Your eyes at 1am

Three things your audience's eyes are doing that you can use.

The Purkinje shift. In dim light, eye sensitivity slides toward blue-green and away from red — described by Jan Evangelista Purkyně in 1819. It's why deep reds go dark and dead in a barely-lit room while blues stay luminous, and part of why blue is the forgiving home base of club lighting.

Adaptation. Eyes calibrate to whatever they've been soaking in. Hold one color long enough and the room's perception re-centers on it — which is exactly why the NEXT color lands so hard. The breakdown hold isn't laziness; it's loading the spring.

Simultaneous contrast and afterimage. Michel Eugène Chevreul, running the Gobelins dye works in Paris, showed in 1839 that a color shifts perception of its neighbors toward its complement — and staring at a saturated color leaves a complementary afterimage. After a long red look, the room is primed for cyan. You can play the audience's retinas like a delay line.