I was dreaming an utterly nonsensical dream. Carol Tiggs was by my side. She was speaking to me, although I could not understand what she said. Don Juan was also in my dream, as were all the members of his party. They seemed to be trying to drag me out of a foggy, yellowish world.
After a serious effort, during which I lost and regained sight of them various times, they succeeded in extricating me from that place. Since I could not conceive the sense of all that endeavor, I finally figured that I was having a normal, incoherent dream.
My surprise was staggering when I woke up and found myself in bed, in don Juan's house. I was incapable of moving. I had no energy at all. I did not know what to think, although I immediately sensed the gravity of my situation. I had the vague feeling that I had lost my energy because of fatigue caused by dreaming.
Don Juan's companions seemed to be extremely affected by whatever was happening to me. They kept on coming into my room, one at a time. Each stayed for a moment, in complete silence, until someone else showed up. It appeared to me that they were taking turns watching over me. I was too weak to ask them to explain their behavior.
During the subsequent days, I began to feel better, and they started to talk to me about my dreaming. At first, I did not know what they wanted of me. Then it dawned on me, because of their questions, that they were obsessed with the shadow beings. Every one of them appeared to be scared and said to me more or less the same thing. They insisted that they had never been in the shadows' world. Some of them even claimed that they did not know it existed. Their claims and reactions increased my sense of bewilderment and my fear.
The questions everyone asked were, "Who took you into that world? Or how did you even begin to know how to get there?" When I told them that the scouts had shown me that world, they could not believe me. Obviously, they had surmised that I had been there, but since it was not possible for them to use their personal experience as a reference point, they were unable to fathom what I was saying. Yet they still wanted to know all I could tell them about the shadow beings and their realm. I obliged them. All of them, with the exception of don Juan, sat by my bed, hanging on every word I said. However, every time I asked them about my situation, they scurried away, just like the shadow beings.
Another disturbing reaction, which they never had before, was that they frantically avoided any physical contact with me. They kept their distance, as if I were carrying the plague. Their reaction worried me so much that I felt obliged to ask them about it. They denied it. They seemed insulted and even went so far as to insist on proving to me that I was wrong. I laughed heartily at the tense situation that ensued. Their bodies went rigid every time they tried to embrace me.
Florinda Grau, don Juan's closest cohort, was the only member of his party who lavished physical attention on me and tried to explain to me what was going on. She told me that I had been discharged of energy in the inorganic beings' world and charged again, but that my new energetic charge was a bit disturbing to the majority of them.
Florinda used to put me to bed every night, as if I were an invalid. She even spoke to me in baby talk, which all of them celebrated with gales of laughter. But regardless of how she made fun of me, I appreciated her concern, which seemed to be real.
I have written about Florinda before in connection with my meeting her. She was by far the most beautiful woman I had ever met. Once I said to her, and I really meant it, that she could have been a fashion magazine model.
"Of a magazine of nineteen ten," she retorted.
Florinda, although she was old, was not old at all. She was young and vibrant. When I asked don Juan about her unusual youthfulness, he replied that sorcery kept her in a vital state. Sorcerers' energy, he remarked, was seen by the eye as youth and vigor.
After satisfying their initial curiosity about the shadows' world, don Juan's companions stopped coming into my room, and their conversation remained at the level of casual inquiries about my health. Every time I tried to get up, however, there was someone around who gently put me back to bed. I did not want their ministrations, yet it seemed that I needed them; I was weak. I accepted that. But what really took its toll on me was not having anyone explain to me what I was doing in Mexico when I had gone to bed to dream in Los Angeles. I asked them repeatedly. Every one of them gave me the same answer, "Ask the nagual. He's the only one who can explain it."
Finally, Florinda broke the ice. "You were lured into a trap: That's what happened to you," she said.
"Where was I lured into a trap?"
"In the world of the inorganic beings, of course. That has been the world you've been dealing with for years. Isn't that so?"
"Most definitely, Florinda. But can you tell me about the kind of trap it was?"
"Not really. All I can tell you is that you lost all your energy there. But you fought very well."
"Why am I sick, Florinda?"
"You are not sick with an illness: You were energetically wounded. You were critical, but now you are only gravely wounded."
"How did all this happen?"
"You entered into a mortal combat with the inorganic beings, and you were defeated."
"I don't remember fighting anyone, Florinda."
"Whether you remember or not is immaterial. You fought and were outclassed. You didn't have a chance against those masterful manipulators."
"I fought the inorganic beings?"
