Chapter Six

The Mystery and Magic
of Colour: A Study in Blue

‘There it is!’ she cried. ‘I have found it at last. This is the true blue. Oh, how light it makes one. Oh, it is as fresh as a breeze, as deep as a deep secret, as full as I say not what.’¹

– Isaak Dinesen

On 24 December 1968, people on Earth received a beautiful gift – the first colour, high-resolution image of an earthrise over the moon. The final version of the photo creates the impression that we, the viewers, stand on the moon watching Earth rise over the moon’s empty horizon line. Through the photo, ‘Earthrise’, our planet’s blue orb set against the barren whiteness of the moon and the blackness of space, became imprinted on our collective consciousness. The image brought home the emotive realisation that the blue sky, so seemingly limitless and infinite when seen from Earth, turns out to be a delicate, diaphanous ring of biosphere protecting and nurturing life on our planet.

The Apollo 8 crew had their aim fixed on their goal to be the first astronauts to complete a lunar orbit, so taking photos of Earth did not appear on the official protocol for the mission (astronauts had previously nearly died when distracted by the stellar views from space). But as the Apollo 8 completed its fourth orbit around the moon, the astronauts, on a spacewalk outside the spacecraft, couldn’t help noticing the striking earthrise.

One of them, Bill Anders, hastily loaded his camera with colour film. His commander jokingly pointed out that taking pictures of Earth wasn’t scheduled. Even so, Anders, a self-described hardened fighter-pilot with no expertise in photography, took dozens of photos, figuring that one would turn out. Among them, he snapped the photo that took our understanding of Earth to a higher level, giving us a new gestalt picture of the planet as a holistic yet fragile, dynamic system, complex in its diversity, singular in its unity, unique in its beauty – a living, colourful presence in the cosmos.

Seen from space, as if in a dream, Earth itself becomes a living, breathing ‘symbol’, an archetype in the most fundamental sense of the word, impressing itself upon us with its strong presence and imparting a profound quality of Being.² We can understand why Anders, when first viewing the earthrise, exclaimed, ‘Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, that’s pretty.’ Our response to the reality of ‘Earthrise’ gives us a more visceral understanding of what Jung meant when he defined archetypal images as those that ‘point to realities that transcend consciousness’.³ Importantly, Jung believed that archetypes ‘possess spontaneity and purposiveness, or a kind of consciousness and free will’.⁴ Thus, contact with the powerful energy of archetypes can transform us.

An example of such a healing archetypal encounter with Earth is found in the Alister Hardy Archive. A woman who had been contemplating suicide shares how, before falling asleep, she had called out to God for help. She continues:

I then dreamt that I was travelling through space – the earth rotating on its axis before me – the stars all around me. I experienced within the dream a feeling of most wonderful peace, and when I awakened, I was both mentally and physically refreshed and my problems were given a different perspective.⁵

The vision of Earth from space gave her a meta-perspective, a more serene, life-saving vantage point, that helped her to see her problems in a new light.

Science tells us that gravity has shaped Earth into a sphere that rotates suspended (or nestled) in space-time. Faced with this awe-inspiring ‘fact’, we can still wonder at Earth’s dream-like mysterious beauty. The writer Richard Bach, in his book Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, speaks of this mystery: ‘The world is a dream, you say, and it’s lovely, sometimes. Sunset. Clouds. Sky. No. The image is a dream. The beauty is real. Can you see the difference?’⁶

I once had a dream that pictures something of the same:

I find myself in space looking at Earth, surrounded by a vast dark expanse and then a ring of stars. Earth has the quality of a bright, blue jewel, and I can see how its gravity bends space-time. But then Earth dislodges itself and floats up towards me like some great inflatable ball. I feel concern for the planet, yet also aware of how playful the scene feels. As I lift my hands to ‘catch’ Earth I become aware that I dream ...

When I wake, I comprehend that the beautiful natural landscapes so dear to me – the deserts, countryside, mountains and seascapes – all lovingly give birth to life. From a cosmological perspective, the dream also graphically shows me that the apparent solidity of Earth is as ephemeral as dreams – the life the Earth sustains, fragile. This awareness made me weep, as it felt both a tremendous gain and loss.

