If we realize that we are dreaming in the dream world, then in the waking world, trapped in the limited conception of ourselves, we must jettison preconceived ideas and sentiments in order to immerse ourselves in the Essence with a naked spirit. Once this lucidity is gained, we have the freedom to act on reality, knowing that if we only try to satisfy our egotistic desires we will be swept away in the whirlwind of emotions, lose our equanimity and control, and thus lose the ability to be our own selves acting on the level of consciousness that corresponds to us. In the lucid dream, one learns that everything one desires with true intensity — with faith — will be realized after patient waiting. Knowing this, we must stop living like children, always demanding, and live like adults, investing our vital capital.
Two monks pray continuously. One is worried, the other smiling. The first asks, “How is it that I am anxious and you are happy, if both pray for the same number of hours?” The other replies, “It is because you always pray to ask, while I only pray to give thanks.” To achieve peace, both in the nighttime dream and in the daytime dream that we call waking, we must become less and less implicated in the world and in our image of ourselves. Life and death are only a game. And the ultimate game is to stop dreaming, that is, to disappear from this dream world and integrate oneself into the one who is dreaming.
There is a dimension with which I have not yet been lucky enough to experiment: shared therapeutic dreams. It is said that María Sabina, the mushroom priestess, received a man who had a terrible pain in his leg. Neither the most sophisticated remedies, nor acupuncture, nor massage had been able to relieve it. The old woman divided a portion of mushrooms into two equal parts to share with her patient. She lay down beside him. They fell asleep embracing. In her dreams, she saw the patient as a wizard, devouring a lamb. The shepherd of the herd struck it with his staff, injuring a leg. María took the animal and, laying her hands on it, healed the injured limb. The healer and her patient awoke at the same time. The pain in his leg had vanished. He never again experienced such suffering.
SEVEN. Magicians, Masters, Shamans, and Charlatans
My first encounter with magic and madness combined into art was during my childhood. I was about five or six years old when Cristina came to work as our maid. With my childish eyes I saw her as an old lady, though in fact she was only forty years old; the air, doubly salt-laden from the sea and from the nitrate dust of the desert, had made furrows in her forehead and cheeks. All her clothes were brown, like the habits of Carmelite nuns. Her hair, stretched and tied back to form a bun, looked like a helmet. It was she, clean, quiet, and friendly, with large but sensitive hands, who gave me the touches that my mother withheld, who rubbed my feet when I had a fever, who dressed me in the morning to go to school, who baked my favorite pastries filled with dark caramel that we called manjar blanco. How I loved Cristina! My need for my mother was very affective and painful, I was united to her absence, but Cristina, with her rustic humbleness, was balsam for my wounded heart.
I was surprised when my father, seeing me in the arms of my beloved maid, said in front of her with a cynical, self-satisfied smile, as if she were deaf: “I’m the only one who will give work to a madwoman.” Those words pierced my soul like a knife. I blushed, struggling to hold back my tears. Jaime shrugged his shoulders with a look of contempt, and left. Cristina began to rock me in her arms until I fell asleep. At about three o’clock in the morning, I woke up in my bed. I heard my father’s loud snoring and my mother’s breathing, which sounded like grumbling. I had gone to bed without my supper. Hungry, and with a dry mouth, I got up to get a glass of water and a fruit. The rooms were dark, but from the kitchen came the faint glow of a candle flame. At first, Cristina seemed not to notice my arrival. With strange concentration, she was sitting on a stool before the bare table, gently and precisely moving her hands in the air. She seemed to be shaping something, creating forms, smoothing invisible matter, going over and over imaginary surfaces with her fingers. A long time passed, maybe an hour. I stood there, mesmerized, transfixed, watching something that I could not understand and that corresponded to nothing I had known. At last, tired, hungry, and thirsty, I could hold back no longer.
“What are you doing, Christina?”
She slowly turned her head and, still stroking the air, looking at me with glazed eyes, said anxiously, “Do you see? I’m finishing. When God took my son, the Virgin of Carmen came to me and told me, ‘Make me a sculpture of me from the air. When it’s finished and everyone can see it, your child will rise from his grave, alive again.’ You see it, right? Tell me!”
What could I say? I did not know how to lie. It was the first time I had been in contact with madness, the first time I had seen a person acting as a unit without observing herself, without a social mask. Terrified, I felt frozen to the spot. The cold night wind, blowing down from the mountains, started sighing. Cristina embraced her invisible sculpture, distraught. “No, I don’t want you to take him, damn you!” She seemed to be struggling against a hurricane, then, sobbing, put her face on the table with her arms dangling as if her hands were empty. After some seconds, she returned to being the person I knew. She gave me a glass of water, peeled an apple for me, and took me to bed. She stayed by me until I dissolved into sleep.
My second encounter with magic was in Santiago. Our group of young poets attracted many older homosexual intellectuals. Sometimes they were painters, sometimes writers, sometimes university professors. They had a unique culture, spoke several languages with French being the preferred one, and were very generous. Knowing us to be heterosexual they fell in love platonically, revered us in silence, and in order to enjoy our youthful presence often invited us to the German pub to drink beer, eat sausages, and listen to a string trio accompanied on the piano by Pirulí (Lollipop), a lanky effeminate man with hair dyed a violent yellow who played Viennese waltzes. Among these men was Chico Molina, about fifty, short in stature with a broad chest, slender legs, and tiny feet, who seduced our minds with his encyclopedic knowledge. He was a polyglot, could read Sanskrit, and knew every author or artist that one could name. One day, apparently more drunk than usual, he revealed to us that his intimate millionaire friend, Lora Aldunate, owned a magic mirror made in the fourteenth century. He had apparently bought it in Italy, in Turin, a city consecrated to the devil. If certain secret rituals were performed in front of it, the mirror would stop reflecting reality and would show old reflections. Molina swore to us that he had seen, more clearly than on film, a night scene in a forest in which naked women kissed the anus of a billy goat beneath the light of the full moon. Excited by such revelations, we rushed him out of the German restaurant and took him to the home of Lora Aldunate, which was very close by. We started yelling, asking him to let us in, demanding to see the magic mirror. A tall, distinguished, deathly pale man opened the blinds on the second floor and emptied his bedpan full of urine onto our heads. “You indecent drunks, don’t play with magic! You will never see my mirror! When I die, I’ll take it to the grave, locked in my coffin with me!” Molina looked at us with a wide smile on his simian face. “See? It’s true. I never lie. As Neruda said, ‘God forbid me from making things up when I’m singing!’”