-Loup with a sphere-shaped house in which I stayed for two months. On a long mountain road, from which one could see the valley extending to the coast, I found a rock that was almost oval in form and approximately six feet tall. Here was this mineral, simple, humble, anonymous, beautiful, a witness to the passage of millions of years. I understood the message I had received from the depths of my subconscious in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. The Aztec solar calendar, with its symbolic system very similar to the Tarot, had placed its energy in my hands, entering through the intellectual portal. The Black Virgin, a powerful idol, had done the same, but had entered through the emotional portal. Now I had to face matter in its original state, without any human sculptors having intervened in its form. This was the body-to-body method. There was nothing significant about this stone other than itself. It was not part of a cathedral, a wailing wall, or the tomb of a demigod; it was itself, living with a rhythm infinitely slower than mine but also with a colossal capital of life. I remembered the five mottoes that appear on the engraving adorning the Rosarium philosophorum: Lapis noster habet spiritum, corpus et animam (Our stone has a spirit, a body, and a soul). And then Coquite. et quod quaeris invenies. The word coquite, being ambiguous — likely “sew”—I translated as “massage,” which gave me “Massage. and find what you seek.” Solve, coagula (Dissolve, coagulate) indicated to me that I should feel that I was dissolving the stone into its own consciousness, in order then to reintegrate it into its body again, this time as an illuminated material. Solvite corpora in aquas (Dissolve the bodies in water) told me that in the action of massaging the stone, I should dissolve both my body and the rock in an absolute communion, feeling the love of the mysterious alchemical elixir that dissolves everything, that transforms all things into unity. And finally: Wer unseren maysterlichen Steyn will bauwen / Der soll der naehren Anfang schauwen (He who wants to realize our perfect stone / should first contemplate the nearest beginning). In order to surpass the individual “I” it was necessary that I let myself be possessed by the impersonal “I,” the universal consciousness (the impersonal is closer to the truth than the personal), and thus, in a trance, reach the living heart of the stone. I decided to massage it for two hours every morning, from six to eight, before having breakfast with my students.

The first day, in a morning mist that submerged us in an abstract space, I saw the rock as an immense egg, insensible to my presence. It seemed clear that whatever I did, no contact would ever be established between us. But I thought of the fable of the hunter who wants to shoot the moon. He tries for years. His arrows never reach it, but he becomes the best archer in the world. I realized that this was not a matter of making the stone a living thing, but of trying to do so. The alchemist must attempt the impossible. The truth is not at the end of the road, but is the sum of all the actions we perform to get there. I felt that I should be naked while performing the massage. Patiently, with water, soap, and a sponge, I washed the stone. Then, aided by lavender oil, I began to caress it. The sun had not yet shone its brightest rays. Although I never ceased fondling the stone, its surface remained cold, impenetrable. True to my decision, I continued my massages every morning. Slowly, I began to love it as one loves an animal. I learned to forget the idea of an exchange, to give with no hope of receiving. I learned to love the existence of this stone without preoccupying myself with the question of whether it was conscious of my existence. The more insensible its body was, the more profound my massages. I remembered the words of Antonio Porchia: “The stone that I take in my hands absorbs a bit of my blood, and palpitates.” Those two months passed by without my knowing it. On the last day, concentrating on massaging as always, I do not know why I raised my eyes but a black raven with a white spot on its chest was there, quietly perched on the rock. It locked eyes with me, squawked, and flew away.

The workshops were coming to a close. A student confessed to having spied on me one morning, and requested a massage. I agreed. I asked her to undress, to lie on a table. I started to massage her without anything in mind. My hands moved by themselves. Accustomed to the apparent insensibility and hardness of the stone, they felt not only the skin and flesh but also the viscera and bones. This body appeared to me to be divided by horizontal barriers, and I dedicated myself to establishing vertical connections from head to toe. The next day, my student gathered up her savings and set off on a trip around the world.

In the series of dreams in which the central character, the self, gives more importance to the realization of others than to its own realization, there was one dream that marked me deeply and that may have been the result of my experience massaging the rock:

I am sitting, meditating before the gates of a temple. I know that they will not let me into the temple because I am carrying a huge bag with me, seemingly full of garbage. I believe that this bag is part of me and that therefore I have the right to attend the ceremonies that are performed inside the temple accompanied by my burden. A group of men and women approach, each one sadly carrying a bag similar to mine. I rise, full of joy, and say, “If you have to see it to believe it, then take a look!” I open my bag and empty it out. A thick stream of black ink flows out of it, forming a puddle at my feet. The poor people follow my example and begin to empty out their bags, which are also full of thick black ink. We have created a dark lagoon.

I remove a thin column from the facade of the temple with which I stir this goo. As the stone rod rotates, long stems emerge from the pool, rising up many meters. Enormous sunflowers open up at their ends. These flowers attract light, and soon the place is pervaded by a golden glow. The towers on the temple also open like flowers. The people’s joy is so intense that it infects me. I awake in a state of joyous excitement. Sunlight comes pouring in through the window of my bedroom.

