Depictions of them may date back to 30,000 B.C. but no one can truly tell you what the auroras look like. Sometimes masquerading as diffuse clouds, to rippling picket fences of an otherworldly green, purple, red, on rare occasions blue, and as discovered by science, even black; in human terms: a quasi-religious cosmic experience. I have often fabricated them with neurons firing in the visual cortex, hallucinating the awestruck hours spent looking up, now inhabiting recurring dreams.
Our skies—and those of other planets in the Solar System like Jupiter and Saturn who also experience auroras—, are populated day and night by a myriad phenomena, optical or invisible, which blur the boundary between reality and dreams: from glories, rainbows and lightning, to moon halos and red sprites, an invisible particle cascade of cosmic rays hitting us at every second. A clear view of the Milky Way, and other astronomical sights like the peak of a meteor shower, fill our nights with dreamscapes, unpuzzled into constellations, the apophenic rendering of human imagination.