Sharing that dream now reminds me of a scene from Charlie Chaplain’s political satire The Great Dictator, which was screened in 1940 during the Second World War. In the film, a dictator, played by Chaplin, fantasises of world dominance while he dances with an oversized inflatable globe of the world. The scene ends with a loud ‘bang’ as the globe unexpectedly pops and deflates, leaving the ‘great’ dictator in tears. The juxtaposition of the two scenes highlights the difference between the power of love and the love of power. The former creates the world, the latter destroys it.

Viewed from space, ‘Spaceship Earth’⁷ shines with a translucent blue, radiating six times more brightly than the moon’s silvery light. The opalescent hue that reflects from Earth gives us a sense of how colour, itself made of light wavelengths, can serve as an archetype alive with Being. As one dream teacher of mine explained, ‘It’s not what we make of the colours that is important, but what the colours make of us.’⁸ Unlike the unmissable blue of the Earth, colours in dreams (and life) often appear ‘disguised’ in the imagery they clothe and so tend to go unnoticed.

During dreamwork, I have often found that people weep when they re-encounter a colour as if for the first time. For example, I worked with a young man, Adam, who had what he considered an unremarkable dream. When Adam re-imagined the dream scene, a bedroom, a detail that he had previously dismissed – a pair of blue socks – caught his attention. As his dream guide, I invited him to imagine putting the socks on and to focus on the blue. In doing so, he associated the socks with Earth and their blue colour to Spirit. Instantly, he sensed a burst of energy at the base of his spine. To calm this powerful energy, I asked Adam to imagine the blue moving into the region of his sacrum, on down to his feet, and then moving upwards again. With the balancing effect of the blue, he felt his spine reinforced with a newfound strength and a sense of purpose that touched him deeply. As Adam discovered, when a colour in a dream appears in clothing, the colour may reflect a quality in us that needs to be recognised and ‘worn’ like an outer garment in waking life. On a similar note, the poet John J. Brugaletta, imagining a day in which everyone in the world wore different shades of blue – cerulean, sapphire, cornflower, denim and baby blue – writes of how, the day after, a sudden transformation took place. Instead of beginning sentences with ‘I’, people started them with ‘You’, now infused with a new spirit of wonder and empathy.⁹

Many people say they do not dream in colour. Yet when researchers awaken participants in a sleep lab during the REM state, people recall both their dreams and the colours appearing in them more readily and more clearly.¹⁰ Even so, when people retell a dream, they often don’t mention colours unless asked. Perhaps we fail to take note of colours because, as Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out in his Philosophical Investigations, ‘The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.’¹¹

Wittgenstein attends to the nature of colour in his treatise Remarks on Colour. He asks, ‘Can we imagine someone who has a different geometry of colour than we do?’¹² How, Wittgenstein wonders, does a person with colour blindness see and experience colour? Normally, the three colour-sensing cones in our eyes process light wavelengths of red, green and blue to create a palette of crisp distinct colours. When these photoreceptors interfere with one another, colour blindness results. Most people with colour blindness do, in fact, see some colour. However, depending on the type of colour blindness, certain colours look washed out. For instance, people who have red-green colour blindness may see these colours dimmed by a film of pinkish-grey.

Imagine a child who wears toy glasses with coloured red lenses. Perhaps, like me, you were once that child! If so, you would have noticed that the red tint dimmed other colours and gave objects a spectral pinkish-grey tinge. Colours burst back to life once the glasses come off. Now imagine the reverse: How would it be to have had red-green colour blindness from birth and then to put on glasses that enabled you to see colours in their correct wavelengths? Such corrective glasses do exist.¹³ When a colour-blind person puts on such new glasses for the first time, they respond with deep emotion: a man in his fifties who received such a gift wept at the bright clarity of the colours. Another stood in amazement staring at the trees and sky, crying with disbelief at the beautiful contrast between the green and the blue. Witnessing such powerful expressions of feeling reminds us of the wonder of colour.¹⁴

Wittgenstein’s investigations into colour, which included conversations with colour-blind people, caused him to conclude: ‘Whatever looks luminous does not look grey. Everything grey looks as though it is being illumined.’¹⁵ Bright colours appear to be illuminated from within, greyish tones (as at dusk) seem to lack an inner illumination. The blue sky of a spring day radiates vitality in contrast to the more melancholic tone of grey-blue. A similar contrast can be seen in images taken by orbiting satellites: the vivid blue of Earth’s healthy biosphere is sullied by murky grey blotches over cities with heavily polluted air. When we (and the Earth) are physically and emotionally healthy, we shine with the light of Intelligence and Imagination that radiates from within us.