In the Bible it is said in Exodus that Moses found a bitter pool while leading his thirsty people through the desert. God indicated a bush to him. Moses stirred the water with the bush, and it became sweet. Thus he slaked the thirst of two or three million throats (Exodus 15:22–25).

When Moses did not reject the bitter water, that is to say, did not reject the apparent nightmare and took action using the branches above him, making the plant into an extension of himself, the water was converted into his sweet ally. The conscious, when it recognizes the subconscious and surrenders to it with love, leads the subconscious to reveal itself with all its positivity. (This is the opposite of what was described by Robert Louis Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.) In the world of lucid dreams we begin by acting, giving, creating. Then we have to learn to receive. Accepting the favor that the other person or thing can perform for us is a form of generosity. Knowing how to give must be accompanied by knowing how to receive. All the characters and objects in our dreams have something to offer us. All the beings that we see in real life, animate or inanimate, can teach us something. For this reason, little by little I set aside voluntary acts and obeyed the will of the dream more and more. At last, I felt very comfortable being what I was in this dream world: a serene old man, surrendering to events, knowing that by virtue of their manifestation, they are a celebration. The following are some happy dreams. I used to write them down. Today I no longer do. That which has a natural tendency to fade should be allowed to do so.

I am exploring the slopes of a mysterious mountain without any concern for the legend of it being inhabited by ferocious golden warriors. In an ice cave I discover a hot spring. I plunge my hands into the water, knowing that after healing all my diseases it will give me the power to cure the ills of others.

I am a child. I go into a school run by a family of fat people. The gym teacher is an elephant. During the exercises I become very fond of the animal. I grow two extra arms from my shoulders. I receive a diploma giving me the title of Rising Demon.

A Mandarin Chinese man lies comatose. A group of elderly priests apply a hot iron to his side to see if the pain makes him react. “You’re wasting your time,” I say. “He’s definitely dead.” The old men stop burning him, and the cadaver looks at me. Puzzled, I wonder, “What am I doing here in China? Who am I?” The dead man answers, “You are me. Worship the one who burns you!”

I have gone up a very high mountain in search of my dead son. I arrive in a valley by automobile. The snow has covered all the roads, but I drive with enthusiasm, despite the danger of falling off a precipice, because I am taking Teo to a huge party. He laughs. We enter a city. On the streets there are carnival parades, led by his brothers.

When we achieve the role of the lucid witness, when we submit our will to that of the dream world, when we realize that we are not ourselves dreaming, nor the person who is asleep, nor the person who is awake in the dream, but the collective self, the cosmic being, who uses us as a channel to make human consciousness evolve, then the barrier between waking and sleep, if it does not disappear, will at least be transparent. We realize that in the shadow of the rational world, the mysterious laws of the dream world thrive.

I suggest that my clients treat reality as a dream, initially as a personal and nonlucid dream, in order to analyze the events as if they were symbols of the subconscious. For example, instead of lamenting because thieves have ransacked the house or because a lover has left, I suggest that they ask, “Why have I dreamed that I was robbed or that I was deserted? What am I trying to say with this?” During my interviews I realized that events tend to arrange themselves, seemingly “by chance,” into series in the dream that correspond to the metamorphosis of a single message. It is common for people to suffer from a breakup with a partner, lose money, or be robbed. In other cases, people who are caught up in conflicts that give rise to irrational anger may dream that they are suddenly in the middle of a hurricane, an earthquake, or a flood.

One client’s mother, with whom he had had a love/hate relationship, had just committed suicide. After the cremation ceremony, his apartment caught fire. In this type of chain of events, reality presents itself to us as a dream inhabited by distressing shadows in which we are victims, passive beings to whom things happen. If we stop identifying with the individual self through conscious effort, if we are able to “let go” and become impassive witnesses to what seems to happen to us by accident, and even more, if we stop suffering from what happens to us and begin to suffer from suffering from what happens to us, then we can get past the stage that corresponds to the lucid dream and introduce unexpected events into reality that cause it to evolve. The past is not immovable; it is possible to change it, enrich it, strip it of trouble, give it joy. It is evident that memory has the same quality as dreams. The memory consists of images as immaterial as dreams. Whenever we remember we recreate, giving a different interpretation to the events remembered. The facts can be analyzed from multiple points of view. The meaning of something in a child’s consciousness changes when we pass on to the adult level of consciousness. In memory, as in dreams, we can amalgamate different images. I spent three months during a harsh winter stuck in a hotel room in Montreal, Canada, waiting for a visa to enter the United States as an assistant to Marceau. The room was gray and depressing, the bed narrow and hard, the sink constantly emitted grunts like a pig, and the window invaded by arrows of neon light from a nearby pizzeria. Not wanting to remember those months as a time of such painful loneliness, in my mind I started painting the walls of the room in brilliant colors. I gave it a large bed with silk sheets and feather pillows, converted the grunts of the sink into gentle trumpet notes, and replaced the arrows in the window depicting a bleeding pizza with a blue lunar landscape in which luminous entities danced. I changed my nasty room into an enchanted place, as if retouching a bad photograph. Eventually, the real room was forever joined to the imaginary room. Then I started to dig up other unpleasant recollections in order to add details to brighten them. I turned egotists into generous teachers, deserts into lush forests, failures into triumphs.

