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Other articles by Dorian Paul Colors in dreams - Jungs Archetypes - Music

THE PRIMORDEAL COLORS by Dorian Paul

When you ask what colours mean in dreams, I feel it is important to ask yourself "what do colours mean concerning my real life and why are they important there?" Everyone I know seems to have a favorite colour; Do you?

Well some dream dictionaries give clue to what colours mean by combining a collection of opinions and uses of colours in history and in our culture. But what about your favorite colour? What does it mean in the collective culture? Most importantly is it found often in your dreams? If so, maybe you are "decorating" to suit your needs within a world you create. Nothing wrong with that, it is a powerful impression, to be surrounded by your favorite colours.

Every dream dictionary has basic color meanings. Basically these can sound very likely but they also sound a bit like generic Aura colour readings too, you know red for mad and so on... take the ones below from the Cleopatra dream dictionary

BLACK : "hate and dark emotions / mysterious and unknown forces"
BLACK : "dark mood"
BLACKNESS : "feeling empty - nothing left"
BLACK AND WHITE : "clear understanding"
BLUE : "feeling depressed"
BLUE : "raunchy"
BLUE : "spiritual energy"
BROWN: "grounded in the real world - earthly"
BROWN : "dark dusty environment"
BURGUNDY : "rich and creative color"
COLOR : "bright colors mean enlightenment and hope"
COLOR : "distinctive characteristics"
EARTH : "great mother comfort"
GOLD : "seek pure golden thought"
GOLD : "the very best"
GREEN : "green with envy"
GREEN : "health growth vitality and happiness"
GREEN : "the color of nature and new growth"
GREEN : "The color of Islam"
GREEN : "inexperienced"
MAROON : "abandon"
OLIVE : "southern lands"
ORANGE : "warmth and harmoney"
PINK : "love and emotion"
RED : "danger, passion, sexual energy "
RED : "passion"
RED : "pun on read"
ROSE : "girly and feminine"
YELLOW : "cowardice"
YELLOW : "happy and sunny disposition"
WHITE : "positive emotions such as peace, happiness, purity, honesty / spiritual purity and innocence"
WHITE : "clearness clarity and understanding"
WHITE : "purity / white people / white supremacy?"

Dreams and dreamers and colour perception in real life, are all unique. There are as many types of perceptions of colour as there are terms and ways to use them, combine this with the differences between dreamers and you kind of get an idea that colour and dreams are almost certainly catered to the individual.

In our visually oriented world, we are becoming more and more a collective bunch of people who dream in colour.

Quite a few years ago, if I were to ask the question about dreams and colour to a "dream expert" in the field of psychology (which I did once when I was a kid) I would get an answer about the fact that we don't really dream in colour, we just think we do, and add colour as an "after the fact" kind of thing, sort of like a child watching a black and white film is given the suggestion that something has a certain colour, and thus the child will often say they saw that colour on the film, even though the film was in black and white.

The truth of the matter is, in our dreams this can happen, where we are given suggestions of colours, however when we dream, our optical center of our brains can be stimulated by the dreaming process, and thus we are actually seeing things, and not just by suggestion. (This however doesn't account for the blind people who no longer have sight but recall a time in their lives when they did, especially when their sight for example was lost due to some type of optical failure within the brain itself) So in turn we are in fact "seeing" colour, if we happen to dream that way.

Black, White and Red These are the primal colour terms. The more "primitive" tribal peoples in the world usually started out from the beginning with these colours.

In linguistic terms anthropologists say every culture that there has ever been has started off two with the terms in describing colours. Those first terms are Black and White or Dark and Light.

Some very primitive tribes found in New Guinea, have absolutely no word for "Green" if you can believe it, perhaps it's due to the fact that "green things" are everywhere to be found in their lives, and so they would related it to the most basic terms of dark and light, as to ignore any special significance to that very common colour. They do however have a term for "Red" as it is not very common, and means much to them in their spiritual as well as daily lives.

Think about these colours as a dream theme? what would it mean if you thought these three colours stood out as being a theme in a dream you have just had? We can look at a black and white dream for a person who dreams mostly in vivid colours as a strange sign something is not quite as reality or perhaps too harsh, but what if there was Red involved as the only colour that really seemed to stand out. In Jungian terms I would see this as a layer of communication that can't be expressed with words. Something as primal as life itself, something basic and cultural on the most simple of levels.

When dealing with the combination take into account this idea that maybe you are dealing with the three things in life that are like a "holy trinity" of sorts: A kind of unspoken spirituality of the primal. Black and white being the crossing line for something and nothingness combined with red, being the life force. Thus, you delve into the story of creation.

This underlying story of creation could possibly be a kind of back drop for this dream story you have had, from the nothingness of white, or black comes the somethingness of black or white, as it is reversed in many cases. Red is however always taken as the human force of life, due to the idea of blood being red.

Sometimes the white represents maleness, the black femaleness or energies and then red being the blood of new life created. There are many combinations of these three, but they always have a creation them, even if it is on a slightly sexual basis rather than impersonal and universal. Its an interesting Primal, and sometimes Jungian theme to keep in mind when dealing with some dreams which have this simple colour theme.

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