Dreams not only reveal the emotional tonalities of colour, but also unveil colours in their ‘pure’ state, unconstrained by form. In your mind’s eye, you can visualise an infinite expanse of blue and intuit the impression this colour makes upon you.¹⁶ In daily life, the colour blue appears in the form that contains it – a flower, a pool of water or even the vast expanse of the sea. Yet in dreams, we may directly apprehend how our supra-sensory perception of pure colour touches our very souls, as in the following dream of mine:

I ride a bicycle down a familiar London street in the dark, early-morning hours. A recent, light snow is melting. The deep night gives way to a blue dawn so beautiful I want to get off my bike, kneel, and cry with joy at the sheer beauty of it. With the beauty and the feeling, I become lucid in the dream...

A few years on, I had a dream in which blue took on an added brilliance and intensity, reflecting the pure light of unbounded Being without reference to a form or object outside itself, not even the sky:

I am arguing with someone over which of us is more alone in this world. I say, ‘I have left my country, my family; my mother and dear aunt have died, and my father hardly knows me [with his dementia].’ Then I see my mother, who shakes her head side to side as if to say, ‘You are not alone.’ With the realisation that she is actually dead in waking life, I become lucid.

I feel as if my soul is carried a long way in a shining darkness. I repeat a sacred name until a dazzling azure blue space opens up as a vast field of light before me. The blue expanse feels like it contains all of creation. The blue overwhelms me and I ‘prostrate’ my being and cry out, ‘Forgive me, God, for every time I have forgotten your blue on the breath.’ I say this moved by a sense of profound gratitude for all the beauty and wonder I have failed to appreciate fully. Then I see what appear to be brilliant white clouds lining the circumference above me. This gives way to the blackness again, through which I am carried on the wind until I wake up, thinking about a line from a Sufi teacher: ‘The only sin is to forget God on the breath.’

In both dreams, the colour blue radiates a joy and beauty that abides at the core of life. I feel the reality of all-encompassing love unbounded and without judgement. The blue answers a deep longing within me, a desire to feel fully present to life itself. At the time of this dream, I felt I was losing my innocence of heart. My immersion in the blue assured me of the soul’s essential purity. The challenge for me would be to trust in, and live by, the soulful quality of that intense blue. In the words of William Blake:

... And we are put on earth a little space,

That we may learn to bear the beams of love...’¹⁷

Speaking of colours in dreams, the 12th-century Sufi mystic Ibn al-῾Arabī discerns that when ‘the man of knowledge’ is lost in nothingness, ‘God grants him an existence from His own existence and paints him with the Divine Color.’¹⁸ Alchemists referred to such ‘dyeing’ as the ‘heavenly tincture’.¹⁹

From a spiritual perspective, luminous colours in dreams signal the presence of the spirit, which filters through the dream material rather as though the dream were a stainedglass window animated by light. We know that light spreads out as distinct colours when it shines through a stained-glass window because of properties in the coloured glass, but the light itself remains uncoloured, pure in its essence.²⁰ ‘Thus,’ as the Sufi scholar William Chittick explains, ‘dream images are perceived in sensory forms, yet they are animated by formless awareness.’²¹ At the same time, the coloured light of our dreams infuses us so that we may then bring the attributes of the colours we have experienced into our waking life. This infusion kindles a light, helping us to remain hopeful and alive to possibilities even during periods of loss. To convey this renewal of hope, the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, well known for her description of the stages of grief, draws on the analogy of a stained-glass window illumined from within on a dark night.²²

Concerning the numinosity of the shining blue, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition teaches, ‘At this stage, thou must not be awed by the divine blue light which will appear shining, dazzling, and glorious; and be not startled by it. That is the light of the Tathagata called the Light of the Wisdom of the Dharma-Dhatu [Absolute reality].’²³ Comfortingly, the Tibetan Buddhists also call this blue ‘the light of grace’.²⁴ Instead of feeling daunted, terrified or awed when we meet fields of intense, coloured light in a dream, their teaching tells us, ‘That is the radiance of thine own true nature. Recognise it.’²⁵

In a modern context, we can compare dreams in which we feel impressed upon by a colour with immersion in a colour therapy pool. Such pools have been used in waking life to enhance the emotional wellbeing of many people, including children. For example, autistic children may have difficulty being aware of their bodies, so when immersed in a pool illuminated by coloured light, they are able, perhaps for the first time, to have a sense of bodily awareness. Writing about such therapeutic ‘colour baths’, the physicist Arthur Zajonc describes how coloured light, emitted from lamps installed on the edge of a colour therapy pool just below the waterline, only becomes visible when the child enters the water and is bathed in colour.²⁶ In a parallel way, when a dream swathes us in a ‘colour bath’, we are invited to know ourselves as bodies of light in a more fluid state of being.

