Being in Dreaming: Chapter 16.

Being in Dreaming ©1991 by Florinda Donner.

Chapter 16.

For a moment, I just lay on my bed, vaguely aware of my amazing, astonishing dream, so unlike any other dream. For the first time ever I was conscious of all I had done.

As a soft, raspy, murmuring, came from the other end of the room and intruded on my reveries, I whispered, "Nelida?"

I sat up only to lie back quickly as the room began to spin around me.

I waited for a few moments, then tried again. I stood up and took a few hesitant steps, but I collapsed on the floor and hit my head against the wall.

When the room kept spinning around me, I cried out, "Shit! I am fainting."

Florinda said, "Do not be so dramatic." Then she giggled as she saw my bewildered face.

She touched my forehead first and then my neck as if she were afraid I might be running a fever. She pronounced, "You are not fainting. You need to replenish your energy."

I asked, "Where is Nelida?"

Florinda responded, "Are you not happy to see me?" She took my arm and helped me back to the bed, and said, "You are faint with hunger."

I contradicted her, more out of habit than conviction, saying, "I am not."

Although I did not feel hungry, I was certain my dizziness was caused by a lack of food. Except for breakfast, I had not eaten at all during the day.

Responding to my thoughts, Florinda said, "We wondered why you had not. We prepared such a delicious stew for you."

I asked, "When did you get here? I have been silently calling you for days."

Closing her eyes, Florinda made a humming sound, as if the noise would help her remember. Finally she said, "We have been here for several days. I think."

I was completely taken aback, and my temper was getting the better of me as I snapped, "You think!"

I quickly recovered, and asked, "Why did you not let me know that you were here?"

More than hurt, I was puzzled that I had failed to notice their presence. I mumbled, more to myself than to her, "How could I have been so unaware?"

Florinda regarded me with a curious expression in her eyes. She seemed surprised by my bafflement.

She remarked sagaciously, "If we had let you know that we were here, you would not have been able to concentrate on your work. As you well know, instead of writing your paper, you would have been focused on our comings and goings. All your energy would have been spent in trying to find out what we do. Would it not?"

Her voice was low and raspy, and a strange, excited light made her eyes even more shiny than usual. She assured me, "It was a deliberate act on our part that you should work without distractions."

Then she went on to explain that the caretaker had helped me with my paper only after he was satisfied with what I had done so far. She claimed that in dreaming he found the inherent order of my notes.

I said smugly, "I, too, saw the inherent order of my notes. I too saw it in a dream."

Florinda readily agreed, saying, "Of course you did. We pulled you into dreaming so you could work on your paper."

There was something startlingly normal about her statement, and yet at the same time it made me feel apprehensive.

I had an uncanny sense that I was finally close to understanding what dreaming-awake was, but somehow I could not quite grasp it.

I repeated, "You pulled me into dreaming?"

In an effort to make sense, I told Florinda all that had happened from the moment I saw the caretaker and the dog in the yard.

It was difficult to make it sound coherent because I could not decide myself when I had been awake and when I had been dreaming.

To my utter bewilderment, I could recall the exact outline of my paper as I had seen it superimposed on my original draft.

I pointed out, "My concentration was far too keen for me to have been dreaming."

Florinda interrupted me, saying, "That is precisely what dreaming-awake is. That is why you remember it so well."

Her tone was that of an impatient teacher explaining a simple but fundamental point to a backward child. She said, "I have already told you that dreaming-awake has nothing to do with falling asleep and having a dream."

As if it would invalidate her statement, I said, "I took notes."

Seeing her nod, I asked her if I would find whatever I saw in dreaming-awake jotted down in my own handwriting on my pad.

Florinda said, "You will. But before you do, you will have to eat first."

She rose, and holding out her hand, helped me to my feet. To put a semblance of order to my appearance, she tucked my shirt into my jeans and brushed off the pieces of straw sticking to my sweater.

She held me at arm's length and regarded me critically. Not satisfied with the results, she began to fuss with my hair, tweaking the unruly strands this way and that.

She pronounced, "You look quite frightful with your hair sticking out all over the place."

I told her, "I am used to taking a hot shower upon awakening."

I followed her out into the corridor, but seeing that she was heading toward the kitchen, I told her that I had to go to the outhouse first.

Florinda said, "I will walk with you."

Noticing my displeased face, she added that she only wanted to make sure I did not get dizzy and fall into the shit hole.

Actually, I was glad to hold on to her arm as we made our way to the yard.