"Yes. You had a mortal encounter with them. I really don't know how you have survived their death blow."
She refused to tell me anything else and hinted that the nagual was coming to see me any day.
The next day don Juan showed up. He was very jovial and supportive. He jokingly announced that he was paying me a visit in his capacity of energy doctor. He examined me by gazing at me from head to toe.
"You're almost cured," he concluded.
"What happened to me, don Juan?" I asked.
"You fell into a trap the inorganic beings set for you," he answered.
"How did I end up here?"
"Right there is the big mystery, for sure," he said and smiled jovially, obviously trying to make light of a serious matter. "The inorganic beings snatched you, body and all. First they took your energy body into their realm when you followed one of their scouts; and then they took your physical body."
Don Juan's companions seemed to be in a state of shock. One of them asked don Juan whether the inorganic beings could abduct anyone. Don Juan answered that they certainly could. He reminded them that the nagual Elias was taken into that universe, and he definitely did not intend to go there.
All of them assented with a nod. Don Juan continued speaking to them, referring to me in the third person. He said that the combined awareness of a group of inorganic beings had first consumed my energy body by forcing an emotional outburst from me: to free the blue scout. Then the combined awareness of the same group of inorganic beings had pulled my inert physical mass into their world. Don Juan added that without the energy body one is merely a lump of organic matter that can be easily manipulated by awareness.
"The inorganic beings are glued together, like the cells of the body," don Juan went on. "When they put their awareness together, they are unbeatable. It's nothing for them to yank us out of our moorings and plunge us into their world. Especially if we make ourselves conspicuous and available, like he did."
Their sighs and gasps echoed against the walls. All of them seemed to be genuinely frightened and concerned.
I wanted to whine and blame don Juan for not stopping me, but I remembered how he had tried to warn me, to deviate me, time and time again, to no avail. Don Juan was definitely aware of what was going on in my mind. He gave a knowing smile.
"The reason you think you're sick," he said, addressing me, "is that the inorganic beings discharged your energy and gave you theirs. That should have been enough to kill anyone. As the nagual, you have extra energy; therefore, you barely survived."
I mentioned to don Juan that I remembered bits and pieces of quite an incoherent dream, in which I was in a yellow-fogged world. He, Carol Tiggs, and his companions were pulling me out.
"The inorganic beings' realm looks like a yellow fog world to the physical eye," he said. "When you thought you were having an incoherent dream, you were actually looking with your physical eyes for the first time at the inorganic beings' universe. And, strange as it may seem to you, it was also the first time for us. We knew about the fog only through sorcerers' stories, not through experience."
Nothing of what he was saying made sense to me. Don Juan assured me that because of my lack of energy, a more complete explanation was impossible. I had to be satisfied, he said, with what he was telling me and how I understood it.
"I don't understand it at all," I insisted.
"Then you haven't lost anything," he said. "When you get stronger, you yourself will answer your questions."
I confessed to don Juan that I was having hot flashes. My temperature would rise suddenly, and while I felt hot and sweaty, I had extraordinary but disturbing insights into my situation.
Don Juan scanned my entire body with his penetrating gaze. He said that I was in a state of energetic shock. Losing energy had temporarily affected me, and what I interpreted as hot flashes were, in essence, blasts of energy during which I momentarily regained control of my energy body and knew everything that had happened to me.
"Make an effort, and tell me yourself what happened to you in the inorganic beings' world," he ordered me.
I told him that the clear sensation I got, from time to time, was that he and his companions had gone into that world with their physical bodies and had snatched me out of the inorganic beings' clutches.
"Right!" he exclaimed. "You're doing fine. Now, turn that sensation into a view of what happened."
I was unable to do what he wanted, hard as I tried. Failing made me experience an unusual fatigue which seemed to dry up the inside of my body. Before don Juan left the room, I remarked to him that I was suffering from anxiety.
"That means nothing," he said, unconcerned. "Gain back your energy, and don't worry about nonsense."
More than two weeks went by, during which I slowly gained back my energy. However, I kept on worrying about everything. I worried mainly about being unknown to myself, especially about a streak of coldness in me that I had not noticed before; a sort of indifference; a detachment that I had attributed to my lack of energy until I regained it. Then I realized that detachment was a new feature of my being; a feature that had me permanently out of synchronization. To elicit the feelings I was accustomed to, I had to summon them up and actually wait a moment until they made their appearance in my mind.
Another new feature of my being was a strange longing that took hold of me from time to time. I longed for someone I did not know. It was such an overpowering and consuming feeling that when I experienced it, I had to move around the room incessantly to alleviate it. The longing remained with me until I made use of another newcomer in my life: a rigid control of myself so new and powerful that it only added more fuel to my worrying.
By the end of the fourth week, everybody felt that I was finally cured. They cut down their visits drastically. I spent much of the time alone, sleeping. The rest and relaxation I was getting was so complete that my energy began to increase remarkably. I felt like my old self again. I even began to exercise.
One day around noon, after a light lunch, I returned to my room to take a nap. Just before I sank into a deep sleep, I was tossing in my bed trying to find a more comfortable spot, when a strange pressure on my temples made me open my eyes. The little girl of the inorganic beings' world was standing by the foot of my bed, peering at me with her cold, steel blue eyes.
I jumped out of bed and screamed so loudly that three of don Juan's companions were in the room before I had stopped my scream. They were aghast. They watched in horror as the little girl came to me and was stopped by the boundaries of my luminous physical being. We looked at each other for an eternity. She was telling me something, which I could not comprehend at first but which in the next moment became as clear as a bell. She said that for me to understand what she was saying, my awareness had to be transferred from my physical body into my energy body.
Don Juan came into the room at that moment. The little girl and don Juan stared at each other. Without a word, don Juan turned around and walked out of the room. The little girl swished past the door after him. The commotion this scene created among don Juan's companions was indescribable. They lost all their composure. Apparently, all of them had seen the little girl as she left the room with the nagual.
I myself seemed to be on the verge of exploding. I felt faint and had to sit down. I had experienced the presence of the little girl as a blow on my solar plexus. She bore an astonishing likeness to my father. Waves of sentiment hit me. I wondered about the meaning of this until I was actually sick.
When don Juan returned to the room, I had gained minimal control over myself. The expectation of hearing what he had to say about the little girl was making my breathing very difficult. Everybody was as excited as I was. They all talked to don Juan at once and laughed when they realized what they were doing. Their main interest was to find out whether there was any uniformity in the way they had perceived the scout's appearance. Everybody was in agreement that they had seen a little girl, six to seven years old, very thin, with angular, beautiful features. They also agreed that her eyes were steel blue and burning with a mute emotion: Her eyes, they said, expressed gratitude and loyalty.
Every detail they described about the little girl I corroborated myself. Her eyes were so bright and overpowering that they had actually caused me something like pain. I had felt the weight of her look on my chest.
A serious query, which don Juan's companions had and which I echoed myself, was about the implications of this event. All agreed that the scout was a portion of foreign energy that had filtered through the walls separating the second attention and the attention of the daily world. They asserted that; since they were not dreaming and yet all of them had seen the alien energy projected into the figure of a human child; that child had existence.
They argued that there must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of cases in which foreign energy slips unnoticed through natural barriers into our human world, but that in the history of their lineage there was no mention whatsoever of an event of this nature. What worried them the most was that there were no sorcerers' stories about it.
"Is this the first time in the history of mankind that this has happened?" one of them asked don Juan.
"I think it happens all the time," he replied, "but it has never happened in such an overt, volitional way."
"What does it mean to us?" another one of them asked don Juan.
"Nothing to us, but everything to him," he said and pointed at me.
All of them then entered into a most disturbing silence. Don Juan paced back and forth for a moment. Then he stopped in front of me and peered at me, giving all the indications of someone who cannot find words to express an overwhelming realization.
"I can't even begin to assess the scope of what you've done," don Juan finally said to me in a tone of bewilderment. "You fell into a pitfall, but it wasn't the kind of pitfall I was worrying about. Your pitfall was designed for you alone, and it was deadlier than anything I could have thought of. I worried about your falling prey to flattery and being served. What I never counted on was that the shadow beings would set a trap using your inherent aversion to chains."
Don Juan had once made a comparison of his reaction and mine, in the sorcerers' world, to the things that pressed us the most. He said, without making it sound like a complaint, that although he wanted and tried to, he had never been able to inspire the kind of affection his teacher, the nagual Julian, inspired in people.
"My unbiased reaction, which I am putting on the table for you to examine, is to be able to say, and mean it: it's not my fate to evoke blind and total affection. So be it!"
"Your unbiased reaction," he went on, "is that you can't stand chains, and you would forfeit your life to break them."
I sincerely disagreed with him and told him that he was exaggerating. My views were not that clear.
