Um, Vix, I’m flattered, but “clearing everything up” is a bit of a tall order. Clearing anything up would be a neat trick, in fact. All I can do is give my take on the subject, and hope it makes a little sense.
I don’t actually see colors around people. To my eyes, an aura appears like a sort of transparent haze-- almost as if the air near a person is glowing very slightly. When I look at that for a while, I get a general impression of what color is there. (IOW, people don’t look like neon signs, but I do perceive a color “somehow”.)
I’m quite sure the effect is not a reverse-print or afterimage, because as far as I can tell, the aura color is completely unrelated to the color of a person’s hair, skin, or clothing. A pale, brightly-clad blonde has about equal chance of having a pastel yellow aura, or a deep, intense blue one, or dingy gray, or any of a thousand other shades.
I don’t claim to know what the colors mean, and I’m not one of the people who will try to tell your future from your aura. In most cases, as far as I can tell, they’re just pretty pictures that few other people can see.
I used to have grave doubts whether I was really perceiving colors, rather than just imagining or hallucinating them. But I became convinced of my own veracity when, of all things, my GF and I got our pictures taken by an aura photographer at a new age bookstore.
In the car on the way to the store, I said to her, “Your aura is all red and yellow. Mine is bright blue, with a little green.” And what do you know, both of those statements were correct. We’ve done this multiple times, with widely varying colors but the same accuracy. (I recently scanned my favorite photo, and use it as my profile pic on the TM homepage. Unfortunately, that’s the only one of which I have a digital copy.)
I’d previously talked to several others about auras, and found that our color perceptions about any given person usually matched. But I had still been willing to put this down to imagination, or unnoticed visual cues, or something. But when my observations are confirmed on film, it can’t be just in my mind.
Granted, this doesn’t prove anything about the cause or meaning of an aura, even from my own subjective point of view. And though I’m quite sure that the colors are real, I don’t expect my own testimony to convince anyone else of that. All I really know is that I see something, and the camera sees something, and the two images match very well.
(FTR, I do believe certain things about where auras come from and what they signify. But those beliefs are based to a large extent on my religion, and therefore have nothing to do with a scientific discussion.)