The Subconscious Nature of Indigo
10 min. read | Subconscious Nature | Color Psychology | Creativity
Explore indigo's unique territory as the threshold between outer and inner sight, and discover how hypnosis can help you access the kind of perception that only emerges when daylight thinking dims. Hop in the deep end and learn what this color of intuition and the "third eye" reveals about true clarity and shifting perspectives for clearer seeing.
You may think indigo doesn’t exist as a distinct color- it's just kind of dark blue, right? But Newton insisted it deserved its own place in the spectrum. Indigo is this narrow, in-between twilight band - the color where outer sight yields to inner perception. And the subconscious nature of indigo reveals something essential about how inner clarity works: that the clearest seeing often arrives when we stop straining for certainty and allow our perspective to shift inward.
Many languages historically lacked a separate term for indigo. Appearing as a very deep shade of blue, like midnight sky, or blue-violet like an iris - indigo barely exists as a distinct color. Many argue it shouldn't be considered a spectral color at all, designating cyan and blue to the spectrum rather than Newton’s blue and indigo. Historians note Newton's seven-color spectrum likely reflected his search for cosmic harmony, matching colors with seven musical notes, seven celestial bodies, etc.
Whether or not you recognize it in the rainbow, indigo does reveal itself every day in the liminal spaces between day and night. The late dusk and early dawn skies are indigo, and those ‘indigo’ times of day are precisely the points when a whole universe of stars can blink in or out of our visibility and conscious perception, adding to this color’s shape-shifting persona.
In other contexts, indigo asserts itself with more stability and gravitas as navy blue - dress uniforms, business suits, diplomatic attire, etc. This is where indigo takes blue’s calm and trusting nature a few shades deeper, imparting a sharper sense of authority, duty, and responsibility, perhaps even wisdom.
But if the ocean that we see is blue, the deeper waters that we don’t see are indigo, more shaded from the light of the sun. The correspondence here, of course, is the deeper layers of our consciousness - our deeper intelligence, our inner but no-less-direct experience of the world that’s just more shaded from the ‘light’ of the thinking mind and conscious awareness.
This distinctly deep color of indigo persists in our consciousness and occupies a unique psychological space: the threshold between seen and unseen, between conscious clarity and subconscious knowing. It’s a threshold color we can hardly perceive that represents clearer perception beyond ordinary sight - an irresistible paradox!
We associate indigo with the "third eye," with intuition, and with the kind of sight that happens behind closed eyelids. This go-between color has come to symbolize inner vision itself - a perfect lens for examining how inner clarity emerges when we adjust our mode of ‘seeing’.
Indigo Dissolves Boundaries & Awakens Clear Seeing
Indigo is ambiguous, transitional, elusive, existing at the edge of perceptibility. Some say it’s a band between 445-450 nm, while others are more generous with a broader range of 420-450 nm - it has no clear boundaries. And we have no distinct "indigo receptor" either. As the color of twilight, our sensory experience of indigo often emerges from combined neural signals, not a single, tidy input (it’s the relative activity across S, M, and L cones and the blue-yellow opponent channel, along with mesopic rod input that shapes perception as light levels fall). In other words, indigo is literally a threshold experience, even in the visual system.
The word comes from the Greek indikon -“from India” where the precious dye was cultivated. In early modern Europe, indigo was nicknamed “blue gold” and commanded extraordinary prices. Creating it required the patient fermentation of Indigofera tinctoria leaves: green plant matter transformed into deep blue dye liquid.
Liminal indigo represents transformation, and indigo dyeing, in and of itself, a richly symbolic transformative process. The indigo dye bath itself is the threshold, and when fabric is lifted out of the inky liquid, oxygen exposure changes the cloth from yellow-green to deep indigo before your eyes. Repeated for centuries, that moment teaches a durable lesson: that in order for seeing to become clearer and for truths to become more visible, you have to cross the threshold and submerge yourself in the transformative process of awakening (sometimes again and again).
As the threshold between blue and violet, indigo also represents the threshold of our outer interpretations of reality and the direct experience of reality as it is. It’s like a threshold between mind and soul, between outer sight and inner vision. If blue represents the calm mind and violet our cosmic connection, indigo is the twilight passage and inner experience between those two stages - where thinking yields to deep inner knowing, where individual consciousness clearly recognizes itself as universal awareness.
Inner Sight, Divine Mystery & Consciousness Across Cultures & Symbol Systems
Indigo consistently appears in contexts of expanded perception and mystical sight, from ancient spiritual traditions to modern consciousness movements. In Hindu traditions, Krishna's skin is often described as śyāma - not bright sky blue but deep blue-black, dark like thunder clouds or the vast night sky. The color signals magnetic depth and divine mystery: truth that invites you inward rather than dazzling you at the surface. Śyāma sits closer to indigo's night sky clarity than to bright daytime blue, a sacred invitation to look deeper within to find true clarity.
The chakra system popularized in the West* links indigo to ajna, the "third eye" center between the eyebrows. When balanced, this center supports clear inner vision, intuition, and perception beyond physical senses. When blocked, it manifests as confusion between imagination and intuition, or inability to trust your own perceptions.
