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.
Indigo might not exist - it's just dark blue, or almost violet, right? But Newton insisted it deserved its own place in the spectrum. This twilight band, the color where outer sight yields to inner perception, 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 is a transitional color that reveals itself every day in the liminal spaces between day and night - and that indigo late dusk sky and/or early dawn sky are precisely the points in time where the whole universe of stars can blink in or out of our visibility and conscious perception, adding to indigo’s shape-shifting persona.
In modern 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 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.
The 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 barely-there color has come to symbolize inner vision itself - a perfect lens for examining how inner clarity emerges when we shift our mode of ‘seeing’ entirely.
Indigo Dissolves Boundaries & Awakens Clear Seeing
Indigo is ambiguous and exists 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. The experience of indigo in nature 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.
Indigo as a color represents transformation, and indigo dyeing is, 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 dye, oxygen exposure shifts 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 become more visible, you have to cross the threshold into the transformative process of awakening (sometimes again and again).
As a bridge between blue and violet, indigo truly 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. 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, governing intuition and inner sight. When balanced, this center supports clear 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, indigo's depth itself 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 isn't merely decorative; it's indigo literally transforming how others perceive you, 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 not in its mere presence but 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 Your Subconscious Enters Indigo Before You Do
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 in nature - twilight sky, deep shadows, distant mountains at dusk - you're experiencing these mesopic conditions where the modes of perception shift.
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 yet yielding, focused yet receptive.
Indigo's elusiveness 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. Here, what seems like deep indigo at one light level slides toward blue or violet as light enters or exits. This perceptual instability is an interesting feature of indigo, teaching us that some forms of clarity require us to completely shift our perspective to allow them to emerge.
The consistent use of indigo in contemplative traditions across cultures suggests a recognized relationship between this color and altered states of awareness, whether through neurological mechanism or cultural conditioning.
The development of color discrimination follows predictable patterns, with the ability to distinguish subtle differences between blues and violets emerging only as visual and cognitive systems mature in children. This parallel development of perceptual and conceptual sophistication suggests that recognizing indigo as a distinct color involves both sensory and cognitive factors.
Your subconscious processes indigo as the color of those between-times: early dawn, late dusk, the moments when ordinary rules of perception shift. These transitions activate deep evolutionary programming about when to shift from external vigilance to internal processing, from doing to being, from searching to receiving.
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
Indigo teaches that clarity has layers. What seems perfectly clear in daylight - that clear blue sky, those obvious facts - represents just the first level. When the sun sets, the bright light dims, and your eyes adjust, an entirely different order emerges: infinite stars that were always there, patterns that were always present, connections that were invisible in the glare.
This mirrors how deep insight works. My clients often report breakthroughs happening not during intense analysis but in 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 indigo-inspired consciousness in action.
The 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 tradition: there's nothing that needs to be learned, thought, or believed - the goal is simply whatever allows ignorance and delusion to fall away, revealing non-conceptual reality that has nothing to do with belief or thought. This is indigo's wisdom precisely: clear seeing emerges not from adding light but from removing interference.
And here's the paradox that indigo embodies: in its inkiness, in its near-darkness, lies the clearest vision. As Christopher Wallis puts it, "There's no doubt possible and no belief needed in clear seeing."
As Wallis describes it, clear seeing is like looking through a window into a scene beyond, studying what's out there, when suddenly your eyes refocus on the pane of glass itself and you see your own reflection - recognizing what was always present but overlooked. This is indigo's revelation: sometimes what blocks our view of infinity (the window) is also what can reveal our true nature (the reflection). Like the blue daytime sky that seems perfectly clear until it darkens to reveal stars, the very medium through which we've been looking holds depths we haven't noticed.
When this recognition finally arrives, Wallis notes, "there's both wonder and relaxation. The straining is done, the striving is done." The physiological response itself confirms the seeing is real. And here's what distinguishes genuine 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."
This is why this indigo-tinged consciousness can't be manufactured through mental effort or conscious analysis. It emerges in that twilight space where, as ignorance falls away and truth is automatically revealed - not through adding light but through allowing your perception to adjust to what was always there, waiting in the darkness.
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.
Newton's controversial addition of indigo to the spectrum itself demonstrates this dual nature of perception. He saw a pattern (cosmic harmony) and trusted his inner vision enough to establish a new color category, literally changing how humanity sees the rainbow. Yet his decision also shows how subjective frameworks shape what we call objective reality.
Discovering Clarity Within Inner Vision
Picture the clearest blue sky you've ever seen - that perfect daylight clarity where everything seems obvious. Now watch the sun set, blue deepening through indigo into night. Notice how that perfectly clear blue sky was actually blocking infinite space and stars and galaxies beyond it. The stars don’t emerge - they were always there, but you needed to change your mode of perception to see them.
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 intuitive knowing can inform analytic thought, revealing truths that surface only through patient inner observation and crossing that threshold into more awakening and deeper insight.
With hypnosis, you can develop your own personal anchor for this state of integrated clarity - one you can access whenever you need to shift from surface seeing to depth perception. 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 perception ripens in the half-light - when effort loosens and attention becomes receptive. We don't always need more light; we sometimes need better dark. We don’t always need more thinking noise; we sometimes need better quiet. We need to let the blue sky deepen several shades to notice 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 less you see. Sometimes clarity comes not from adding more information but from shifting into an entirely different kind of perceiving and knowing. Indigo reminds us that the stars don't disappear at dawn - we just stop seeing them. 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 natural deep clarity - and integrated perception that honors both the daylight of consciousness and the starlight of deeper knowing.
