Alejandro Jodorowsky - Psychomagic - The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

How can a person be sure that he is dreaming? After all I also could decide right now, while talking to you, that I am dreaming.

In the beginning I made a test. I supported myself in the air with my two hands as if on an invisible table, and I propelled myself upward. If I floated, I knew I was dreaming. Quickly, I looped around and began working on the dream. I will read you a lucid dream written in my yellow notebook in 1970, which covers for me an important detail: I made an effort for the first time to practice the technique described here.

I am alone in an unknown home. Everything seems completely real, but without knowing why, as nothing indicated that, I think, “Maybe I’m dreaming. If I am dreaming, I can fly.” I make an effort. I support myself in the air with the palms of my hands, and I propel myself up. I float in the room. “It is a dream!” I tell myself. I decide to take advantage of the opportunity to perfect my flight, and not only to see myself fly but to feel myself fly. I turn over; I go up and down. I am satisfied. I decide to plane glide around the whole house. I fly through a corridor, and I arrive in a dark living room. In the corner, I see two five-year-old boys. I go toward them to see them better: they are not boys but old gnomes, skinny and wrinkled. They laugh and hide. They are the spirits of the house. They have a disturbing air. They avoid me. They disappear in the shadows and laugh at me. They don’t dare me to look for them. The dream absorbs me; I lose lucidity. . I travel in a bus without a conductor or passengers. I look out the window and see a petrified forest. I tell myself, “This is probably a dream. I am going to confirm it.” I fly. I get out of the bus by passing through the window glass, and I glide through the forest. I lose lucidity again. . Now I find myself in a cellar, before an opaque window. I don’t hesitate to realize that I am dreaming, and I tell myself, “Surely, this is a dream.” I try to exit flying out the window, but I don’t achieve this. I have the feeling that the walls have various meters of thickness. But I must get through them. I feel this is impossible. I force myself to try. I pass through the wall without difficulty, and I exit the space. Outside there is a blue sky; I float between the clouds. While I let myself be taken by a soft breeze, I think, “I must take advantage of this dream to see my interior God.” Suddenly, I feel a profound exhaustion invade me, obviously caused by a terrible fear. I give myself explanations: “It is too hard a test. I am still not prepared for this meeting; I will leave it for another day.”

And I wake up. On the one hand, I feel content to have discovered this technique that lets me know if I am dreaming, but, on the other hand, I am irritated because of my inability and my lack of value. In my dreams notebook, I write this commentary:

I believe the moment has arrived to go further in the lucid dream: to run risks. But I’m still scared of dying; I do not dare. . I cannot have entered into my unconscious until I find the interior God: trust in Him. . I must pursue the gnomes, confront them, speak to them without confusing myself with their mockery and establish a real contact with them, to know their secrets. I must create worlds, cross Death’s path, get to the center of my being, defeat the monsters and the terrors. . I want to be more courageous next time and overpower my fear. Also, I have to find allies and accept them, not always do all the work alone.

I suppose your lucid dream practice passed through different phases.

I began directing the game. I told myself, “I want to see elephants walking by in Africa.” And in a few seconds I was in Africa, seeing a herd of elephants. I could change the set, desire to go to the South Pole and then to see thousands of penguins. . This gave me such joy that I stopped waking myself up. I have experimented with all kinds of adventures with myself. Once, I wanted to know what it was like to die: I threw myself from the top of a building, and I smashed against the wall. Immediately, I found myself alive in another body, among the multitude that looked at the suicided corpse. This is how I discovered that the brain doesn’t know death. Another time, I decided to let myself be possessed by a mythological god.

Did you have a female orgasm?

The experience of being penetrated was more complete than that of a usual sexual relation. Don’t forget that I worked with oneiric images that exceeded the limits of reality. So that you understand better my practice, I can read the dream exactly as I wrote it down, in detail, in my notebook, with the date April 9, 1978.

I am in a dorm, spread out between two twin beds. I am supporting my back against the wall. In front of my feet appears an Invunche. .

An Invunche?

Yes. I’ll explain: The afternoon before the dream, I had been at a café with a Chilean exile whom I asked about the mapuche folklore. He told me that, according to the legend, the witches of Chiloé stole children and mutilated them so that, converted into monsters, they would serve as helpers with the name “Invunche.” I’ll continue:

. . a blind dwarf, naked, hairless, with a bird’s beak, stumps for arms, a deformed torso, and bowlegged: a kind of large fetus, as horrible as it was disturbing. And so I think, “It is a god with whom I have to have relations. His faith should breed something in my spirit.” Now I know I am dreaming and that I have the power to guide my dream. I decide to work on this monster with the objective of transforming it into a positive deity. I achieve this. The Invunche acquires good posture, normal features, and turns into a beautiful being, indescribable, like a live statue. I get out from between the beds, and I lay down with my mouth to the sky in the middle of the bedroom. I know that I must be inseminated by a god. I look for my femininity, lifting my legs to do so. A transparent tube, some forty centimeters long, comes out from between the legs of the god. I decide to surrender myself without resistance so that he can introduce the tube between the sex and the anus, this space, the perineum, in Tantra called chakra muladhara. I know that I do not have a vagina, and I am not trying anal penetration. The god kneels down between my open legs and begins to penetrate me. His organ rises up my spinal column until I feel it enter my brain. My awareness shatters.

Impressive. .

If you call this cataclysmic explosion “female orgasm,” yes, Gilles, I have experienced it, and it was a marvelous feeling. I felt very emotional letting myself be possessed by this god created from my own monstrosity. Then I dedicated myself to achieving unreachable desires in the state of wakefulness, especially sexual desires, of course. In dreams, I gave myself to fantastic orgies with half-human, half-panther women. Allow me to read to you another annotation made after one of these dreams. Although I want to clarify a point: Before achieving the lucid dream, in which I controlled the images, I had to overcome a series of obstacles that appeared like so many other tests of initiation. Only then could I claim the right to be the owner and god of my dreams. This passage taken from my notebook shows well this aspect of the process:

I am in an industrial world, without nature, only made up of buildings. It is a border. I do not have identification documents. Three soldiers prevent my passage. I jump the barrier and take off running, pursued by the soldiers. After opening a garage door, I find myself in front of a well a thousand kilometers deep. At the edge of this abyss, I realize that I am dreaming. The pursuers have ceased to exist. I decide to throw myself to the bottom, knowing already that nothing can happen to me. I jump and I fall with a great velocity. I am not afraid. I feel the desire to stop the fall. The fall stops. On the wall there appears a door. I enter and now I am at the entrance of a cathedral.