I almost fell as we stepped outside, but not so much from weakness as from the shock of seeing how late in the day it was.

Florinda asked, "What is the matter? Do you feel faint?"

I pointed up at the sky. A faint gleam was all that remained of the sun's light. I said, "I can not possibly have lost a day." My voice had all but vanished even before I finished speaking.

I struggled to assimilate the idea that indeed a whole night and the whole day had passed, but my mind would not accept it. Not being able to account for time as measured in the usual manner unhinged me.

Florinda answered my thoughts, saying, "Sorcerers break time's flux. Time, in the fashion we measure it, does not exist when one dreams the way sorcerers dream.

"Sorcerers stretch or compress time at will. For sorcerers, time is not a matter of minutes or hours or days but is an altogether different matter.

She proceeded in a patient, measured tone, "When dreaming-awake, our perceptual faculties are heightened.

"However, when it comes to perceiving time, something altogether different happens. The perception of time does not become heightened but is canceled out completely."

She added that time is always a factor of consciousness; that is, to be aware of time is a psychological state that we automatically transform into physical measurements.

It is so ingrained in us that we can hear, even when we are not consciously aware of it, a clock ticking inside us subliminally keeping track of time.

She emphasized, "In dreaming-awake that capacity is absent. A thoroughly new and unfamiliar structure, which somehow is not to be understood or interpreted as we normally do with time, takes over."

I tried to come to grips with her elucidation, and said, "Then all I will ever consciously know about dreaming-awake is that time has either been stretched or compressed."

She assured me emphatically, "You will come to understand a great deal more than that.

"Once you become adept at entering heightened awareness, as Mariano Aureliano calls it, you will be aware then of whatever you wish because sorcerers are not involved in measuring time. They are involved in using it; in stretching or compressing it at will."

I said, "You mentioned earlier that you all helped me into dreaming. Then some of you must know how long that state lasted."

Florinda said that she and her companions were perennially in a state of dreaming-awake, and that it was precisely their joint effort that pulled me into dreaming-awake, but that they never kept track of it.

I asked, "Are you implying that I might be dreaming-awake now?"

But I knew the answer before she responded, and so I asked, "If I am, what did I do to reach this state? What steps did I take?"

Florinda said, "The simplest step imaginable. You did not let yourself be your usual self. That is the key that opens doors.

"We have told you many times and in many ways that sorcery is not at all what you think it is.

"To say that to stop yourself from being your usual self is sorcery's most complex secret sounds like idiocy, but it is not. It is the key to power, and therefore the most difficult thing a sorcerer does.

"And yet, it is not something complex or impossible to understand. It does not boggle the mind, and for that reason no one can even suspect its importance or take it seriously.

"Judging by the result of your latest dreaming-awake, I can say that you have accumulated enough energy by preventing yourself from being your usual self."

She patted my shoulder and as she turned away she whispered, "I will see you in the kitchen."

The kitchen door was ajar but no sound came from the inside. I whispered, "Florinda?"

A soft laughter answered my call, but I could not see anyone.

As soon as my eyes became accustomed to the penumbra, I saw Florinda and Nelida sitting around the table. Their faces were unnaturally vivid in that tenuous light. Their same hair, their same eyes, and their same noses and mouths gleamed as if lit by an inner light. It was the most eerie thing to see two beings so totally alike.

As I stepped closer, I said, "You two are so beautiful that you are scary."

The two women gazed at each other as if to validate my statement, and then burst into a most disturbing laughter. I felt a curious prickle running down my spine. Before I had a chance to comment on their odd sounding laughter, they stopped.

Nelida beckoned me to sit on the empty chair beside her.

I took a deep breath. I had to stay calm I told myself as I sat down.

There was a tenseness and a crispness about Nelida that unnerved me. She served me a plateful of a thick soup from the tureen standing in the middle of the table.

Nelida pushed the butter and a basket with warm tortillas toward me and said, "I want you to eat everything."

I was famished. I attacked my food as if I had not eaten for days. It tasted wonderful.

I ate all there was in the tureen and washed down the buttered tortillas with three mugfuls of hot chocolate.

Satiated, I slumped back in my chair. The door to the yard was wide open and a cool breeze rearranged the shadows in room.

Twilight seemed to be lasting forever. The sky was still streaked with heavy layers of the colors vermilion, deep blue, violet, and gold.

The air had that transparent quality that brought close the distant hills.

