Alaskan Eskimo artists turned to dreams & trances for inspiration. They hoped to penetrate a house of knowledge which they believed lay beneath the sea. When they returned to the land of men, they carved likenesses of the spirits they had met there. They also disclosed wisdom these spirits had bestowed upon them.

Such carvings & wisdom rarely deviated from set forms. Minor bits of creativity might be added, but the masks remained to the highest degree conventional, not only within a single village, but over great spans in time & space.

In short, when the task of artistic inspiration & creation was assigned to the unconscious, the images that resulted were corporate ones. They didn't come out of the depths of any private unconscious. The dreamer looked inward, but his dream took him directly to an ancient storehouse of tribal experience. What he learned there equipped him to handle functions of the mind too obscure for deliberate, conscious activity, and to do so with ease, communicating with others who shared these complex memories & perceptions.

A Canadian artist recently went on CBC radio to ask listeners to let him borrow old home movies. He assembled these into a remarkable document-remarkable because it enables us to perceive, with some objectivity, our clichés, our collective unconscious, something otherwise so immediate, so obvious, we can't step back from it.

When Hollywood films were films, they were lived; as late TV shows, they can be studied, seen for what they are: part of our collective unconscious. As advertising changes, it reveals itself as folklore. A manual for would-be writers, entitled Plots That Sell to Top-paying Magazines (1952), offered a breakdown of magazine short story themes. Specific magazines, it said, accepted only specific themes & published these over & over with only slight variations. To save time in determining these themes, it advised readers to skip the stories & look at the ads: "The key is in the ads."