Background and Foreground of Dreams
Tony Crisp
A dream or vision presents a view of life in which inner feelings and states are personified - as for instance Christ becomes seen as a person exterior to ones own being. In this sense something that is a general human event, such as the many people in history who have given their lives to save others, becomes a single exterior symbol in a dream, such as Christ would be. So the statement that Christ – transcendent human love – has died to save us all, could refer to all the human beings in the past who have given their life to others. The dream image could therefore integrate our sense of our forebears whose life and death was the foundation of our own existence. It refers to the fact that countless people gave their lives, often willingly, that we might live.
What we do with language illustrates this in large degree. In other words, how we learn language illustrates how we learn many other things. For instance there are certainly many words for which you know the precise meaning, and yet you have never looked them up in the dictionary. Your understanding has arisen from seeing them in context with other words. So you have arrived at understanding by frequently meeting the word in a variety of contexts.
This connects with the cultural symbols and figures which or who we meet displayed in cultural contexts. For instance Buddhism in Europe and probably in the US, is displayed in the context of a non-dominant religion. Christianity - Christ - is displayed in a dominant cultural role. All of this is information. Also the symbols of these religions portray enormous information. The crucified figure for Christianity, and the seated, reposed figure with eyes half closed for Buddhism. These portray a huge difference and without anything else ARE information.
Such things never become consciouis unless we pointedly examine them. We learn about them almost without conscious thought, and often they remain as part of our 'background' of our perception.
We are therefore faced with what is a foreground, and what is background in our life.
Part of our background, for instance, is that we are each an historical event, with particular family, national and cultural background and tendencies. It is what used to be called blood.
Our Background is what is often called the unconscious. It is the complex and varied influences and the interactions, which underlie our existence. These spread from the deeply subatomic, atomic, molecular, cellular, organic and inter-organ activities of our body and environment, to social processes on as many levels. It includes personal but forgotten memory, personality structure, response and experience. But this background is also all the things mentioned above in regard to cultural information, all the lives that have preceded ours and left their mark in one way or another, and the time we are born.
The Foreground is what we sense as the reality of our isolated, independent integrity or identity. It is the world of our present experience through senses and thoughts. Our conscious waking self, and the sense we have of ourselves.
Integration between the two is actually a working relationship between self and reality. But as ‘reality’ is generally so hard to grasp in any encompassing way, when it is felt in anything more than tiny parcels of information - i.e. when it is sensed in anything like its entirety - it is experienced as a relationship with the mystical or numinous.
Things, such as childhood trauma, may stand in the way of a ‘working’ relationship between background and foreground. Remember that background includes all of the workings of the cosmos in its most intricate ways. For without that you would have no body. And events in our family, in the cosmos, in social history, in our own actions and behaviour, have preceded our emergence as an individual and this moment now. We inherit the effects of these and have to meet them in our daily life, in this moment now. In past cultures these were recognised and given various names or described in various ways - sin - as you sow, so shall you reap - karma - kismet.
Different ways of thinking about and dealing with such causes of dysfunction were used in different ages and cultures. In the west, we mostly see events in our life as accidents, or as having psychological causes, such as childhood traumas or care. Western culture seems somewhat blind to cultural, historical and family causes which flow into the individual from prior to his or her birth. This is starting to be defined though from the genetic point of view.
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