As if propelled by some inner force, the night seemed to shoot out of the ground. The shadowed movements of the fruit trees in the wind, rhythmic and graceful, swept the darkness up into the sky.

Esperanza burst into the room then and placed a lit oil lamp on the table. She regarded me with unblinking eyes, as if she had difficulty in focusing.

She gave the impression that she was concerned with some otherworldly mystery, and that she was not yet quite there. Then slowly her eyes thawed, and she smiled as if she knew now that she had returned from a great distance.

Then when I noticed my notepad and my loose sheets under her arm, I cried out, "My paper!"

Grinning broadly, Esperanza handed me my notes.

Eagerly, I examined the sheets and laughed out loud upon seeing the pages on the pad filled with precise and detailed instructions, written half in Spanish and half in English, on how to proceed with my term paper. The handwriting was unmistakably mine.

I said excitedly, "It is all there. That is how I saw it in my dream."

The thought that I might be able to zoom through graduate school without having to work so hard made me forget all my anxiety.

Esperanza said, "There are no shortcuts to writing good term papers, not even with the aid of sorcery. You should know that without the preliminary reading, the note taking, and the writing and rewriting you would never have been able to recognize the structure and order of your term paper in dreaming."

I nodded wordlessly. She had spoken with such an incontestable authority that I did not know what to say.

I finally managed to ask, "What about the caretaker? Was he a professor in his youth?"

Nelida and Florinda turned to Esperanza, as if it were up to her to answer.

Esperanza said evasively, "I would not know about that. Did he not tell you that he is a sorcerer in love with ideas?"

She was silent for a moment, then added softly, "When he is not taking care of our world as befits a caretaker, he reads."

Nelida elucidated, "Besides reading books, he reads a most extraordinary number of scholarly journals. He speaks several languages, so he is quite up to date with the latest of everything. Delia and Clara are his assistants. He taught them to speak English and German."

"Is the library in your house his?" I asked.

Nelida said, "It belongs to all of us. However, I am sure he is the only one, beside Vicente, who has read every book on the shelves."

Noticing my incredulous expression, she advised me that I should not be fooled by appearances regarding the people in the sorcerers' world.

Nelida assured me, "To reach a degree of knowledge, sorcerers work twice as hard as normal people. Sorcerers have to make sense of the everyday world as well as the magical world. To accomplish that, they have to be highly skilled and sophisticated mentally as well as physically."

She regarded me with narrowed, critical eyes then chuckled softly.

She explained, "For three days, you worked on your paper. You worked very hard, did you not?" She waited for my assent and then added that while dreaming-awake I worked on my term paper even harder than I did while awake.

I hastened to contradict her, saying, "Not at all. It was all quite effortless."

I explained that all I did was see a new version of my paper superimposed on my old draft, and then I copied what I saw.

Nelida maintained, "To do that took all the strength you had. While dreaming-awake you channeled all your energy into a single purpose. All your concern and effort went into finishing your paper.

"Nothing else mattered to you at the moment. You had no other thoughts to interfere with your endeavor."

I asked, "Was the caretaker dreaming-awake when he looked at my paper? Did I see what he saw?"

Nelida rose and walked slowly to the door. For a long moment she peered out into the darkness then returned to the table.

She whispered something to Esperanza which I did not hear, and then she sat down again.

Esperanza chuckled softly and then said that what the caretaker saw in my paper was different from what I saw and wrote down.

She ended by saying, "and quite naturally so, because his knowledge is by far more vast than yours."

Esperanza stared at me with her quick, dark eyes that somehow made the rest of her face seem lifeless.

She continued, "Guided by his suggestions, and according to your own capabilities, you saw what your paper ought to read like. That is what you wrote down."

Nelida said, "While dreaming-awake, we have access to hidden resources which we never use ordinarily."

She explained that the instant I saw my paper, I remembered the clues the caretaker had given me.

Noticing my incredulous expression, she reminded me what the caretaker had said about my paper, "Too many footnotes, too many notes and sloppily developed ideas."

Her eyes radiated sympathy and amusement as she went on to say that since I was dreaming and since I am not as stupid as I pretended to be, I immediately saw all kinds of links and connections within my material that I had not noticed before.

Nelida leaned toward me with a half-smile playing over her lips as she waited for my reaction.

"It is time you know what made you see a better version of your original paper."

Esperanza sat up straight and gave me a wink as if to emphasize that Nelida was about to reveal a major secret.

Nelida said, "When dreaming-awake we have access to direct knowledge."