Photographs of Earth from space remind us that no matter how celestial blue may appear, it also heralds life on Earth. Indeed, paint pigments originate in the earth, their colours extracted from stones, minerals, clay, seashells, plants and herbs. The brilliant pigments used in medieval illuminated manuscripts all have their origins in earth-bound substances involving such humble ingredients as pine resin, wax, urine and even dung, as well as caustic lye and deadly materials such as lead and mercury.

Lapis lazuli blue, extracted from the rare mineral lazurite deep in the Himalayas of Afghanistan, requires painstakingly slow grinding into blue powder before it can be mixed with agents to draw out the pigment. The resulting colour, also called ultramarine blue (which means ‘the blue from over the sea’), was once the most expensive pigment in medieval Europe. Given the preciousness of lapis lazuli blue, we can understand why Europeans in the Middle Ages believed that the mere sight of its hue dispelled melancholy. Holding a polished sphere of lapis lazuli stone that I bought as a memento of the shimmering blue in my dreams, I feel more serene and secure.

Modern research has shown that light and colour have such psycho-physiological functions.²⁷ Blue light, for example, inhibits the production of the melatonin that causes us to fall asleep, while at the same time relaxing us so that we feel both bright and at ease, like a calm ultramarine sea. When we understand the properties of colour and their effects, we can appreciate that much as light and colours in the waking world can help us physiologically and emotionally, so can the light and colours of our dreams.

The soul-longing I associate with bright blue also has a literary counterpart in the ‘blue flower’ yearning of romantic love. This image flourished in German Romanticism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The German Romantic writer Novalis, a lucid dreamer, wrote a novel in which the lead protagonist, Henry, longs to find a blue flower that he had seen in a dream within a dream (possibly based on one of Novalis’ own lucid dreams):

He dreamed that he was sitting on the soft turf by the margin of a fountain, whose waters flowed into the air, and seemed to vanish in it. Dark blue rocks with various coloured veins rose in the distance. The daylight around him was milder and clearer than usual; the sky was of a sombre blue, and free from clouds. But what most attracted his notice was a tall, light-blue flower, which stood nearest the fountain, and touched it with its broad, glossy leaves. Around it grew numberless flowers of varied hue, filling the air with the richest perfume. But he saw the blue flower alone and gazed long upon it with inexpressible tenderness. He at length was about to approach it, when it began to move and change its form. The leaves increased their beauty, adorning the growing stem. The flower bent towards him and revealed among its leaves a blue, within which hovered a tender face. His delightful astonishment was increasing with this singular change, when suddenly his mother’s voice awoke him, and he found himself in his parents’ room.²⁸

Although Henry never actually finds the idealised blue flower, his search leads him to find his true love, Mathilde. Ultimately, colours lead us to a direct apprehension of the profound qualities that they reveal.

Henry’s intoxication with the flower’s blue incandescence is echoed in Aldous Huxley’s poetic description of the spring flowers as they appeared to him after he had taken four tenths of a gram of the psychedelic substance mescaline. An hour and a half after taking mescaline, Huxley became mesmerised by flowers ‘shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged’, alive with ‘naked existence.’²⁹ He writes:

I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing – but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like ‘grace’ and ‘transfiguration’ came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for.³⁰

Huxley understood mescaline to have affected his brain chemistry in such a way that ‘things’ became free of the concepts and categories we ordinarily use to delimit them in time and space and so quivered with extraordinary Beingness. Because of this, he proposed that careful use of mescaline could potentially give the user an introduction to a mystical experience of colour perceived in both the inner and outer worlds – colours becoming primary, more central than any definition or denotation.

