[...]
> Yes. It's been a long time since I've done this
> myself, so I practiced in the
> mirror today to see what results I could get. I
> have brown hair, and ended up
> seeing a faint blue and yellow aura around my head.
> Here is what you do. Face the
> mirror with your back about 2 feet (60 cm) from the
> wall. Make sure the wall is
> white. The trick is to look at your head but focus
> your eyes on the wall behind
> you. If you can maintain your focus behind you
> while glancing at the outline of
> your head and body, you should begin to notice the
> 'aura' effect.
This sounds to me like the fairly standard way of getting complimentary-coloured after images. For instance, staring at a red pencil, then looking at white paper, will produce a (fading) image of a blue pencil (even with reversed-colour brand names, if you're steady enough!).
The fringing you're seeing sounds to me like slight mis-registration between the original image of your head and the after-image impressed on your retinas; you will see the same thing with the pencil on white paper.
AFAIK, the idea is that the cone cells that are most stimulated by the particular colour in an object, become "exhausted" or accomodated.
When one then looks at white (all colours), the previously stimulated cones do not respond much. This lets the the cones for the other 2 colours (say green and blue for a red object) fire preferentially, leading to perception of the complimentary colour.
> Sometimes I can see vibrant aura's with lots of
> colors extending up to a foot away
> from a persons body, but other days barely anything
> at all.
That's interesting, can't think of why that happens.
> I have about the same
> success as seeing those damn 3-d images that were so
> popular a couple of years
> back. :-)
The first time I saw one of those, it took half an hour of (too much!) effort to see it. But my father, who is long-sighted, saw his first 3D image within seconds of looking at it! (without glasses as I recall).
Mike