"I was sitting with my family around the dinner table and I don't know why I said it but I said, "The number five is yellow." There was a pause and my father said, "No, it's yellow-ochre." And my mother and brother looked at us like, 'this is a new game, would you share the rules?' I was dumbfounded. So I thought, "Well." At that time in my life I was having trouble deciding whether the number two was green and the number six blue, or the other way around. And I said to my father, "Is the number two green?" and he said, "Yes, definitely. It's green." Then he took a long look at my mother and brother and became very quiet.    Thirty years after that, he came to my house and said, "you know, the number four *is* red, and the number zero is white. And," he said, "the number nine is green." I said, "Well, I agree with you about the four and the zero, but nine is definitely not green!"

"I see music in color with texture and shape. For example, the dull whir of an office air circulation system is a dull, tarnished pewter color, with overtones of grimy putty-colored army tan. It always is, and always has been, as long as I can remember.  In the same way, Maria Callas' voice is always a blushing pink, but the specific shape, texture and tone of pink varies with what she sings".   ccn

" The sounds of musical instruments will sometimes make me see certain colors, about a yard in front of me, each color specific and consistent with the particular instrument playing; a piano, for example, produces a sky-blue cloud in front of me, and a tenor saxophone produces an image of electric purple neon lights".   I also have had coloured taste sensations; for example, the taste of espresso coffee can make me see a pool of dark green oily fluid about two feet away from me".  SD.

"For as long as I can remember, I've had this implicit sense of a relationship between letters and colors. To me, every letter seems to have a color of its own. When I think of a word, I am aware of its color and the color of its component letters. The phenomenon is consistent enough that I can rely on it to help me remember things like phone numbers and proper names. I call it my letter-color synaesthesia".  cc