You said to only apply a style on a particular page. The problem is for me and I risk feeling ignorant, but the pages are not created as static pages.
Well, yes. And that's the "problem". The structure is conditional and depends on context. I have my grudges with it as well. The key to theming is understanding when certain structures appear and why. An example - although you have one and the same title for a node, it can appear as a different <hX> element in teaser and node views, as it probably should. There is a semantic difference there.
I can't look at an xhtml page within the code, as there are no xhtml pages in the code. So, I've got the .node .content black and so the image area around a picture is black but that's only a small part of the display area. The home page is a book page made from an image in a photogallery. I didn't feel so ignorant or confused using Drupal in a long time until I started trying to do this. I didn't think CSS was all that confusing.
You have .tpl files and you have default theme functions. The definitions in a .tpl file override the defaults. Most of the defaults are snippets in code. Look for the *_theme functions to get all defaults. The .tpl is simply html with a bit of php thrown in to inject content.
The problem for me is that every page is being generated with php, so I can't just open a page in Dreamweaver and look at the Style on a part of the screen. There doesn't seem to be a way to edit these things in a WYSIWYG, type display environment... where I'd be able to apply a style and see that indeed there was a change to the background and then see the text and try a lighter text, all this in one step. It's like I have to try a change and then upload it and see if there is any change. Can anyone offer any tips?
If you want to apply the black-box method. Open drupal.css and the theme's css files in a handy editor. Open a page of a certain type - a list, a node view (they differ on node type), an editor form, admin page, etc... Use the CSS->Check Style Information and/or Information->Display ID & Class Details to get idea of the possible selectors, which could have been aplied. And find which rules are influencing the display. Or just ignore that, and define a CSS rule of sufficient specificity - that's a trial and error. You can alway put in your theme file an id, like <body id='my-special'> and do something like #myspecial h2.title {} to guarantee that your rules are preferred by the browser.
..... If the design of a theme was based on a dark or black background for the content and menu areas, things would be a bit easier for me. It would be a better place to start for me. There aren't any themes with this are there?
You are getting from the wrong end - colours and such. Look at what resembles your layout - it is the most difficult part of the design. The coulours will come from that. Unfortunately there is a lot of black magic involved in good css design. Or so it seems.
Cheers, Vlado