Seeing Faces? Pareidolia Can Influence Your Lucid Dreams

Face pareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing face-like structures in everyday objects.

The simplest explanation is an evolutionary one: being able to detect predatory faces and figures amid background noise gives you a greater chance of surivival.

Our dreams can be very varied, sometimes we'll dream of buzzing city streets, filled with dream characters. At other times we'll find ourselves in a veritable ghost town.

There will, almost certainly, be occasions where you'll wish to interact with a dream character but there will be none to be found. In these situations pareidolia is the perfect means to easily conjure a new dream companion.

The solution is self-evident: search your environment for pareidolia-inducing content.

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In the animal kingdom, pattern recognition makes the difference between life and death. And natural selection, operating as it does, pushes such a sensitivity to maximum use. After all, it's better to have a false-positive (to see a face where there is none), than a false-negative (to end up as lunch).

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Look around and search for faces in your surroundings. Good places to look are: trees, clouds, rock formations, crumpled materials like carpets and curtains, or anything that produces random patterns.

It's as easy to do in the lucid dream world as it is right now while you're awake.

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Image credit: NASA / JPL.

NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter photographed the Cydonia region in the northern latitudes of Mars on July 25, 1976 while searching for a landing site for the Viking 2 lander.

According to new research published in the journal Psychological Science, we process ‘pareidolia faces’ using the same visual mechanisms of the brain that we do for real ones.

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