In order to determine the nature of hallucinogen-occasioned spiritual experience,³¹ researchers studied reports from people who had taken psilocybin, a compound with similar effects to mescaline. Using a questionnaire designed to analyse the characteristics of mystical experience, the researchers identified four salient features of drug-induced visions: a singular noetic or sacred quality, positive mood, transcendence of space-time, and ineffability.

Dreams can naturally give us a mystical perception of colour without the need to use chemical agents. Consider this homely dream shared by a recently bereaved widow who had lost her husband of many years:

[In my dream] I came down in the morning and went straight to the front door ... Through the glass top of the door I could see grey foggy mist outside, blotting out the oak trees across the road and even the rose bushes with their last buds in the front garden. It was not a tempting world to look out upon – bleak and wintry and dark – but I opened the door. And there, to my complete amazement, lay on the front doorstep, covering its entire length, the most beautiful bouquet of garden flowers that I had ever seen. At the heart of it were the deepest of velvety red roses, the flowers I most love, and all around were flame, cream and golden roses, delicate ferns, and every variety of Michaelmas daisies, from the deep blue and purple varieties to the tiniest of white fairy-like clusters. A profound joy and thankfulness filled my being and I bent down and picked up the flowers and carried them into the house.³²

As a postscript, she adds that this dream ‘had such an extra-ordinary vividness that I felt impelled to go downstairs and to open the door just as I had done in the dream and to look at the doorstep where the flowers had been lying.’ We can sense how the coloured light held in the flowers, set against the grey backdrop, has healing properties for the dreamer. If this were your dream, I would invite you to paint or buy a similar bouquet or to plant flowers that remind you of the encouragement the dream imparted.

Another woman, who happens to be a minister of a church, related to me how she often dreams of being enveloped in luminous, pastel flowers that revive her and refuel her with the energy she needs for her ministry. The colours in her dream-flowers – soft lavender, yellow, pink and blue – touched her in a very literal and purposeful way. Such dream experiences call to mind a teaching from the 18th-century writer and minister George MacDonald: ‘The idea of God is the flower.’³³ In even more essential terms, ‘The idea of God is the colour.’ Colours highlight the extraordinariness of the ‘everyday’ if we could but notice them.

Blue takes its rightful place in the rainbow, where colours exist in harmony and balance. No colour or quality dominates, yet we intuitively sense the distinct qualities and the relationships they share. Similarly, colours displayed in the round on the artist’s ‘colour wheel’ intimate an underlying organisation and imaginative power in their harmonious inter-relationships.

In the colour wheel, blue has a primary relationship to red and yellow. From mixing these three, we get the so-called secondary colours of violet, green and orange. The mixing of two colours reconciles opposites into a new synthesis: out of two colours a new one arises. Contemplating the interplay of chromatic energy of the colour wheel, the artist Paul Klee describes ‘motion’ as unnecessary because ‘there is no question “to move there” but to be “everywhere” and consequently, also “there”.’³⁴ The colour wheel illuminates unity in multiplicity as the varying colours emerge out of one source: light.

Keeping in mind the development of colours on the colour wheel, we can reflect upon the composition of the colours that appear in our dreams, the qualities they bring to us and how these speak to our needs and nature. I recall a dream of mine in which a group of workers load up boxes of what appear to be coloured markers or crayons in preparation for a conference. One of the men sees me and says to his co-workers jokingly, ‘You won’t be able to hold onto your crayons with all the colours she has in her dreams!’ Although the sky-blue crayon has been especially meaningful to me since childhood, each of the colours in a box of crayons holds its own magic and meaning.

As we continue to explore the world of dreams, we will revisit the nature of colours, light and darkness. But before we move on, take a moment to let a colour from one of your own dreams – your own ‘box of crayons’ – reappear in your mind’s eye. Allow yourself to engage with the colour and notice its qualities, where you sense the colour in your body, how it moves you emotionally or inspires you intellectually, and how it touches your heart. Think of the colour as the language of your soul.³⁵

Find an object, like my lapis lazuli stone, that mirrors this dream-colour and display it in your home as a reminder of what the colour means to you. Through colours, we witness the ‘Presence of the Imagination’³⁶ coming alive in the world, just as in our dreams. As Goethe’s Faust proclaims, we find life in the ‘many-hued reflected splendour’ of light.³⁷ Illuminated by the light of the imagination, colours truly become ‘acts of light’,³⁸ as they imbue us with their wonderous hues and mysterious qualities of Being.