my mind to point at things. It was as if that knowledge had been erased from my memory. The darkness in that hotel room was most extraordinary. It brought me a delicious sense of peace and harmony. It brought me also a profound sadness, a longing for human warmth, for companionship. I felt more than bewildered. Never had anything like this happened to me. I lay in bed, trying to remember if that longing was something I knew. It was not. The longings I knew were not for human companionship; they were abstract; they were rather a sort of sadness for not reaching something undefined. "I am coming apart," I said to Carol. "I am about to weep for people." I thought she would understand my statement as being funny. I intended it as a joke. But she did not say anything; she seemed to agree with me. She sighed. Being in an unstable state of mind, I became instantly swayed toward emotionality. I faced her in the darkness and muttered something that in a more lucid moment would have been quite irrational to me. "I absolutely adore you," I said. Talk like that among the sorcerers of don Juan's line was unthinkable. Carol Tiggs was the nagual woman. Between the two of us, there was no need for demonstrations of affection. In fact, we did not even know what we felt for each other. We had been taught by don Juan that among sorcerers there was no need or time for such feelings. Carol smiled at me and embraced me. And I was filled with such a consuming affection for her that I began to weep involuntarily. "Your energy body is moving forward on the universe's luminous filaments of energy," she whispered in my ear. "We are being carried by the death defier's gift of intent." I had enough energy to understand what she was saying. I even questioned her about whether she, herself, understood what it all meant. She hushed me and whispered in my ear. "I do understand; the death defier's gift to you was the wings of intent. And with them, you and I are dreaming ourselves in another time. In a time yet to come." I pushed her away and sat up. The way Carol was voicing those complex sorcerers' thoughts was unsettling to me. She was not given to take conceptual thinking seriously. We had always joked among ourselves that she did not have a philosopher's mind. "What's the matter with you?" I asked. "Yours is a new development for me: Carol the sorceress-philosopher. You are talking like don Juan." "Not yet." She laughed. "But it's coming. It's rolling, and when it finally hits me, it'll be the easiest thing in the world for me to be a sorceress-philosopher. You'll see. And no one will be able to explain it because it will just happen." An alarm bell rang in my mind. "You're not Carol!" I shouted. "You're the death defier masquerading as Carol. I knew it." Carol laughed, undisturbed by my accusation. "Don't be absurd," she said. "You're going to miss the lesson. I knew that, sooner or later, you were going to give in to your indulging. Believe me, I am Carol. But we're doing something we've never done: we are intending in the second attention, as the sorcerers of antiquity used to do." I was not convinced, but I had no more energy to pursue my argument, for something like the great vortexes of my dreaming was beginning to pull me in. I heard Carol's voice faintly, saying in my ear, "We are dreaming ourselves. Dream your intent of me. Intend me forward! Intend me forward!" With great effort, I voiced my innermost thought. "Stay here with me forever," I said with the slowness of a tape recorder on the blink. She responded with something incomprehensible. I wanted to laugh at my voice, but then the vortex swallowed me. When I woke up, I was alone in the hotel room. I had no idea how long I had slept. I felt extremely disappointed at not finding Carol by my side. I hurriedly dressed and went down to the lobby to look for her. Besides, I wanted to shake off some strange sleepiness that had clung to me. At the desk, the manager told me that the American woman who had rented the room had just left a moment ago. I ran out to the street, hoping to catch her, but there was no sign of her. It was midday; the sun was shining in a cloudless sky. It was a bit warm. I walked to the church. My surprise was genuine but dull at finding out that I had indeed seen the detail of its architectural structure in that dream. Uninterestedly, I played my own devil's advocate and gave myself the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps don Juan and I had examined the back of the church and I did not remember it. I thought about it. It did not matter. My validation scheme had no meaning for me anyway. I was too sleepy to care. From there I slowly walked to don Juan's house, still looking for Carol. I was sure I was going to find her there, waiting for me. Don Juan received me as if I had come back from the dead. He and his companions were in the throes of agitation as they examined me with undisguised curiosity. "Where have you been?" don Juan demanded. I could not comprehend the reason for all the fuss. I told him that I had spent the night with Carol in the hotel by the plaza, because I had no energy to walk back from the church to their