For anyone who has read through all of them, this is by far Castaneda's most controversial book. It's fascinating reading, featuring long-awaited direct contacts with the Tenant (by whatever name -- he is known by a few different designations in Spanish) in equally long-awaited scenes taking place in Tula, the home of the ancient Toltecs.
Besides being such a gripping reading experience, the dreaming practices are real and can be experienced. For the practical-minded, this is a huge improvement over jumping into abysses and some of the other not very practical sorts of things done in the other books.
Now as for the rest:
1. There is no don Juan in this book. When dJ left this world (in the book Tales of Power), Carlos was still piddling about trying to see his hands in dreams. The advanced dreaming practices outlined in this book could not have possibly been learned back in those years when dJ was here. Either there was another teacher (and he did confirm that he had at least one other teacher), or...
2. The book is stylistically inconsistent with all of his previous books. Was the author getting old? Did he stop employing the services of his usual editor? or did someone else write this book? At any rate, this book has virtually nothing in common with any of his other books, either in practice or stylistically.
As we depart from this book, we come to the Cleargreen years and the Magical Passes, which I won't even bother to review. It's clear from this book and everything after it that, despite the unifying presence of the name "don Juan," Castaneda's books are about at least four distinctly different sets of practices that have little to do with each other. Discerning readers should distinguish from among them and use what is useful for them.
To be more explicit about that claim, CC's first three books are more or less ethnography about practices associated with Indians, the fourth book goes way beyond that, the fifth through eighth books introduce us to nagual groups and the concept of the assemblage point, the ninth (this) book covers someone's dreaming practice, Magical Passes covers just that, Wheel of Time looks back at the other books, and, not quite finally (we might include the books by Armando Torres here), Active Side of Infinity is a kind of autobiography that seems to have been written earlier and then withheld until after his passing.
The Art of Dreaming is absolutely the best book of its kind, thus its rating. Anyone who can understand this book could not possibly have any use for any of the other more popular books about lucid dreaming, except perhaps to use the paper for, as don Juan said in one of the other books, well, "you know what we use paper for in Mexico..."
One point to make is that while books by psychologists about lucid dreaming put the dreaming self at the service of the rational waking mind, a truer practice would put the mind at the disposal of the self that dreams, by whatever name; in other words, by experiencing dreams with ones awareness (as we also experience waking life) instead of trying to control their content. The former treats them as real, while the latter treats them as a product of our mind, which is the flaw of all psychology including (or especially) Jungian. But I guess all that hinges on what "real" means.
Regardless of the events that tarnished Castaneda's personal reputation during the 1990s, regardless of the stylistic deficiencies and the anachronistic use of don Juan as a character, regardless of whether we believe all the stuff that happened in Tula, as a book about dreaming, this book is the real deal.
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