Don Juan: Art of Dreaming

Spring 2007

Topic (3): Dreaming substitutes place for time; “past” and “future” are different places in the world of the dreamer, as when Carlos drove his car back to where it actually was in Journey to Ixtlan while riding on thin air. Did the Tenant in The Art of Dreaming use a version of this trick (“sleight of being?”) to replace Carlos’s Nagual woman in don Juan’s warriors’s party, leading the party to its doom (why?)? Was Carlos similarly compromised in the earlier “Blue Scout” episode.

“ ‘How then should we perceive the world?’ ‘Everything is energy. The whole universe is energy. The social base of our perception should be the physical certainty that energy is all there is. A mighty effort should be made to guide us to perceive energy as energy.” (p. 3)

In the western world, life is organized along a horizontal time span, with “past” occurring to the left and “future” taking place to the right. However, “past” which is experienced through a process we call recollection (memory) is the fixation of the corner point at a certain particular position by its cohesion. Anticipating (we say ‘of the future’) is this movement from the corner point from one position to another. The western world begs an “explanation” (really a strewn together sentence that supposedly makes sense) for each cause and effect relationship, where “intent” serves as the mediator between the action of cohesion and anticipation. In fact, this polar world in which we live (life/death, up/down, rise/fall) shows the recollecting self and the anticipating self in a manner where they are twinned against each other and us. These “antitwins” are counterintuitive. The recollecting self cannot act, it simply recollects what happens (the “past) and tells itself that it is acting. The anticipating self is chained to never be able to think, instead it acts as though it were. Furthermore, every action begs a cause for its effect, while associating it with a “place.” This is contradictory to a...