(*Worth noting: There's no single authoritative ancient chakra system - the original Tantric sources describe many different systems with 5, 6, 7, 9, 10+ chakras. The now familiar seven-chakra model comes from one 16th-century Sanskrit text, badly translated in 1918, then appropriated and overlaid with Western psychological, occult, 'New Age,' and yes, color associations that have zero basis in the original traditions. This doesn't make it useless - these modern interpretations still shape some of our subconscious associations with colors, whether historically accurate or not. See Christopher Wallis' clarifying deep dive.)
In various Egyptian burial practices, blue dyes appeared in wrappings and artifacts, suggesting cultural associations between deep blue hues and the journey through the afterlife - though specific symbolic interpretations remain scholarly speculation rather than documented belief.
Japanese aizome (indigo dyeing) traditions associate the color with purification and protection. Samurai wore indigo-dyed garments under their armor, believing the fabric offered spiritual and practical protection. Modern science has validated one aspect of this belief - indigo-dyed fabric does demonstrate antimicrobial properties, showing how intuitive practices sometimes align with empirical reality.
Across cultures, the depth of indigo becomes the message. The Tuareg people of the Sahara wear indigo-dyed veils so saturated that the dye transfers to their skin, marking them with their wealth and wisdom - the deeper the indigo staining, the higher the status. This is indigo literally transforming how people perceive others, the color's depth becoming a visible marker of invisible qualities.
Among the Yoruba of West Africa, the darkest indigo cloth - achieved through patient, repeated dipping - holds the highest value. The indigo dyeing process requires specialized expertise, with master dyers, often women, holding significant social status. The depth of color directly correlates with the skill and patience required to create it. Here again, indigo's value lies in its intensity - the darker the blue, the more it reveals about the dedication invested in its creation.
The 1970s-1990s "Indigo Children" phenomenon, while lacking scientific support, reveals our collective association between indigo and perception that doesn't fit conventional frameworks. The cultural resonance of this concept - children credited with expanded awareness and strong intuitive abilities - points to indigo as the color we assign to ways of knowing that transcend ordinary sight.
How Indigo Moves Through the Subconscious
Your subconscious associates indigo with between-times: late dusk, early dawn, the moments when ordinary rules of perception shift. These transitions activate deep evolutionary programming about when to transition from external vigilance to internal processing, from doing to being, from searching to receiving.
As light dims, vision shifts from predominantly cone-based (color/detail) toward rod-supported sensitivity - a mesopic zone where both systems contribute. In this twilight state, your visual system is operating between two modes of perception. When you see indigo manifesting in nature as twilight sky, deep shadows, distant mountains at dusk, you're experiencing these mesopic conditions where the modes of perception change.
In evening light, the spectrum shifts and reduced short-wavelength stimulation releases the brake on melatonin production, ushering in hypnagogic, insight-friendly states. The subjective felt sense of indigo often coincides with this liminal physiology - alert and relaxed, focused and receptive.
The consistent use of indigo in contemplative traditions across cultures also suggests a recognized relationship between this color and altered states of awareness, whether through neurological mechanism or cultural conditioning.
Indigo's elusive, transitional nature isn't just conceptual - it's neurological. The Abney effect demonstrates that adding even small amounts of white light makes colors shift their apparent hue. Indigo’s already a little shifty, so what seems like deep blue at one light level slides more violet in other light. This perceptual instability is an interesting feature of indigo, teaching us that seeing something more clearly for what it is requires us to completely shift our perspective and/or mode of perception to allow the fuller view to emerge.
What Indigo Subconsciously Asks Us
Indigo's psychological territory centers on perception itself - not just what you see, but how you see and what you do with that seeing. While other colors activate content about feeling or action, indigo raises questions about the nature of clarity, knowing, and the responsibility that comes with deeper insight. On a subconscious level, indigo seems to remind us that with clearer vision comes the responsibility of acting on what we perceive and the truths that becomes more clear.
These are some of the questions indigo might whisper to your subconscious to reveal this dual nature of insight and responsibility:
What truth have you glimpsed but avoided acting upon?
Where does the fear of seeing clearly protect you from the responsibility of knowing?
What would you have to change if you admitted what you already know at deeper levels?
How long have you pretended not to see what requires your action?
Where have you chosen comfortable confusion over inconvenient clarity?
What inner knowing have you been dismissing as "just intuition"?
If you trusted your deepest perception, what duty would that create?
What becomes possible when you stop doubting what you see in moments of stillness?
Think of a moment when you knew exactly what needed to be done but hesitated—what was the cost of not trusting that inner clarity?
These questions reveal indigo's core teaching: profound clarity more often emerges not from the bright illumination of thought and reason, but from receptive inner awareness - and with that clarity comes the responsibility to honor what we've seen.
The Subconscious Wisdom of Indigo
Picture the clearest blue sky you've ever seen - that perfect daylight clarity where everything seems visible, everything clear. Now watch the sun set, blue deepening through indigo into night. Notice how that perfectly clear blue sky was actually not clear at all, but blocked the infinite space and stars and galaxies beyond it. The stars don’t emerge - they are always there, and you need to change your mode of perception and let the interference fall away to see them.
