Today’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday (#SoCS) is “blue”. The idea is to write about the firsst blue object you see when sitting down to write your post. Well, I am blind, so I don’t see anything blue as I sit here to write. I could be writing about things I know to be blue. The sky is blue. The ocean is blue. Or at least, they’re both seen as blue due to the sun’s reflection on them, or something.
I could be writing about my sensory cat, the soft toy I got for my 31st birthday from my sister. I think the cat is blue. It is filled with lavender, which I know is kind of blue too.
How would I describe blue to a person who’s never seen it? I can, at least, having had color perception as a child, still imagine blue in my mind’s eye. Someone born totally blind can’t. I once wrote a post describing the color green to blind people on my old blog. This was a journaling prompt, just so you know that no actual blind person asked me to describe the color green. Which, I should say, I really can’t.
I mean, synesthesia may be able to help. Blue is a “cool” color. It is the color of the number three in my synesthetic perception. Then again, even with synesthesia, everyone’s perception is different, so that wouldn’t make sense.
Interestingly, there are no blue letters in the word “blue” and the overarching color in the word is orange for the letter B.
I wonder now, does my synesthesia always make words look like the color associated with their first letter. I’m not sure, but the word “green”, even though the two E’s are green, isn’t really green overall. It’s more red with a touch of green. The G is red.
Mondays are green too, even though the word “Monday” has no green letters in it. Fridays are blue and yet again, there’s no blue letters in the word. Isn’t that fascinating?
A Multitude of Musings 
Excuse my ignorance but what is synesthesia?
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Oh sorry, I was just writing and didn’t realize most people don’t know. Synesthesia is where the senses get mixed up. A sensory experience in one sense creates a sensory experience in another. For example, you can see sounds or smell music or whatever. In my case, I get a sense of color when reading letters on my Braille display.
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Ah okay. That’s interesting 🙂
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Your color perceptions are really amazing and we never thought of it from that perspective.
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Absolutely fascinating. I think that must be a beautiful experience getting a sense of colour when using braille.
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It definitely is. It’s the only way I can perceive colors now that I’m totally blind.
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Oh the lack of logic in synaesthesia! 😀 it’s so fun. As a fellow synaesthete, I guess there’s no rule in it for me, it can be logical but sometimes it’s not. I guess it’s a bit funny from an outsider’s perspective that while I am totally blind since birth – no colour, no light perception, no anything at all – I do have some understanding of colour and it seems to at least mostly cover with how sighted people perceive them. And while my synaesthesia is auditory-tactile or auditory-taste so that I can feel and/or taste sounds/words, or in some cases the other way around, I have a feeling that in some roundabout way my synaesthetic experiences may be at least partly helping me with grasping the idea of colour and specific colours and shades.
It’s interesting how you perceive blue thanks to your synaesthesia and so great that although you can’t see colours any longer, you still have such a strong connection to them in your mind. For me, the word blue (in English and Swedish, and other Germanic languages in which it sounds more or less similar) feels and tastes like a hard milk caramel candy. 😀
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That’s so fascinating that even though you’ve never had any sight whatsoever, you have an idea of colors that resonates with sighted people’s experience. It’s interesting that blue tastes and feels like a hard milk caramel candy, because I always associate those with the color yellow, because the type of candy that comes closest I think (Werter’s original) is dark-yellow.
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Yeah, I know it’s yellow, but still, in terms of my synaesthesia, it’s always tightly connected with the word blue no matter what, even though the colour blue I perceive in a completely different way. This is so weird, and quite fascinating indeed, even for me when I think of it more. 😀
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