The core of our being is the act of perceiving, and the magic of our being is the act of awareness. Perception and awareness can be a single, functional, inextricable unit with two domains. The first one is the attention of the tonal; that is to say, the capacity of average people to perceive and place their awareness on the ordinary world of everyday life: our first ring of power; our awesome but taken-for- granted ability to impart order to our perception of our daily world.

The second domain is the attention of the nagual; the capacity to place our awareness on the nonordinary world. It's our second ring of power, or the altogether portentous ability all of us have, but only sorcerers use, to impart order to the nonordinary world.

What I have struggled to vanquish, or rather suppress in you, is not your reason as the capacity for rational thought, but your attention of the tonal, or your awareness of the world of common sense. The daily world exists because we know how to hold its images; consequently, if one drops the attention needed to maintain those images, the world collapses.

Practice is what counts. Once you get your attention on the images of your dream, your attention is hooked for good. In the end you can hold the images of any dream.

Our first ring of power is engaged very early in our lives and we live under the impression that that is all there is to us. Our second ring of power, the attention of the nagual, remains hidden for the immense majority of us, and only at the moment of our death is it revealed to us. There is a pathway to reach it, however, which is available to every one of us, but which only sorcerers take, and that pathway is through dreaming. Dreaming is in essence the transformation of ordinary dreams into affairs involving volition. Dreamers, by engaging their attention of the nagual and focusing it on the items and events of their ordinary dreams, change those dreams into dreaming.

There are no procedures to arrive at the attention of the nagual, only pointers. Finding your hands in your dreams is the first pointer; then the exercise of paying attention is elongated to finding objects, looking for specific features, such as buildings, streets and so on. From there the jump is to dream about specific places at specific times of the day. The final stage is drawing the attention of the nagual to focus on the total self.

That final stage is usually ushered in by a dream that many of us have had at one time or another, in which one is looking at oneself sleeping in bed. By the time a sorcerer has had such a dream, his attention has been developed to such a degree that instead of waking himself up, as most of us would do in a similar situation, he turns on his heels and engages himself in activity, as if he were acting in the world of everyday life.

From that moment on there is a breakage, a division of sorts in the otherwise unified personality. The result of engaging the attention of the nagual and developing it to the height and sophistication of our daily attention of the world is the other self, an identical being as oneself, but made in dreaming.

There are no definite standard steps for reaching that double, as there are no definite steps for us to reach our daily awareness. We simply do it by practicing. In the act of engaging our attention of the nagual, we find the steps. Practice dreaming without letting your fears make it into an encumbering production.