Jodorowsky’s Endless Dream

The dreamer has a memory, he can remember what he decided to do while awake, and success is very likely. I proceeded slowly for years, with inexhaustible patience, until I conquered the world of dreams. I do not use the word conquer in the sense of winning a battle or a territory. For me, conquering means to live in the fullness of the dream world, which has no limits. In this conquest there are difficulties and also traps into which one can fall, remaining without progress for years. Drought periods may occur, during which the subconscious refuses to provide us with dream lucidity. We can dream unceasingly, all night long, and awake without remembering any of it. Patience. Faith. Suddenly, like a flower opening up, we will once again find ourselves lucid, living in this other world. These dreams teach us, they show us at what level of consciousness we have arrived, and they give us the joy of living.

I had to first overcome the nightmares: my dreams were populated by menaces, shadows, murderous persecutions, disgusting events and objects, ambiguous sexual relations that excited me while also making me feel guilty. Here, I was a character inferior to my level of consciousness in the real world, capable of misdeeds that I would never have allowed myself to perpetrate while awake. I repeated many times, like a litany, “It is I who dream, just as it is I who am awake, and not a perverse and vulnerable child. The dreams happen in me; they are part of me. All that appears is myself. These monsters are aspects of me that have not been resolved. They are not my enemies. The subconscious is my ally. I must confront the terrible images and transform them.” I often had the same nightmare: I was in a desert, and a psychic entity determined to destroy me would come from the horizon as a huge cloud of negativity. I would wake up screaming and soaked in sweat. Now, tired of this undignified flight, I decided to offer myself in sacrifice. At the climax of the dream, in a state of lucid terror, I said, “Enough, I will stop wanting to wake up! Abomination, destroy me!” The entity approached threateningly. I stood still, calm. Then, the immense threat dissolved. I woke up for a few seconds, then peacefully went back to sleep. I realized it was I myself who had fed my terrors. I now knew that what terrifies us loses all its power in the moment that we stop fighting it. I began a long period during which whenever I had dreams, instead of running I would face my enemies and ask them what they wanted to tell me. Gradually, the images transformed before me and began to offer me presents: sometimes a ring, other times a golden sphere or a pair of keys. I now understood that just as every devil is a fallen angel, every angel is also a demon that has risen.

Alejandro Jodorowsky
The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography