The sole fact of remembering a dream is already like organizing it. I do not see the dream again just as it was, but I see selected parts of it. On the same note, seeing again the last twenty-four hours, I do not have access to all the events of the day but only to those that I have retained. This selection already constitutes an interpretation on which, additionally, I patch my judgments, my appreciations. . To become more conscious, we can begin to distinguish our subjective perception of the day from the objective reality. When one does not confuse these anymore, one is able to attend as a spectator the unwinding of the passing day, without being carried away by judgments and appraisals. From this position as witness, it becomes possible to interpret one’s life as one interprets a dream. Permit me to give you an example of the application of this approach: One of my students, named Guy Mauchamp, one day asked me for advice. He did not know how to take some young dishonest punks squatting in the house that belonged to him. Surprised that he had not called the police, since the law was on his side, I told him, “In a certain way, this situation suits you. Thanks to it, you are expressing an old distress. I suggest the following approach: Consider this situation as a dream. Try to interpret it as you would a dream you had the previous night. Do you have a younger brother?” He responded in the affirmative, and I asked him then if, in his infancy, he had not felt betrayed by this baby capturing the attention of his parents. He, of course, confirmed that he had. I quickly interrogated him about the relationship he maintains today with the brother in question. As I expected, Guy confessed to me that they had a bad rapport and never saw one another. I explained to him that it was he himself who maintained this encroaching situation with the squatters in order to express the distress caused by the arrival of his brother. I added that he needed to forgive his brother, treat him well, and make peace with him if he wanted the situation resolved. I gave him psychomagic advice and, a week later, I received a post card from Strasbourg, “Firecrackers over the cathedral — big explosion of sacred joy,” with the following message: “Following my question, you prescribed a psychomagic act, and I give you the end results. It resulted that I gave my brother a bouquet of flowers and treated him to a bite to eat as we renewed our fraternal rapport and put the past, when I felt betrayed by him, aside. The goal was to obtain the departure from my house of the fraudulent and illegal renters. I offered the flowers to my brother and spoke with him Friday noon. Friday night, the two squatters left — with my furniture! But finally they are gone, and I can return to my home. Thank you.” Interesting, no? Taking the furniture was like taking some of Guy’s past.
So, you had asked this young man to interpret an existential situation as if it were a dream filled with symbols to decipher.
Exactly. Since we dream our life, we will interpret it and discover what it wants to say to us, the messages that it wants to transmit to us, as if transforming it into a lucid dream. Once the lucidity is reached, we are free to act in reality, knowing that if we seek only to satisfy our egotistical desires, we will be taken, we will lose all detachment, all control, and all possibility for a true act. To live amusing and effective lives — as much in the nocturnal dream as in the diurnal dream that we call our life — we must become less and less involved.
This detachment, which does not prevent action or compassion and does not authorize greed or sentimentality, looks a lot like wisdom.
Of course! What good is it to live with the dreams and to make an effort at lucidity if not to move toward wisdom? Reality is a dream on which we must work in order to progressively pass from the unconscious dream, lacking all lucidity, and which can be a nightmare, to what I call the sage dream.
And the Enlightened? The spiritual traditions say those that are Enlightened. .
To wake up is to stop dreaming, to vanish from this oneiric universe, to become the dreamer.
FOUR
THE MAGIC ACT
How does one pass from the oneiric act to the magic act? Above all, what is the magic act according to Jodorowsky?
As I have said, it was in Mexico where I acquired a true command of the oneiric act. If Chile was, in the past, a poetic country, Mexico is an absolutely oneiric country where the unconscious flourishes. Any person just a little bit sensitive feels this dimension there, understands this dream presence in the very texture of Mexican reality. On the other hand, you could travel there for ten years without ever catching a glimpse of the Mexico magic. Mexico City comprises a whole world of sorcerers, a world that is very costly for uninformed foreigners to enter. When people are in bad shape or when things are not going well, they pay a call to a sorcerer who carries out a kind of purification. She scrubs the whole body using a heap of herbs soaked in holy water. This is an extremely common practice, and not only among the peasants. Intellectuals and politicians do not hesitate to devote themselves to it; so much is witchcraft part of Mexican life. Among these sorcerers, there are, of course, healers expert in hallucinogenic mushrooms and medicinal plants. Some are acquainted with up to three thousand herbs. Others use animal excrement exclusively. There are also bizarre creatures presenting phenomena that may be swindle or may be magic. For example, I remember a woman from a remote village who always went about scantily dressed in a nightshirt: steel spikes came out of her whole body.
Black magic is also practiced, and a number of sorcerers operate with evil spells. You can ask these sorcerers to cast an evil spell on an enemy. I have personally been witness to some things. For example, in one of my shows, I made fun of an influential woman whom everyone called la Tigresa and said she was the president’s mistress. My actors refused to perform, convinced that la Tigresa had cast a spell over the theater. So I agreed to have a sorcerer’s assistant come to lift the spell. I have to admit that I laughed when I saw him splash the theater with holy water. But then, while we had a coffee, he began to complain, and an immense boil pushed its way out onto his anus. This sudden eruption grew to such proportions that he had to go to the hospital. There was no doubt in his mind that he had absorbed into his body the bad spell cast over the theater.
Psychosomatic reaction?
It’s possible. But in any case, sometimes strange things happen. . One day, a director of a fine arts school with whom I had just signed a contract told me, “You are naive. You swear by Mexico. Everything seems wonderful to you. But if you dare to look here in this drawer, you will discover there another aspect of this country.” So I moved near the drawer, opened it, and straightaway was overcome by an atrocious headache.
What then did this infernal drawer contain?
Horrible wax statuettes used by sorcerers to torture from afar the designated victims of their clients. Their features were, in themselves, so horrible to look at that I felt faint. If they were exhibited at Beaubourg or the Louvre, the public could see what power an art object can have, beneficial or maleficent. A work bearing such energy directly affects the organism of anyone who contemplates it. Although strongly disagreeable in itself, this experience made me wonder. I asked myself what could a beneficial artist be: the good magician whose works of art would be charged with such a positive force that they would push a spectator into ecstasy. It is a principle that served me thereafter in Psychomagic.