Deprivation and Restoration of Blue

I wear blue-blocking goggles at night sometimes to prevent the blue light from screens from interrupting the production of melatonin (sleep hormone). Yesterday I took them to work, wearing them on the ride to and from the office. It's a scene I've seen almost every day for two years now. Without blue light, I saw it as if fresh for the first time.

Some observations. Without blue light, white and yellow become indistinguishable, as do blue, violet, and black. 

There are essentially two colors left: red and green. Things that are red appear really red, startling even, redder than red of a rainbow. The Dodge I passed was so red I froze in amazement. I had never seen such redness in my life. It was like being in a dream or a movie. 

And green things appear really green, a saturated blue-green, like the color of that garish dye some people put in ponds. The pine trees never stood out like they did with the blue-blockers. I was taken aback by how piney the countryside is. Pine everywhere, bristles dipped in wet viridian, set upright. Tufts of cool season grass, too, are puddles of electric color amid the orange dormant turf.

The sky is perhaps the ugliest thing with blue-blockers. It's a dull yellow-grey tinged with puke green, like pea soup, and clouds are muddy yellow-grey. Orange stands out, but not as vibrantly as red or green.

Overall, with blue-blockers, everything appears much brighter and in high resolution. You see into the woods as with X-ray vision, and everything shaded finds hidden light. Previously-unnoticed details pop up all around. My guess is that, in the absence of blue light, the pupils dilate, allowing more light in of the other colors.

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Then, taking the blue-blockers off, my eyes were overpowered with brightness and blueness. Everything became tinged with blue. White becomes—impossible as it may seem—whiter than white, so white it's blue (and once a friend told me that in ancient languages there was often one word for white and blue, the two being light and dark variations of the same color). Normal blues, like the county road signs, became deep sea blues, just as startling as the deep reds with the blue-blockers on. On the other hand, the reds and greens, without the blue-blockers, became drab and uninteresting. Yellows, however, appeared as fluorescent orange.

Within a minute or so, the eyes readjusted to blue light, and everything appeared normal again. I have to say, the world is different and interesting without blue light, but also a little depressing, like the depressing feeling one gets in late afternoon in August. I'll take all the colors.