The Art of Dreaming
About This Book
The Art of Dreaming is Carlos Castaneda's most systematic presentation of the Toltec dreaming practices — the seven gates of dreaming that the warrior's tradition had developed over millennia as the primary technology for shifting the assemblage point beyond the range of ordinary waking perception and accessing the full range of awareness available to a fully developed sorcerer's consciousness. Don Juan presents dreaming not as the passive experience of sleep-state imagery but as an active practice of controlled awareness in non-physical dimensions — what Castaneda sometimes calls the 'second attention' — that with sufficient development becomes as reliable and navigable as waking experience.
The seven gates represent the sequential stages of dreaming development: the first gate (becoming aware of the moment of falling asleep), the second gate (controlling what is dreamed, including changing the dream scene at will), the third gate (achieving continuity of awareness across sleep), and the higher gates that involve increasingly distant and strange territories including contact with the inorganic beings who inhabit dimensions that the dreaming body can reach but the physical body cannot. Castaneda's account of the inorganic beings — the ancient inhabitants of the universe who predate organic life and who are fascinated by the dreaming awareness of human beings — is one of the most distinctive and philosophically provocative elements of the later Toltec teaching.
What You'll Learn
• Learn the seven gates of dreaming in sequence: what each gate consists of, what specific discipline enables its opening, what becomes accessible once a gate is opened, and what the characteristic challenge or danger is at each stage
• Understand the inorganic beings: what don Juan tells Castaneda about these entities — their nature, their age, their relationship to human dreamers, what they offer and what they want — and why the dreaming body's encounter with them is simultaneously the most potent form of dreaming development and the most dangerous
• Grasp the concept of the dreaming body as a vehicle for awareness: how the dreaming body is distinct from both the physical body and the astral body (in the Theosophical sense) — what it is capable of, how it is developed, and what the relationship between dreaming body experience and waking reality is once the dreaming practice is sufficiently developed
• Recognise the relationship between dreaming and the final stages of the warrior's path: how the full development of the dreaming practice enables the 'crossing of the third attention' that don Juan presents as the ultimate aim of the Toltec warrior — and what this crossing would actually mean in terms of the continuation of individual awareness after physical death
• Appreciate how The Art of Dreaming expands the dreaming framework introduced in earlier books: what is new in this more systematic treatment compared to the earlier accounts of don Juan's dreaming teaching, and what the complete seven-gate framework adds to the understanding of dreaming as a spiritual practice
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