For those who don’t keep an eye on alt.dreams.lucid here’s a link that someone posted there that stood out for me as being one of the most enthusing and informative articles about LDs I’ve seen in a long time. I genuinely felt excited again about the prospect of lucid dreaming.
I should probably point out that I haven’t read any Castaneda books, and more or less all I know about him I’ve read from that page and others on the same site. He sounds, um, interesting. Anyway that page is more of a personal thing by Ian Mapleson, who describes some interesting experiences.
I have just started reading Casteneda. I started with Art of Dreaming though and not the first one. I think that page may be a bit old because there is another book out called … Uhm Magical Passes or something like that. The “passes” part is right just not sure on the “magical.” Passes gives actual practices for drawing in and manipulating energy. Pictures and everything.
Some say his books are totally fiction… There is no Don Juan Matus. Others disagree. A lot of people think he knows what hes talking about. The books are very interesting regardless of how you take them and I think have some validity.
The Art of Dreaming talks about dreaming in the context of a step in the education and becoming of a shaman or as Matus calls them sorcerers. The practices of dreaming in the book lead to whole body transport into other realms of the universe by shifting part of our energetic essence called the assemblage point. The assemblage point is a tennis ball sized luminous point within our energy bodies through which energy filaments of the universe are filtered and become what we percieve. According to Don Juan changing the position of this assemblage point allows us to “see” the energetic essence of everything, percieve other worlds/realities and even change our shapes. Some of it is very strange but I guess only if you insist that this is the only reality.
Anyway… thats what I got from the first half of this book. A lot to absorb but not completely hard to understand. This looks like a nice page with good ideas. The word intend is hard to explain in Castenedan terms though. In the book, Don Juan says that to intend that you are a Dreamer means that you convince yourself without convincing yourself. I take this to mean that you just slowly feel or come to think of yourself as a dreamer. The way I do this is to think “I am a dreamer” and before I can start to build an argument as to why I am, I distract myself by reading something or thinking on something else. Hehehe… trying to trick myself into it.
I’ve read all of Castaneda, in order, and he has a little to offer. There is a forum that discusses his techniques, but there is also a lot of debate about the “truth of it all”. I personally ignore the arguments and look for what I can use. See for yourself:
