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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