house, but that they already knew this. "We knew nothing of the sort," he snapped. "Didn't Carol tell you she was with me?" I asked in the midst of a dull suspicion, which, if I had not been so exhausted, would have been alarming. No one answered. They looked at one another, searchingly. I faced don Juan and told him I was under the impression he had sent Carol to find me. Don Juan paced the room up and down without saying a word. "Carol Tiggs hasn't been with us at all," he said. "And you've been gone for nine days." My fatigue prevented me from being blasted by those statements. His tone of voice and the concern the others showed were ample proof that they were serious. But I was so numb that there was nothing for me to say. Don Juan asked me to tell them, in all possible detail, what had transpired between the death defier and me. I was shocked at being able to remember so much, and at being able to convey all of it in spite of my fatigue. A moment of levity broke the tension when I told them how hard the woman had laughed at my inane yelling in her dream, my intent to see. "Pointing the little finger works better," I said to don Juan, but without any feeling of recrimination. Don Juan asked if the woman had any other reaction to my yelling besides laughing. I had no memory of one, except her mirth and the fact that she had commented how intensely he disliked her. "I don't dislike her," don Juan protested. "I just don't like the old sorcerers' coerciveness." Addressing everybody, I said that I personally had liked that woman immensely and unbiasedly. And that I had loved Carol Tiggs as I never thought I could love anyone. They did not seem to appreciate what I was saying. They looked at one another as if I had suddenly gone crazy. I wanted to say more, to explain myself. But don Juan, I believed just to stop me from babbling idiocies, practically dragged me out of the house and back to the hotel. The same manager I had spoken to earlier obligingly listened to our description of Carol Tiggs, but he flatly denied ever having seen her or me before. He even called the hotel maids; they corroborated his statements. "What can the meaning of all this be?" don Juan asked out loud. It seemed to be a question addressed to himself. He gently ushered me out of the hotel. "Let's get out of this confounded place," he said. When we were outside, he ordered me not to turn around to look at the hotel or at the church across the street, but to keep my head down. I looked at my shoes and instantly realized I was no longer wearing Carol's clothes but my own. I could not remember, however, no matter how hard I tried, when I had changed clothes. I figured that it must have been when I woke up in the hotel room. I must have put on my own clothes then, although my memory was blank. By then we had reached the plaza. Before we crossed it to head off to don Juan's house, I explained to him about my clothes. He shook his head rhythmically, listening to every word. Then he sat down on a bench, and, in a voice that conveyed genuine concern, he warned me that, at the moment, I had no way of knowing what had transpired in the second attention between the woman in the church and my energy body. My interaction with the Carol Tiggs of the hotel had been just the tip of the iceberg. "It's horrendous to think that you were in the second attention for nine days," don Juan went on. "Nine days is just a second for the death defier, but an eternity for us." Before I could protest or explain or say anything, he stopped me with a comment. "Consider this," he said. "If you still can't remember all the things I taught you and did with you in the second attention, imagine how much more difficult it must be to remember what the death defier taught you and did with you. I only made you change levels of awareness; the death defier made you change universes." I felt meek and defeated. Don Juan and his two companions urged me to make a titanic effort and try to remember when I changed my clothes. I could not. There was nothing in my mind: no feelings, no memories. Somehow, I was not totally there with them. The nervous agitation of don Juan and his two companions reached a peak. Never had I seen him so discombobulated. There had always been a touch of fun, of not quite taking himself seriously in everything he did or said to me. Not this time, though. Again, I tried to think, bring forth some memory that would shed light on all this; and again I failed, but I did not feel defeated; an improbable surge of optimism overtook me. I felt that everything was coming along as it should. Don Juan's expressed concern was that he knew nothing about the dreaming I had done with the woman in the church. To create a dream hotel, a dream town, a dream Carol Tiggs was to him only a sample of the old sorcerers' dreaming prowess, the total scope of which defied human imagination. Don Juan opened his arms expansively and finally smiled with his usual delight. "We can only deduce that the woman in the church showed you how to do it," he said in a slow, deliberate tone. "It's going to be a giant task for you to make comprehensible an incomprehensible maneuver. It has been