I used a different technique with the closest memories, those I had experienced during that same day: I got in the habit of reviewing them before going to sleep, first from start to finish, then the other way around, following the advice of an old book on magic. This practice of “walking backward” had the effect of allowing me to place myself at some distance from events. After having analyzed, judged, and reprimanded or praised myself upon first examination, I went back over the day again in reverse and found myself to be distanced. Reality, thus captured, presented the same characteristics as a lucid dream. What this made me realize, more than ever, was that like everyone, I was to a large extent immersed in a dreamlike reality. The act of reviewing the day in the evening was equivalent to the practice of recalling my dreams in the morning. But to merely recall a dream is to organize it rationally. We do not see the complete dream, but the parts that we have selected depending on our level of consciousness. We reduce it to fit within the limitations of the individual “I.” We do the same with reality: when reviewing the last twenty-four hours, we do not have access to all the events of the day, but only to those we have captured and retained, which is to say a limited interpretation; we transform reality into what we think it is. This selective interpretation is the largely artificial foundation on which we then base our judgments and evaluations. To be more conscious, we can begin by distinguishing our subjective perception of the day from what constitutes that day’s objective reality. Once we stop confusing the two, we can view the events of the day as spectators, without letting ourselves be influenced by judgments, evaluations, and juvenile emotions. From this point of view, life can be interpreted as a dream is interpreted.

One client did not know how to get some young and unscrupulous tenants to vacate a house he owned. Something kept him from going to the police, even though the law was on his side. I said, “This situation is fitting for you. Thanks to it, you are expressing an old anxiety. Try to interpret it like a dream from last night. Do you have a younger brother?” He said yes, and I asked him if he had felt neglected when this intruder robbed him of his parents’ attention. He answered that it was so. Next, I asked him about his current relationship with his brother. As I had expected, he told me that it was not a good relationship, considering that they never saw each other. I explained that it was he himself who encouraged the invasion of his tenants (who were younger than he) in order to externalize the anguish he had felt in his childhood due to the presence of his younger brother. I added that if he wanted to resolve the situation, it was necessary to forgive his brother, treat him well, and become friends with him. “You should bring him a big bouquet of flowers and have lunch with him, so as to establish a fraternal relationship and set aside the past, in which you felt displaced by him. If you do this, you will put an end to your problem with the tenants.” He looked at me oddly. How could solving an old problem resolve a present difficulty? And yet, he followed my advice to the letter. He later sent me a short note: “I brought flowers to my brother and spoke with him on Friday at midday. On Friday night, the tenants left, taking all my furniture with them. But at least they left and I could get my house back. Could the loss of furniture mean that I have broken away from a painful part of my past?” This question revealed that my client was learning to decipher real situations as if they were dreams.

If we realize that we are dreaming in the dream world, then in the waking world, trapped in the limited conception of ourselves, we must jettison preconceived ideas and sentiments in order to immerse ourselves in the Essence with a naked spirit. Once this lucidity is gained, we have the freedom to act on reality, knowing that if we only try to satisfy our egotistic desires we will be swept away in the whirlwind of emotions, lose our equanimity and control, and thus lose the ability to be our own selves acting on the level of consciousness that corresponds to us. In the lucid dream, one learns that everything one desires with true intensity — with faith — will be realized after patient waiting. Knowing this, we must stop living like children, always demanding, and live like adults, investing our vital capital.

Two monks pray continuously. One is worried, the other smiling. The first asks, “How is it that I am anxious and you are happy, if both pray for the same number of hours?” The other replies, “It is because you always pray to ask, while I only pray to give thanks.” To achieve peace, both in the nighttime dream and in the daytime dream that we call waking, we must become less and less implicated in the world and in our image of ourselves. Life and death are only a game. And the ultimate game is to stop dreaming, that is, to disappear from this dream world and integrate oneself into the one who is dreaming.

There is a dimension with which I have not yet been lucky enough to experiment: shared therapeutic dreams. It is said that María Sabina, the mushroom priestess, received a man who had a terrible pain in his leg. Neither the most sophisticated remedies, nor acupuncture, nor massage had been able to relieve it. The old woman divided a portion of mushrooms into two equal parts to share with her patient. She lay down beside him. They fell asleep embracing. In her dreams, she saw the patient as a wizard, devouring a lamb. The shepherd of the herd struck it with his staff, injuring a leg. María took the animal and, laying her hands on it, healed the injured limb. The healer and her patient awoke at the same time. The pain in his leg had vanished. He never again experienced such suffering.