Colour in dreams and in spelling.
I recently asked my newsletter subscribers for topics they would like me to address in future blogs. Rebecca, from Minnesota, USA, suggested colour in dreams.
Being American, Rebecca didn’t ask about ‘colour’ though, she asked about ‘color’. I’m delighted to bring you my offering about colour in dreams, interwoven, as it turns out, with a story about spelling.
Last night, I dreamed …
I was getting ready to go for a run. I was all set to go, bar putting on my running socks and shoes. The shoes were lined up, and there was a big pile of random socks. I delved into the sock pile, put on one sock, delved in again, and put on the second sock only to find they were different colours. It seemed necessary to wear a matching pair, so I kept taking one sock off, delving in again, mismatching again, and so on until eventually I was wearing identical socks. The final colour didn’t bother me; it was the matching that was important. Happy with a matching pair at last – white trimmed with a pale lime green – I woke up, ready to start my day.
I had been contemplating writing this blog before I fell asleep, so on one level my dreaming mind obliged by processing my thoughts and delivering a dream about colour.
On another level, I know this dream is about spelling. Let me explain:
My new book, yet to be published, has just been beautifully edited, polished, and converted into American English. The finished product was delivered to me three days ago, and I have been very much immersed in reading it through. While I am completely ready and excited to run with this book being published in American English instead of British English, it still feels weird seeing my words, my turns of phrases, my expressions, etched in what every fibre of my being sees as incorrect spelling.
Throughout school and university in England and Scotland, we were expected to write in British English. American spellings were always ‘corrected’. I imagine that this might be different today, with globalisation – or globalization.
Whether it’s a book or a blog that I’m writing, my quandary is that more than half of my readers and clients are American. So do I write about color for my majority readers, or do I write about colour because of my cultural background?
You might think this is academic, after all, we all know what colour or color means, and most of my readers know I’m British by birth. Maybe it doesn’t matter. But it’s in my bones. What a quandary!
Business-wise the quandary is compounded by Google. If I use the word colour in a blog title, will it come up for people Googling for color, or only for people Googling for colour? Should my choice of spelling be guided by my majority market? Google algorithms change, so the answer is hard to predict.
Yes, I will get on to the subject of colour in dreams!
So, back to my mismatching socks dream of last night. When I looked at my whole dream I realised – or realized – that the mismatched socks symbolised my spelling quandaries. How important is it for my spelling to match my readers? How important is it for my spelling to match my cultural origins? I’m totally ready to move ahead once I get the match right, and it appears, from the dream, that I’m happy to go ahead with the matching pale lime green.
So what does this colour symbolise for me?
As with all dreams, our symbols are unique and personal. My job – as a dreamer and dream analyst – is to work out what any particular symbol represents for the dreamer of that particular dream.
I think of lime, the fruit, as being refreshing. I closed my eyes and visualised the colour from my dream, then asked the colour for its name. “Fresh mint,” it replied, immediately. Logically, I would see mint as a darker colour than lime, but this little symbol-busting technique is generally accurate. I laughed. My book will be newly ‘minted’, off the press sooner rather than later, I hope! And it will be fresh, in content, approach, message. It’s time for me to let go of my quandaries around spelling and focus on the content of the book itself. I can run with that!
I’ve partly answered Rebecca’s question. Now let’s explore more about colour in dreams:
Rebecca said, “I know color symbolism varies by culture and that each symbol needs to be interpreted by the dreamer. You very often add possible insights about color when it has strongly been represented in a dream to the dreamer on your Dream Show, but I thought a blog about color could be helpful and enlightening.”
She is right. If you notice a stand out colour in your dream, a good place to begin is to look for your own cultural associations.
I find, on The Dream Show and with clients, that dream colours often equate to the symbolism of chakra colours, since yoga and an understanding of chakras is pretty much mainstream for so many of us across various cultures these days. If you’re familiar with the chakras, and you dream of yellow, for example, you might equate this with the third chakra, with personal power, or whatever you, personally, associate with third chakra symbolism.
But don’t leave it there. Ask yourself what yellow (in this example) means to you. You might come up with sunshine, hope, spring (daffodils); it might be a colour you love to wear, or hate to wear, a colour that is authentically you, or absolutely not you. Contemplation might take you back to school, where, perhaps, your sporting colours were yellow, or your bedroom walls were painted yellow. It might take you back to a memory of being a toddler and being reprimanded for scribbling on the walls with yellow pencils.
Contemplate the colour until one particular association feels right. At this point you’ll often notice that the association fits in with the theme of the dream.
Most of us dream in colour, in the same way that we experience colour in our every day lives. The colours worth exploring in your dreams are the stand out or vivid colours, those that seem to be reaching out for your attention.
Shades of colour are important. I was recently helping a client explore a dream where she was given a pink item of clothing. Pink in general was a colour she didn’t like, but the particular shade of pink in her dream engendered a positive, warm, and supportive feeling that provided a solid clue for the interpretation. It’s not enough to draw up a list of personal colour meanings: red means this, blue means that. The shades and subtleties are meaningful. Like my lime green (fresh mint) running socks.
A final tip, when looking for the meaning of a colour in your dream, is to close your eyes and immerse yourself in the colour. What is the personality of the colour? If someone wore this colour, what would you feel it said about them? What kind of person would choose this colour? If this colour had an intention, what would it be? It was your unconscious mind that came up with the colour in the dream, so give that unconscious mind time, space, and freedom to speak to you.
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