a masterful movement on the chessboard, performed by the death defier as the woman in the church. She has used Carol's energy body and yours to lift off, to break away from her moorings. She took you up on your offer of free energy." What he was saying had no meaning to me; apparently, it meant a great deal to his two companions. They became immensely agitated. Addressing them, don Juan explained that the death defier and the woman in the church were different expressions of the same energy; the woman in the church was the more powerful and complex of the two. Upon taking control, she made use of Carol Tiggs's energy body, in some obscure, ominous fashion congruous with the old sorcerers' machinations, and created the Carol Tiggs of the hotel, a Carol Tiggs of sheer intent. Don Juan added that Carol and the woman may have arrived at some sort of energetic agreement during their meeting. At that instant, a thought seemed to find its way to don Juan. He stared at his two companions, unbelievingly. Their eyes darted around, going from one to the other. I was sure they were not merely looking for agreement, for they seemed to have realized something in unison. "All our speculations are useless," don Juan said in a quiet, even tone. "I believe there is no longer any Carol Tiggs. There isn't any woman in the church either; both have merged and flown away on the wings of intent, I believe, forward. "The reason the Carol Tiggs of the hotel was so worried about her appearance was because she was the woman in the church, making you dream a Carol Tiggs of another kind; an infinitely more powerful Carol Tiggs. Don't you remember what she said? 'Dream your intent of me. Intend me forward."' "What does this mean, don Juan?" I asked stunned. "It means that the death defier has seen her total way out. She has caught a ride with you. Your fate is her fate." "Meaning what, don Juan?" "Meaning that if you reach freedom so will she." "How is she going to do that?" "Through Carol Tiggs. But don't worry about Carol." He said this before I voiced my apprehension. "She's capable of that maneuver and much more." Immensities were piling up on me. I already felt their crushing weight. I had a moment of lucidity and asked don Juan, "What is going to be the outcome of all this?" He did not answer. He gazed at me, scanning me from head to toe. Then he slowly and deliberately said, "The death defier's gift consists of endless dreaming possibilities. One of them was your dream of Carol Tiggs in another time, in another world; a more vast world, open-ended; a world where the impossible might even be feasible. The implication was not only that you will live those possibilities but that one day you will comprehend them." He stood up, and we started to walk in silence toward his house. My thoughts began to race wildly. They were not thoughts, actually, but images, a mixture of memories of the woman in the church and of Carol Tiggs, talking to me in the darkness in the dream hotel room. A couple of times I was near to condensing those images into a feeling of my usual self, but I had to give it up; I had no energy for such a task. Before we arrived at the house, don Juan stopped walking and faced me. He again scrutinized me carefully, as if he were looking for signs in my body. I then felt obliged to set him straight on a subject I believed he was deadly wrong about. "I was with the real Carol Tiggs at the hotel," I said. "For a moment, I myself believed she was the death defier, but after careful evaluation, I can't hold on to that belief. She was Carol. In some obscure, awesome way she was at the hotel, as I was there at the hotel myself." "Of course she was Carol," don Juan agreed. "But not the Carol you and I know. This one was a dream Carol, I've told you, a Carol made out of pure intent. You helped the woman in the church spin that dream. Her art was to make that dream an all-inclusive reality: the art of the old sorcerers, the most frightening thing there is. I told you that you were going to get the crowning lesson in dreaming, didn't I?" "What do you think happened to Carol Tiggs?" I asked. "Carol Tiggs is gone," he replied. "But someday you will find the new Carol Tiggs, the one in the dream hotel room." "What do you mean she's gone?" "She's gone from the world," he said. I felt a surge of nervousness cut through my solar plexus. I was awakening. The awareness of myself had started to become familiar to me, but I was not yet fully in control of it. It had begun, though, to break through the fog of the dream; it had begun as a mixture of not knowing what was going on and the foreboding sensation that the incommensurable was just around the corner. I must have had an expression of disbelief, because don Juan added in a forceful tone, "This is dreaming. You should know by now that its transactions are final. Carol Tiggs is gone." "'But where do you think she went, don Juan?" "Wherever the sorcerers of antiquity went. I told you that the death defier's gift was endless dreaming possibilities. You didn't want anything concrete, so the woman in the church gave you an abstract gift: the possibility of flying on the wings of intent."