ggplot2 error : Discrete value supplied to continuous scale

Evidently, you can’t have different color aesthetics for two different geoms. As a workaround, use a fill aesthetic for the points instead. This means you have to use a point marker style that has a filled interior (see ?pch and scroll down for the available point styles). Here’s a way to do that:

ggplot() + 
  geom_point(data=merged,aes(x = pauseMedian, y = numTotalPauses, fill = diff),
             pch=21, size=5, colour=NA) +
  geom_polygon(data = splineHull, 
               mapping=aes(x=pauseMedian, 
                           y=numTotalPauses, 
                           colour = microstyle),
               alpha=0) 

Adding colour=NA (outside of aes()), gets rid of the default black border around the point markers. If you want a colored border around the points, just change colour=NA to whatever colour you prefer.

Also see this thread from the ggplot2 Google group, discussing a similar problem and some workarounds.