I could see the disappointment in her eyes as she regarded me for a long moment.

Nelida snapped impatiently, "Do not be so dense!

"Dreaming-awake should have made you realize that you have, as all women do, a unique capacity to receive knowledge directly."

Esperanza made a silencing gesture with her hand and said, "Did you know that one of the basic differences between males and females is how they approach knowledge?"

I had no idea what she meant.

Slowly and deliberately, she tore off a clean sheet from my notepad and drew two human figures.

One head she 'crowned' with a cone and said that it was a man. On the other head, she drew the same cone, but upside down, and said that it was a woman.

Esperanza, with her pencil poised on the figure crowned with a cone, explained, "Men build knowledge step by step."

"Men reach up. They climb toward knowledge. Sorcerers say that men cone toward the spirit. They cone up toward knowledge. This coning process limits men on how far they can reach."

She retraced the cone on the first figure. "As you can see, men can only reach a certain height. Their path toward knowledge ends up in a narrow point seen here as the tip of the cone."

She looked at me sharply. "Pay attention," she warned me and pointed her pencil to the second figure with the inverted cone on its head.

"As you can see, the cone is upside down, and open like a funnel. Women are able to open themselves directly to the source. Or rather, the source reaches them directly at the broad base of the cone.

"Sorcerers say that women's connection to knowledge is expansive. On the other hand, men's connection is quite restricted.

She proceeded, "Men are close to the concrete, and aim at the abstract.

"Women are close to the abstract, and yet try to indulge themselves with the concrete."

I interrupted her, "Why are women, being so open to knowledge, or the abstract, considered inferior?"

Esperanza gazed at me with rapt fascination.

She rose swiftly, stretched like a cat until all her joints cracked, then sat down again.

She explained, "That women are considered inferior, or, at the very best, that female traits are equated as complementary to the male's has to do with the manner in which males and females approach knowledge.

"Generally speaking, women are more interested in power over themselves than over others.

"Power over others is clearly what males want."

Nelida interjected, "Even among sorcerers."

The women all laughed.

Esperanza went on to say that she believed that originally women saw no need to exploit their facility to link themselves broadly and directly to the spirit.

She said women saw no necessity to talk about or to intellectualize this natural capacity of theirs because it was enough for them to put their natural capacity into action, and to know that they had it.

Esperanza stressed, "Men's incapacity to link themselves directly to the spirit was what drove them to talk about the process of reaching knowledge. And they have not stopped talking about it.

"And it is precisely this insistence on knowing how they strive toward the spirit, and this insistence on analyzing the process that gave them the certainty that being rational is a typically male skill."

Esperanza explained that the conceptualization of reason has been done exclusively by men, and that this has allowed men to belittle women's gifts and accomplishments.

And even worse, it has allowed men to exclude feminine traits from the formulation of the ideals of reason.

She emphasized, "So by now, of course, women believe what has been defined for them.

"Women have been reared to believe that only men can be rational and coherent.

"Now men carry with them a load of unearned assets that makes them automatically superior regardless of their preparation or capacity."

I asked, "How did women lose their direct link to knowledge?"

Esperanza corrected me, "Women have not lost their connection. Women still have a direct link with the spirit.

"They have only forgotten how to use it. Or rather, they have copied men's condition of not having it at all.

"For thousands of years, men have struggled to make sure that women forget it.

"Take the Holy Inquisition, for example. That was a systematic purge to eradicate the belief that women have a direct link to the spirit.

"All organized religion is nothing but a very successful maneuver to put women in a lower place. Religions invoke a divine law that says that women are inferior."

I stared at her in amazement, wondering to myself how she could possibly be so erudite.

Esperanza went on, "Men's need to dominate others and women's lack of interest in expressing or formulating what they know and how they know it has been a most nefarious alliance."

"It has made it possible for women to be coerced from the moment they are born into accepting that fulfillment lies in homemaking, in love, in marriage, in having children, and in self-denial.

"Women have been excluded from the dominant forms of abstract thought and educated into dependence.

"Women have been so thoroughly trained in the belief that men must think for them that women have finally given up thinking."

I interrupted her, "Women are quite capable of thinking."

Esperanza corrected me, "Women are capable of formulating what they have learned, but what they have learned has been defined by men.

"Men define the very nature of knowledge, and from that knowledge they have excluded that which pertains to the feminine. Or if the feminine is included, it is always in a negative light.

"And women have accepted this."

