The sky is vivid blue and the sun burns hot and yellow. The horse is flying. The flying horse soars beyond rust-brown dirt roads and gardens of red and orange flowers and sunflowers, over green hills and streams edged with trees in full leaf. The horse flies effortlessly. Cold air brushes past my cheeks and the flanks of the horse. I feel power in my legs. Sometimes there are feathered wings on the horse. Sometimes I am the horse. My own muscled wings carry me through the air.

It is my favorite dream.

When my husband and I are having a good time, I am smiling. My eyes are half-closed. He asks me what I am thinking, and I grin and close my lids and tell him I am thinking of colors. Red and orange, shocking pink with juicy slices of chartreuse and violet, deep indigo and amber flicker in my mind’s eye. The riot of hues shift and splinter and recreate new tessellations in the darkness. Joy is these brilliant colors.

I come back to certain combinations in my work again and again. Purples with olive and sage green; maroon with shocking pink and acid yellows and greens; pinks with orange and a slice of turquoise; soft gray with plum and black. I cut the colors in fabric. I weave the colors, and my pleasure in the patterns on my loom comes through sight and touch and juxtaposition. These are my personal choices. The world has others. Each year, a panel of experts get together to select colors that will show up on fashion runways and upholstery and even toys and paint chips. Color changes—gray replaces brown replaces navy as neutrals in suits and shoes. But this is marketing, not my real life. [For 2018, the color of the year was ultra violet.]

My memories are stored in color. The pale blue walls of my dying father’s hospital room, the faint color in the sky outside my mother’s, and in happier times the red embroidery of my wedding dress, the way the light glinted gold off my husband’s hair on the day we married. Sunlight tinted by the blood in my eyelids.

I see color the way a musician hears tones. And I have favorites the way some mathematicians are fond of primes.

As an artist, I was trained to use a color wheel with evenly spaced primary colors: red, blue, and yellow, secondary colors set in between each, and to divide the cool colors (green/blue/violet) on one side and warm colors (yellow/orange/red) opposite. Complementary colors are opposite one another and work well side by side—green and red, blue and orange, and yellow and violet. Mixed together, complements blue and orange or purple and yellow or red and green make mud.

In four-color process, used to print most colored images on paper or tin in the last hundred years and more, the full range of colors are a product of four colored inks: cyan (a cerulean blue), yellow, magenta, and black (CMYK). I was astonished that magenta and yellow could be combined to create red and orange, since magenta always reads as somewhat purple to me.

In light, this works differently. Light waves are generally arranged in a rainbow line, long red waves of light at one end and shortest violet at the other. Combining colored light, on the other hand, uses just three colors: red, green, and blue (RGB). The colors of light do not mix like pigment. Unlike paint on a palette, red light and green light make yellow . . . not mud. In fact, the “secondary colors” of light are the primary yellow, cyan, and magenta of four-color process, with black the fourth hue and an absence of light. The light from a magenta and a yellow spotlight overlap to produce pure pink, rather than the orange from a laser printer or my paintbrush.

The way light works is interesting, but it barely makes sense to me. Give me a paintbrush and a box of watercolor and I will sigh in relief. Most of us learn about mixing colors with paint, not in a lab or a theater. My experience mixing colors began when I was four in Kindergarten, standing before an easel with emptied frozen juice cans refilled with poster paints. When my yellow sun dripped down my page across the blue sky, it left a trail of green. That is how I understood mixing paint to make new colors.

There is a lot more to color than this. We make color in our imagination. I associate color in a far more personal way. Some colors make me smile, some make me reach to touch. Colors seem rich or flat or boring or lush because of associations I have with each. The colors we “like” may be influenced by early experiences—the mean aunt in a yellow dress may condition us to distrust yellow. The kind aunt with auburn hair may create a soft spot for redheads. But what may be universal is our perception of the color around us and this is reflected by our unconscious reactions. Companies have spent millions researching how the color affects sales of novels, how much we eat in a restaurant, and whether babies are calm in their rooms (metallics, red, and not yellow).

Some colors have very different impact depending on culture. Red is often portrayed as a threatening color in the west, a danger sign. Think of stop signs, blood, the stained teeth of vampires. A recent study of students about to take an exam found that looking at red before an exam consistently led to scores about 20% lower. This was an American study. In China, red is the color of happiness and good fortune. Perhaps in China, red would improve scores. Perhaps this is not biology but mostly culture.

My flying dream is aglow with color. It is the pure truth. Even in my dreams, it is the colors as much as the events that warm me. Only in the bad times, the bad dreams at night or in the day, during the times of death and loss and disappointment, there is less color.

Depressed people are sometimes said to feel blue, and the Blues in music are rich and beautiful, but not cheery. How we see color varies not only on where and when we live, but also according to our mood. Designers have long understood that color impacts mood, that the colors we see can impact our comfort. More interesting, perhaps, recent research suggests our mood influences our perception of color. That is, we have long assumed that color impacts how we feel, but how we feel impacts the color we are able to see.

People shown a sad film and then a field of colors are less able to distinguish between purple and yellow tints. This suggests color works two ways on our emotions, both as cause and result. The color we see may enhance or depress our mood and our mood may impact what we “see”. Should this be surprising to anyone? We see the world as sunny and bright when we are happy, and we call it gray when we are sad. This may be a literal truth.

Most people today report that they dream in color. Overall, a few people claim they dream only in black and white and shades of gray, and this is way down from surveys conducted in the past that showed many people dream in black and white. One theory is that whether people dream in color in influenced by the media they have seen. People raised in the time of black and white movies and television, for example, are likely to report dreaming in black and white. But some people also claim they do not dream at all, and we know that just is not true. Everyone dreams, only some of us do not remember. Woken in the middle of dream sleep, most dreamers report soft, pastel colors, but a few recall specific colors in their dreams when they wake on their own. Those are generally people with lives connected to color in a significant way. This still does not answer the question about dreaming in black and white. Maybe some of us simply forget the color in our dreams.

Everyone dreams, beginning even before we are born, but adult dreams are constructed from experience. Those always blind experience intense auditory dreams, but for the rest of us dreams are richly visual. People who have been colorblind from birth have no color in their memories from which to build dream images. They dream in black and white or whatever limited colors they experience when awake. What we recall from our dreams is impacted by how we live and the colors we have learned to accept in daytime images. We dream what we know.

A government-funded study found the most common dreams are “being chased, falling, flying, failing an examination, being unable to find a toilet or restroom.” I have had that last dream about the search for a toilet when I needed to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. But how is it that some of us understand enough about flight to dream of it, even without setting foot on a plane? I can not say, though I have had those dreams since childhood. How we perceive color is impacted by surroundings including the lighting and other colors, and also by mood and culture and experience.

My phantom dreamtime horse is no particular color, not even when I am the horse, because I am not looking at myself when I fly. I cannot see myself, only the rushing landscape. I feel the stretch of muscle and tendon. I see the fields and hills below, intensely colored. The rich green landscape, the bright sky, the stony mountains rising purple and black and white with snow, the air cold and sparkling alive! It is my favorite dream. When I am most happy, the world glows with color. And I get to fly.