"Don't worry," he said laughing, "sorcery is action. When the time comes, you'll act your passion the same way I act mine. Mine is to acquiesce to my fate, not passively, like an idiot, but actively, like a warrior. Yours is to jump without either capriciousness or premeditation to cut someone else's chains."
Don Juan explained that upon merging my energy with the scout I had truthfully ceased to exist. All my physicalness had then been transported into the inorganic beings' realm and, had it not been for the scout who guided don Juan and his companions to where I was, I would have died or remained in that world, inextricably lost.
"Why did the scout guide you to where I was?" I asked.
"The scout is a sentient being from another dimension," he said. "It's a little girl now, and as such she told me that in order to get the necessary energy to break the barrier that had trapped her in the inorganic beings' world, she had to take all of yours. That's her human part now. Something resembling gratitude drove her to me. When I saw her, I knew instantly that you were done for."
"What did you do then, don Juan?"
"I rounded up everyone I could get hold of, especially Carol Tiggs, and off we went into the inorganic beings' realm."
"Why Carol Tiggs?"
"In the first place, because she has endless energy, and, in the second place, because she had to familiarize herself with the scout. All of us got something invaluable out of this experience. You and Carol Tiggs got the scout. And the rest of us got a reason to round up our physicality and place it on our energy bodies: We became energy."
"How did all of you do that, don Juan?"
"We displaced our assemblage points, in unison. Our impeccable intent to save you did the work. The scout took us, in the blink of an eye, to where you were lying, half dead, and Carol dragged you out."
His explanation made no sense to me. Don Juan laughed when I tried to raise that point.
"How can you understand this when you don't even have enough energy to get out of your bed?" he retorted.
I confided to him that I was certain I knew infinitely more than I rationally admitted but that something was keeping a tight lid on my memory.
"Lack of energy is what has put a tight lid on your memory," he said. "When you have sufficient energy, your memory will work fine."
"Do you mean that I can remember everything if I want to?"
"Not quite. You may want as much as you like, but if your energy level is not on a par with the importance of what you know, you might as well kiss your knowledge good-bye: it'll never be available to you."
"So what's the thing to do, don Juan?"
"Energy tends to be cumulative: If you follow the warrior's way impeccably, a moment will come when your memory opens up."
I confessed that hearing him talk gave me the absurd sensation that I was indulging in feeling sorry for myself; that there was nothing wrong with me.
"You are not just indulging," he said. "You were actually energetically dead four weeks ago. Now you are merely stunned. Being stunned and lacking energy is what makes you hide your knowledge. You certainly know more than any of us about the inorganic beings' world. That world was the exclusive concern of the old sorcerers. All of us have told you that only through sorcerers' stories do we know about it. I sincerely say that it is more than strange to me that you've become, in your own right, another source of sorcerers' stories for us."
I reiterated that it was impossible for me to believe I had done something he had not. But I could not believe either that he was merely humoring me.
"I am not flattering or humoring you," he said, visibly annoyed. "I am stating a sorcery fact. Knowing more than any of us about that world shouldn't be a reason for feeling pleased. There's no advantage in that knowledge. In fact, in spite of all you know, you couldn't save yourself. We saved you, because we found you. But without the aid of the scout, there was no point in even trying to find you. You were so infinitely lost in that world that I shudder at the mere thought."
In my state of mind, I did not find it strange in the least that I actually saw a ripple of emotion going through all of don Juan's companions and apprentices. The only one who remained unaltered was Carol Tiggs. She seemed to have fully accepted her role. She was one with me.
"You did free the scout," don Juan continued, "but you gave up your life. Or, worse yet, you gave up your freedom. The inorganic beings let the scout go in exchange for you."
"I can hardly believe that, don Juan. Not that I doubt you, you understand, but you describe such an underhanded maneuver that I am stunned."
"Don't consider it underhanded and you have the whole thing in a nutshell. The inorganic beings are forever in search of awareness and energy. If you supply them with the possibility of both, what do you think they'll do? Blow you kisses from across the street?"
I knew that don Juan was right. However, I could not hold that certainty for too long: Clarity kept drifting away from me.
Don Juan's companions continued asking him questions. They wanted to know if he had given any thought to what to do with the scout.
"Yes, I have. It is a most serious problem, which the nagual here has to resolve," he said, pointing at me. "He and Carol Tiggs are the only ones who can free the scout. And he knows it too."
Naturally, I asked him the only possible question, "How can I free it?"
"Instead of my telling you how, there is a much better and more just way of finding out," don Juan said with a big smile. "Ask the emissary. The inorganic beings cannot lie, you know."