CHAPTER VIII Curative Effect of Colour

I have a story for you that will illustrate the effect of colour. A fragile flower was bending on its stem, and all its fragrance had gone. The owner happened to put it is a room where the only light was purple, and this flower, reddish-yellow in colour, began to revive. This was due to the complementary action of the colour rays. Try it and see for yourself.

The effect of colours is very much neglected on your side, and you might try various colours on your patients. Get an orange-red bulb for those who are depressed, and blue for those who are excitable. Your green walls are soothing to those who are agitated and worried. This is well known over here, and in all our hospitals the colour treatment is used. Among our patients there was a man who was insane on your side, and when anyone had been insane throughout his earth life, it is often necessary to give him prolonged treatment when he has passed on. As with you, there is sometimes a diversity of opinion among the doctors.

A newcomer to the medical staff was doubtful concerning the value of ray treatment, and wished to confine his efforts to suggestive attempts to rouse the patient from his lethargy. The head physician agreed that the new doctor should try his own method for a short time, and when it proved almost useless, he came in one day and ordered the use of coloured rays. The effect was surprising. The patient sat up in bed for the first time and spoke, asking where he was. The effects on the brain being disused throughout the earth life is to make the owner like a child who has to learn all over again who to use his limbs after a serious illness, during which their use has been inhibited. The colour treatment is far more complicated than you would suppose from the very rough idea I have given you. Various shades are used, and it needs experience to know which exact tone should be used in a given case.

I have been studying these colour rays of late, and that is why I think it may interest you to hear about them. In the case of purple, for instance, all the many different shades are used according to the nature of the case. We have more colours than you have, for we can see the infra-red and ultra-violet shades, all of which have their names and their therapeutic values. I have seen a patient brought into the hospital raving in a kind of delirium, and after the application of the correct shade of violet lamp he has fallen into a deep sleep and continued to progress to complete recovery. It is through the skin that the effects are produced, but unless the patient is wearing a garment of a colour that clashes with the shade you are using, you need not strip him. Green pyjamas, for instance, would tend to neutralize a red lamp, but if the patient is wearing a flimsy nightdress is a pastel or white tone, the rays will penetrate. But if you can get a much surface of shin as possible exposed to the light, so much the better. Now let us take the colours seriatim.

ORANGE. – the chief effect of the yellow and orange shades is to rouse the despondent and idle, and restore energy to the listless. They are the most powerful of the colour rays, with the exception of red. The main use to which we put them over here is to rouse those who sleep too long on their arrival. Some would sleep until what they would call the judgment day, and our doctors use various means to wake them. They would wake of their own accord eventually, but they might slumber for thousands of your years, and often there is a friend or relative anxiously waiting for the patient to be roused. The rays work by stimulating the brain cells, and the first result is that the patient can be roused for short periods, which gradually lengthen. Some patients resent being roused, and in one case, where there is nobody specially anxious for her awakening, the doctors gave up their efforts, and for all I know to the contrary, that woman is still asleep. She was so positive that she had to sleep until the last trumpet that nothing could rouse her. This shows you that false teaching has a concrete result.

RED. – When you use a red light, you must be careful not to do so in the case of a patient who has strong mediumistic power, or you may find that he will be controlled by some discarnate spirit. As you know, a red lamp is used in séances for physical phenomena, not only because it enables the sitters to see what is going on, but because it helps the medium to go into trance. You yourself have no power to produce these phenomena, so that there is no risk of your being controlled. The moment you find the patient becoming controlled to the slightest degree, stop the red ray treatment and do not attempt it again.

GREEN. – The main use of green is to soothe the irritable and to help the fidgety to control their restlessness. For epileptics a daily dose of green light often considerably reduces the frequency of the attacks. Patients who are too restless to occupy themselves are often benefited by green rays. If you test the various shades of green, you will find that the more the patient needs soothing, the bluer should be the light, and vice verse, the yellow green lamp being useful for those who need stimulating, not so much physically as mentally. This type of patient is self-centred and fussy, and selfish with regard to food and physical comfort.

I saw a man being treated by this means on our side. He was one of those egotists who are always right in their own eyes, and he ridiculed the idea that he had died and was living in a new world of spirit. “ There is no such thing,” he said, “ don’t talk nonsense. How can I be dead when I am very much alive?” And he threw out his chest and swung his powerful limbs. He was left for a time to adjust himself, but one day a relative begged our doctors to help him, adding that he was now willing to be treated. He had begun to realise that there was something about this new existence that he could not understand, and he admitted that he was in need of help. So we put him in the yellow-green room, and gradually increased the strength of the rays. He is improving and will soon be a much happier man.

Sometimes we have failures, but not often, as the doctors here know whether they can day anything for a given case, and undertake only those that will derive benefit. But occasionally they treat a patient in order to satisfy a friend, when the patient should really have been left to rest longer. I have seen one or two such cases, and sometimes the patient gets tired of the treatment, despising it for its apparent simplicity.

BLUE is one of the most soothing of colours, and even in your world, is used in medical treatment. The ultra-violet ray owes a large part of its sedative effect to the colour value, and, as you know, can be useful as a hypnotic. The difference between blue and violet is one only of degree, and when we reach those ultra-violet rays that are beyond your ken, we get the perfect anæ sthetic, just as among the infra-red shades we find rays that are powerful enough almost to raise the dead.

To return to our blue lamp, if you were to substitute blue for red during this writing, you would find that we should get nothing at all, since blue definitely inhibits psychic power. Consequently, in haunted houses, where no other means of laying the ghost are available, temporary quite could be obtained by means of blue lamps. In medicine, the blue rays are used over here for allaying fears, and the kind of á me en peine, of whom you have had some experience, is soothed by this means. It is strange to me that, in the asylums on your side, this method of treating excitable patients has not been tried. The effects of the various shades of blue and violet vary only in degree. One of the obvious advantages of the colour treatment is that you can do not possible harm, and the patient’s relatives could not possibly object to it use. The more likely obstacle is the usual one of regarding it as too simple to be affective on the lines of the biblical personage who was reluctant to cure his leprosy by bathing in the river.