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.
SEVEN
Magicians, Masters, Shamans, and Charlatans
My first encounter with magic and madness combined into art was during my childhood. I was about five or six years old when Cristina came to work as our maid. With my childish eyes I saw her as an old lady, though in fact she was only forty years old; the air, doubly salt-laden from the sea and from the nitrate dust of the desert, had made furrows in her forehead and cheeks. All her clothes were brown, like the habits of Carmelite nuns. Her hair, stretched and tied back to form a bun, looked like a helmet. It was she, clean, quiet, and friendly, with large but sensitive hands, who gave me the touches that my mother withheld, who rubbed my feet when I had a fever, who dressed me in the morning to go to school, who baked my favorite pastries filled with dark caramel that we called manjar blanco. How I loved Cristina! My need for my mother was very affective and painful, I was united to her absence, but Cristina, with her rustic humbleness, was balsam for my wounded heart.
I was surprised when my father, seeing me in the arms of my beloved maid, said in front of her with a cynical, self-satisfied smile, as if she were deaf: “I’m the only one who will give work to a madwoman.” Those words pierced my soul like a knife. I blushed, struggling to hold back my tears. Jaime shrugged his shoulders with a look of contempt, and left. Cristina began to rock me in her arms until I fell asleep. At about three o’clock in the morning, I woke up in my bed. I heard my father’s loud snoring and my mother’s breathing, which sounded like grumbling. I had gone to bed without my supper. Hungry, and with a dry mouth, I got up to get a glass of water and a fruit. The rooms were dark, but from the kitchen came the faint glow of a candle flame. At first, Cristina seemed not to notice my arrival. With strange concentration, she was sitting on a stool before the bare table, gently and precisely moving her hands in the air. She seemed to be shaping something, creating forms, smoothing invisible matter, going over and over imaginary surfaces with her fingers. A long time passed, maybe an hour. I stood there, mesmerized, transfixed, watching something that I could not understand and that corresponded to nothing I had known. At last, tired, hungry, and thirsty, I could hold back no longer.
“What are you doing, Christina?”
She slowly turned her head and, still stroking the air, looking at me with glazed eyes, said anxiously, “Do you see? I’m finishing. When God took my son, the Virgin of Carmen came to me and told me, ‘Make me a sculpture of me from the air. When it’s finished and everyone can see it, your child will rise from his grave, alive again.’ You see it, right? Tell me!”
What could I say? I did not know how to lie. It was the first time I had been in contact with madness, the first time I had seen a person acting as a unit without observing herself, without a social mask. Terrified, I felt frozen to the spot. The cold night wind, blowing down from the mountains, started sighing. Cristina embraced her invisible sculpture, distraught. “No, I don’t want you to take him, damn you!” She seemed to be struggling against a hurricane, then, sobbing, put her face on the table with her arms dangling as if her hands were empty. After some seconds, she returned to being the person I knew. She gave me a glass of water, peeled an apple for me, and took me to bed. She stayed by me until I dissolved into sleep.
My second encounter with magic was in Santiago. Our group of young poets attracted many older homosexual intellectuals. Sometimes they were painters, sometimes writers, sometimes university professors. They had a unique culture, spoke several languages with French being the preferred one, and were very generous. Knowing us to be heterosexual they fell in love platonically, revered us in silence, and in order to enjoy our youthful presence often invited us to the German pub to drink beer, eat sausages, and listen to a string trio accompanied on the piano by Pirulí (Lollipop), a lanky effeminate man with hair dyed a violent yellow who played Viennese waltzes. Among these men was Chico Molina, about fifty, short in stature with a broad chest, slender legs, and tiny feet, who seduced our minds with his encyclopedic knowledge. He was a polyglot, could read Sanskrit, and knew every author or artist that one could name. One day, apparently more drunk than usual, he revealed to us that his intimate millionaire friend, Lora Aldunate, owned a magic mirror made in the fourteenth century. He had apparently bought it in Italy, in Turin, a city consecrated to the devil. If certain secret rituals were performed in front of it, the mirror would stop reflecting reality and would show old reflections. Molina swore to us that he had seen, more clearly than on film, a night scene in a forest
in which naked women kissed the anus of a billy goat beneath the light of the full moon. Excited by such revelations, we rushed him out of the German restaurant and took him to the home of Lora Aldunate, which was very close by. We started yelling, asking him to let us in, demanding to see the magic mirror. A tall, distinguished, deathly pale man opened the blinds on the second floor and emptied his bedpan full of urine onto our heads. “You indecent drunks, don’t play with magic! You will never see my mirror! When I die, I’ll take it to the grave, locked in my coffin with me!” Molina looked at us with a wide smile on his simian face. “See? It’s true. I never lie. As Neruda said, ‘God forbid me from making things up when I’m singing!’”
Some time later, we learned that he was a pathological liar and fraudster. For months he had sparked our admiration by reading us chapters from his magnificent novel The Swimmer without a Family in exchange for invitations to dinner, until one of our friends, a philosophy professor, discovered that it was a translation of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, which had not yet been published in Spanish. Well then, did the magic mirror exist, or was it a lie made up with Lora Aldunate’s complicity? His anger had seemed sincere when he opened the blinds, but Lihn raised a doubt: no one fills a chamber pot with urine in a single night; it was hard to believe that such a distinguished man would accumulate so much of the yellow liquid just for the pleasure of collecting it. But countless depravities exist . . .
The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Page 25
