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discover these similarities. What especially amazed
me
was the realization that my
dream of the "Sundance
letter" had been clueing me to this connection,
if only I
had thought to track it down.
Since I had overlooked
one dream clue, I wondered
if I had overlooked others. I searched
back through my
dream journals and found that during the period of those
community dream enactments described earlier,
I had
experienced several dreams involving a group of people
surrounding a tree. In one dream, we
are running around
a tree, wrapping it with
ribbons.
This dream image
seemed similar in form
to the Sun Dance. It also
reminded me of the
May Pole celebration. These
resemblances suggested that
there existed
an
archetypal or Universal Idea that is common
to the Sun
Dance, the May Pole celebration,
my dream of the
"research dance" and my
imaginary experiment in
revelation.
Meanwhile, the A.R.E.
Dream Research Project was
being prepared. Could it be that within this
cooperative
experiment, there might occur dreams that would reflect
upon the project itself? People in an intimate, long-term
residential workshop
might dream about
their
community experience, but could
people working
together through the mail also have dreams
about their
shared venture?
Since in my dream
I am contacted at Sundance by
letter, cooperative dreaming through
the mail seemed
less unlikely. And so I asked the research participants
to
question their dreams about our project. As shown in my
report on that project (see
page 42), some participants
did have dreams about our cooperative experiment. And
as an unexpected bonus, some of
these dreams also
hinted at there being a Universal
Idea underlying the
Sundance theme.
What is the nature of this Universal Idea?
The image of
a gyroscope (or a top) is a convenient device to
portray
the dynamic structure of the symbolic
process we are
dealing with. The gyroscope has three main components:
the central axis, the circular motion around the axis,
and
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