The Dreamspell as Jose Arguelles envisioned it, is an extraordinary journey through the rooms of five enchanted castles. In the imagery of the Dreamspell these castles have a curious architecture. They are constructed in the form of four-armed crosses, laid out with their rooms lined up in rows along each of the four arms.
The four arms of each one of the Dreamspell castles curl at right angles as they radiate from the center of each castle. The rooms are numbered from one to thirteen starting at the center and moving room by room out to the end of each branch or “wing” of the structure. Two of the rooms in each “wing” are equiped with magic towers that denote their special status.
Since each castle has four wings, and each wing is lined with a row of thirteen rooms, the castles contain 52 rooms apiece (13 x 4=52). This fact is central because the number 52 is a very important numerological element in Maya mathematics.
Each Castle comes in a different color. Each color represents one of the four sacred colors of the directions in the Maya Medicine Wheel, plus a fifth color to represent the Center. They are Red in the East, White in the North, Blue in the West, and , Yellow in the South, with Green in the Center.
Although each castle is considered to represent one of the directions they each have aspects of all four directions within their individual architecture. For intance, the Red Castle of the East has a red eastern wing, but it also has a white northern wing, a blue western wing and a yellow southern wing. Likewise, the Yellow Castle of the South also has a red eastern wing, a yellow southern wing, a blue western wing and a white northern wing. All five castles are equiped with those four thirteen-room-long wings, and all five castles contain the unity of the four directions represented in the colors of their four wings.
Each room in each wing of each castle has its own unique power. The rooms are each named for the combination of number and glyph that it represents. The very first room is considered to be the innermost room in the eastern wing of the Red Castle of the East. It is called “One Imix” named after the first number and the first glyph. The next room is the adjacent chamber along the length of the wing, “Two Ik”. The next room is “Three Akbal” and so on.
Each of the four wavespells (wing) in each castle is crowned with two towers. The towers rise above the fifth and ninth rooms of the wavespell.
Although the Dreamspell is patterned after the traditional Mayan Calendar, and the traditional Mayan terminology can and is often used in the Dreamspell, it has its own special terminology. The glyphs are called “solar seals”. The numbers are called “tones”, recalling the notes of the musical scale. The four wings of each castle are called “wavespells”. The twenty Mayan glyphs (seals)of the Dreamspell have special names in English: Imix is called “Dragon”. Ik is called “Wizard”. Akbal is called “Night” and so on. The thirteen numbers have special names also: One is called “Magnetic”. Two is called “Lunar”. Three is called “Electric” and so on.
The Dreamspell is designed following a very artistic pattern and so a lot of very colorful imagery is used in its implementation. The outlay of the five castles is pictorially represented in a schematic form by five cross-shaped images made up of 52 little “seals” each. The seals are lined up along the length of each “wavespell” arranged in order of colors. The colors come in the same order as the four directions. One Imix (Magnetic Dragon) is red. Two Ik (Lunar wind) is white. Three Akbal (Electric Night) is Blue, and so on.
The very first room in the very first wavespell of the very first castle in the five-castle spread is red. It is called the Red Magnetic Dragon room. The next room beyond the door on the far wall is white. It is called the White Lunar Wind room, and so on
Caney Circle 