Indigo teaches that clarity has layers. What seems perfectly clear in daylight - that blue sky, those obvious facts - represents just the first level. When the sun sets and your eyes adjust, an entirely different order emerges: infinite stars that were always there, patterns that were always present, connections invisible in the glare.
This mirrors how deep insight and awakening works. Thoughts, like sunlight lighting up the sky, are powerful signals. They’re louder and often drown out our deeper intelligence. My hypnosis clients often report breakthroughs happening not during, or because of intense analysis, but in mentally relaxed moments afterward - in the shower, on a walk, in meditation/self-hypnosis practice, just before sleep. "I stopped trying to figure it out and suddenly knew" describes this indigo-inspired consciousness in action: that threshold where the thinking mind’s volume gets turned down enough to reveal the answer or connect with truth.
10th-century Kashmir Shaivite philosopher Abhinavagupta described awakening as a fundamental shift in perspective where "ignorance falls away and truth is automatically revealed." As Christopher Wallis explains this path to awakening: there's nothing that needs to be added - learned, thought, or believed. The goal is simply whatever allows ignorance and delusion to fall away, revealing non-conceptual reality as it is (before all our thoughts and beliefs drown it out). Indigo’s wisdom echoes this: clear seeing emerges from letting your perspective and mode of perception change, to let the glare of thought quiet down, to remove interference, so the deeper reality that was always present can reveal itself.
Wallis likens this clear seeing to looking out through a window to scene beyond, when suddenly your eyes refocus on the pane of glass itself and you see your reflection - recognizing the true nature of what was always there, but overlooked. Like the blue daytime sky that seems perfectly clear until it darkens to reveal stars, the very medium through which we've been looking hides layers we haven't consciously noticed.
When this recognition finally arrives, Wallis notes, "there's both wonder and relaxation. The straining is done, the striving is done." And here's what distinguishes this kind of clarity from sophisticated mental models: "The clear seeing is self-validating. Without any insistence, without any mental conceptualization, it's just a quiet, calm, clear seeing that is thoroughly self-validating. There's a knowing - this is it - without the thought that this is it."
But this is part of the paradox that indigo embodies: in the perceived near-darkness of the preconscious lies the clearest seeing. Sometimes no thought - the absence of the light of reason - yields the deepest clarity. As Christopher Wallis puts it, "There's no doubt possible and no belief needed in clear seeing."
That’s why this bridged awareness presence, this indigo-style clear seeing, can't be manufactured through mental efforting or conscious analysis. It emerges in that twilight space where, as ignorance falls away and truth is automatically revealed by allowing your perception to adjust to what was always already there.
Part of indigo's paradox is that it both darkens and illuminates. This liminal space between blue's calm mind and violet's cosmic connection is where revelations happen. Some of humanity's richest creations weren't consciously constructed - they were revealed. From Kekulé's benzene ring appearing in a dream, to Einstein's insights arriving during walks, our deepest breakthroughs emerge from this indigo territory between waking analysis and unconscious knowing. The clear seeing that indigo promotes is often revelatory, like those first stars appearing only as the light fades away at nightfall.
Notice indigo tonight at twilight - that brief moment when the sky holds both day's last blue and night's first violet. It lasts mere minutes, this threshold where one way of seeing yields to another. When you do, allow your thinking mind to calm - you may notice a star - or an insight - appear.
Discovering Clarity Within Inner Vision
Full clarity requires both day vision and night vision, so to speak - both outer sight and inner perception. In hypnosis, we don't abandon logic or reject evidence; we create conditions where deep inner knowing and clear seeing can inform how we think and feel and behave, and reveal truths that surface only through crossing that inward-looking threshold.
With hypnosis, you can develop your own personal anchor for this state of integrated clarity - one you can access whenever you need to shift your way of seeing something. Every time you notice indigo in your daily life, it can remind you: there's another way to see this, another layer of clarity available.
Contact me to access The Clarity Code, functional hypnosis audio that explores this Higher State experientially.
Trust Your Inner Sight
Indigo suggests that awareness expands in the half-light - when effort loosens and attention moves inward. We don't always need more light to see clearly; we sometimes need better dark. We don’t always need more thinking noise to figure it out; we sometimes need better quiet. When we let the blue sky deepen several shades, strip the glare of thinking away, we can get clearer on what was there all along.
The next time you find yourself straining to see something clearly - whether it's a decision, a pattern, a solution you’re seeking - remember indigo's teaching. Sometimes the harder you look, the more you rely on thinking, the less you see. Sometimes clarity comes not from adding more information, but from shifting into an entirely different kind of perceiving and knowing. Indigo also reminds us that the stars don't actually disappear at dawn - we just stop seeing them. So perhaps what we call clarity is simply remembering how to see differently.
If you're ready to explore what becomes visible when you trust your inner sight as much as your outer vision, book your free consultation here. Together, we'll discover how hypnosis can help you access your deeper clarity naturally.