I interjected, "You are years behind the times. Nowadays women can do anything they set their hearts to do. They pretty much have access to all the centers of learning, and to almost anything men can do."

Esperanza argued, "But this is meaningless as long as women do not have a support system and a support base.

"What good is it that women have access to what men have when women are still considered inferior beings who have to adopt male attitudes and behaviors in order to succeed?

"The truly successful women are the perfect converts. They too look down on women.

"According to men, the womb limits women both mentally and physically.

"This is the reason why women, although they have access to knowledge, have not been allowed to help determine what this knowledge is.

Esperanza proposed, "Take, for instance, philosophers. The pure thinkers.

"Some of them are viciously against women.

"Others are more subtle in that they are willing to admit that women might be as capable as men were it not for the fact that women are not interested in rational pursuits.

"And if women are interested in rational pursuits they should not be because it is more becoming for a woman to be true to her nature as a nurturing and dependent companion of the male."

Esperanza expressed all this with unquestionable authority.

Within moments, however, I was assailed by doubts. I asked, "If knowledge is but a male construct, then why your insistence that I go to school."

Esperanza replied, "Because you are a witch, and as such you need to know what impinges on you and how it impinges on you."

"Before you refuse something, you must understand why you refuse it.

"You see, the problem is that knowledge in our day is derived purely from reasoning things out.

"But women have a different track that is never, ever, taken into consideration.

"That track can contribute to knowledge, but it would have to be a contribution that has nothing to do with reasoning things out."

I asked, "What would it deal with, then?"

Esperanza replied, "That is for you to decide after you master the tools of reasoning and understanding."

I was very confused.

Esperanza explained, "What sorcerers propose is that men can not have the exclusive right to reason.

"Men seem to have it now simply because the ground where men apply reason is a ground where maleness prevails.

"Let us, then, apply reason to a ground where femaleness prevails. And that ground is, naturally, the inverted cone I described to you, a women's connection with the spirit itself."

She tilted her head slightly to one side as if considering what to say.

She said, "That connection has to be faced with a different aspect of reasoning- an aspect never, ever used before- the feminine side of reasoning."

I asked, "What is the feminine side of reason, Esperanza?"

She answered, "Many things. One of them is definitely dreaming."

She regarded me questioningly, but I had nothing to say.

Her deep chuckle caught me by surprise. She said, "I know what you expect from sorcerers.

"You want rituals and incantations. Odd, mysterious cults. You want to sing. You want to be one with nature. You want to commune with water spirits. You want paganism. Some romantic view of what sorcerers do. Very Germanic.

She went on, "To jump into the unknown you need guts and mind. Only with them both will you be able to explain to yourself and to others the treasures you might find."

She leaned toward me, eager, it seemed, to confide something.

She scratched her head and sneezed repeatedly, five times as the caretaker had. She said, "You need to act on your magical side."

I asked, "And what is that?"

Esperanza answered, "The womb."

She said this so distantly and calmly, and as if she were not interested in my reaction, that I almost missed hearing it.

Then suddenly I realized the absurdity of her remark, and I straightened up and looked at the others.

Esperanza repeated, "The womb! The womb is the ultimate feminine organ.

"It is the womb that gives women that extra edge and the extra force to channel their energy."

She explained that men, in their quest for supremacy, have succeeded in reducing woman's mysterious power, her womb, to a strictly biological organ whose only function is to reproduce; to carry man's seed.

As if obeying a cue, Nelida rose, walked around the table, and came to stand behind me. "Do you know the story of the Annunciation?" she whispered in my ear.

Giggling, I turned to face her and said, "No. I do not."

In that same confidential whisper, Nelida proceeded to tell me that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, men are the only ones who hear the voice of God.

Women have been excluded from that privilege, with the exception of the Virgin Mary.

Nelida said that an angel whispering to Mary was, of course, natural.

But what was not natural was the fact that all the angel had to say to Mary was that she would bear the son of God.

The womb did not receive knowledge but rather the promise of God's seed.

A male god, who engendered another male god in turn.

I wanted to think and to reflect on all that I had heard, but my mind was in a confused whirl.

I asked, "What about male sorcerers? They do not have a womb, yet they are clearly connected to the spirit."

Esperanza regarded me with undisguised pleasure, then looked over her shoulder, as though she were afraid to be overheard, and whispered, "Sorcerers are able to align themselves to intent and to the spirit because they have given up what specifically defines their masculinity, and they are no longer males."