Aura
Category: Spiritual
The colors of the aura: the traditional table and its limits
Spiritual traditions assign a different meaning to each color of the aura. Red stands for vitality, passion, and anger; orange for creativity and sociability; yellow for intellect and optimism; green for healing, growth, and envy; blue for calm and communication; violet for spirituality and intuition; white for purity and higher consciousness. The table shifts from one culture and one school to the next, though, and no unified standard exists. That the same green is assigned to healing and to envy says a great deal about the nature of the system. When you see an aura of a particular color in a dream, what that color calls up for you personally matters more than any dictionary meaning. Add one line to your notes about what you felt on seeing it. When you read the entry back later, that line will be a firmer clue than the table.
Migraine aura and spiritual aura: one name, two different things
As a medical term, aura refers to the neurological symptoms that appear before a migraine attack. The best known is the scintillating scotoma: a jagged ring of light appears in part of the visual field and spreads over 15 to 30 minutes. It arises when an electrical wave called cortical spreading depression (CSD) passes across the visual cortex. People who get migraine auras sometimes mistake that experience of seeing light for a spiritual aura. If rings of light or patches of color appear as you fall asleep, ruling out a neurological cause comes first. When a scintillating scotoma without headache keeps recurring, when a gap in the visual field lingers, or when speech also becomes difficult, set the subject of dreams and spirituality aside and see an eye doctor or a neurologist.
How a dream of seeing an aura gets read
Seeing a person's aura in a dream is read as a reflection of how sharply you register other people. A dream in which someone is wrapped in a dark aura may be unconscious wariness or distrust toward that person taking shape. A bright, shining aura is read as trust or affection toward them, or as a fullness in your own mind. What you want to check before the color itself, though, is how you felt while you were looking at that light. Whether the dark color frightened you or made you feel sorry for the person turns the reading around. Rather than looking the dream color up in a dictionary, write the three things down side by side: the color, the person, and what you felt at that moment. Do that and you'll also notice whether the same person keeps returning.
What a Kirlian photograph actually captures
The high-voltage photographic technique the Kirlians developed in the Soviet Union in 1939 records patterns of luminous discharge around an object. It spread as "scientific proof of the aura," but what it captures is corona discharge, a physical phenomenon and nothing more. The discharge pattern changes with humidity, pressure, voltage, and the water content of the subject, and it has no bearing on emotion or spiritual state. The phantom leaf effect, in which the whole pattern is said to remain after part of a leaf is cut away, also reproduces poorly, and residual moisture is the stronger explanation. Services advertising aura photography can be found in plenty of places, but the image handed to you pictures an electrical discharge; it is not evidence that an aura exists. If someone shows you one, remember that touching the electrode with a damp hand is enough on its own to change the picture.
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