Dreaming In Color

“I dream my paintings, and then I paint my dreams.”

Vincent Van Gogh

Welcome dreamers,

I had been thinking about the importance of color in dreams for a while.  However, when every dream that I recalled for the last two weeks had a significant spot of color, I knew that was a sign- fingers to the keyboard!  We don’t always notice whether or not we dream in color, unless something jumps out at us as we are writing or remembering the dream.  As we recall the dream, we may suddenly be struck by, (as I was last night) a very bright blue necklace.  This symbol has been gracing my dreams off and on for years, and I am still discovering it’s many layers of meaning.  Uncovering the significance of the colors in your dreams can add an important layer of emotional resonance that may otherwise be missed, or misinterpreted.

 Take a moment; close your eyes, and see this:  The feathery chartreuse yellow/green of new meadow grass tinged with whispy pink blossoms; like an Ansel Adams photograph, in soft focus.

See this: The brilliant blue stone about two inches long; a cross between a lapis and a turquoise, shimmering with the colors of both the Caribbean and the cobalt blue Adriatic seas, set in finely wrought silver filigree.

See this: The silver bullet of a plane, hard and metallic, leaving a trail of white herringbone streaks across the sky.

See this: The peering yellow eyes that pop out of the darkness; just the eyes, just the yellow, surrounding you, as you sit at your campfire in the dark forest.

The colors in our dreams add a dimension of emotional resonance, a layer of the creative muse, a focal point calling our attention: “Look at this!  Don’t miss this!”  When an otherwise nondescript color scheme in a dream suddenly pops with a notable splash of color, this splash is often pointing our attention to a central image in the dream.

Our brains are hard-wired to resonate emotionally with different colors.  The color red, which excites our autonomic nervous system, can fire us up with associations to danger, excitement, and/or passion.  The color blue calms the autonomic nervous system, and is associated with serenity, calm, peacefulness.  Robert Hoss, in his book Dream Language, points out that this all happens below the threshold of our awareness, yet has a profound affect on our emotional state.  In addition to some universal or instinctive responses to colors, we also have ingrained in our subconscious a whole set of cultural and personal associations to colors.  These come from our myths, our literature, our families, our language, our personal histories, our cultures.

 Therefore, paying attention to the colors in our dreams can not only add emotional richness to our understanding, but also significantly alter the meaning we make out of the dream.

 It can be fun and informative to make a color wheel of your personal color connections when you have color in your dream.  Write the color in the middle of a page, draw a circle around it, and then make spokes out from it like a child’s drawing of a sun.  Then, without censoring, or even thinking about your actual dream image, just write down your associations to the color itself.  For example, when I think of yellow, I make my circle and write the words canary, yellow-bellied (cowardice), cheerful, sunshine, the yellow brick road, bright, jaundiced.  I then go back to the image in the dream, and circle the ones that somehow seem related to this dream.  You can see how dreaming of a yellow sweater would have a very different significance if my associations were cheerful and bright, as opposed to cowardly or sickly.

What follows is an abridged version of the Luscher Color Association chart (a psychological profiling tool) and some common emotional responses (thanks again to Bob Hoss).  This is not meant to be a complete list; you can add your own associations.

 Red: active, aggressive, joy, passion, danger, power, hot, “stop”

Orange: friendly, warm, active, enthusiastic, autumn, harvest

Yellow: cheerful, spontaneous, alert, positive, prosperity, “caution”

Green: nature, youthfulness, spring, growth, money, safety, “go”

Blue: calm, serenity, fulfillment, tranquility, unity, tenderness

Violet: mystic union, sensitivity, high class, sensuality, luxury, magic

Brown: earth, comfort, warmth, roots

Grey: uncommitted, uninvolved, shielding of self

Black: evil, nothingness, extinction, our shadow side, formal, unknown

White: purity, innocence, peace, light, goodness, holiness

Pink: romantic, love, soft, gentleness

Gold/Silver: the sun and the moon, value, psychological integration, wealth

Back to that blue stone:  That stone has been following me around in my dreams for years, and it has become a touchstone (yes, pun intended); a mythic sorcerers stone; a connection to the breastplate of Aaron the high priest (Moses’ brother), with it’s 12 gemstones, that could be used to foretell the signs, and finally; to deep seas and deep emotions.  My “dream action” (from the blog of 10/1/12, the final step in Robert Moss’s Lighting Dream Work) lead me on a search for this stone.  I finally found it years after the original dream in the shuk in Jerusalem.  This was my first trip back in 27 years, after having lived there for 5 years in the late 70’s. With both the visit and finding the stone, I reclaimed a missing piece of myself.  So, color me blue: the “true blue” of unification of pieces of my life that had become separated.

Dream well,

Linda Yael