Have you ever seen a tiger in the clouds? How about Jesus in the gnarled bark of a tree - or Richard Dawkins in a coffee stain?
This peculiar quirk of human psychology goes by the rather lovely sounding name of Pareidolia (say: pah-ray-doh-lee-a).
Many great scientists have pondered the origins of this trait. The simplest explanation is an evolutionary one: being able to detect predatory faces and figures amid background noise gives you a greater chance of survival.
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).
As the descendants of a long line of excellent facial hallucinators, nature has imbued us all with a tendency to seeing faces and patterns in the mundane. Even when they're not actually there.
The Pareidolia Dream Hack
It is a little known fact that we can take advantage of pareidolia as a means to hack our lucid dreams.
At its heart, the principle is simple: take an established and powerful psychological predisposition, in this case pareidolia, and exploit its natural momentum to move us towards our chosen goal.
Let me show you two approaches to using pareidolia in your lucid dream adventures:
#1. Populating Your Dream World
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. This should be incredibly easy, so easy in fact, that you should be able to do it right now.
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.
In your lucid dream, once you've found your candidate, give it your full attention. Really invest your time and focus into seeing this pareidolic face. Unlike the waking world, your dream will quickly start to imbue this phantom-face with more and more detail, until, quite by magic, it shall spring into life.If you struggle, try engaging your pareidolic companion in conversation. This is a surprisingly rapid and effective process, which can lead to all manner of interesting and unexpected results!
#2. Inducing Wake Initiated Lucid Dreams
Wake Initiated Lucid Dreams (WILD) are one of the trickiest of all lucid dreams to induce. They require focus, patience and perfect timing. The best time to attempt a WILD is during a Wake Back To Bed (WBTB) practice.
Inevitably, before you enter a full-fledged dream, you'll first have to wade through the amnesia-inducing labyrinth of hypnagogia (the fleeting half dreams and psychedelic imagery you'll see as you fall asleep).
One of the difficulties with traversing hypnagogia into dreaming, is the time it takes for hypnagogia to coalesce into a stable dream environment. Often this will take much longer than your ability to maintain awareness and focus.
To expedite this process, we can once again turn to our friend pareidolia.
As you watch the kaleidoscope of hypnagogia play out before your mind's eye, actively search the imagery for anything that resembles a face or living creature.
Our minds are voracious in their desire to hunt for such imagery. Not only will this help keep your attention focused, it will also allow you to ride the wave of this natural pareidolic tendency.
You'll find that because you are working in accordance with a natural instinct, your hypnagogic imagery should settle far more rapidly, into a solid and full-fledged dream. Our minds want to hallucinate faces. We just need to let them.
As a useful side effect, you'll also find that your lucid dream will likely start with a ready made companion.
Exploring Further
This is the tip of the iceberg for such explorations. There are countless practical uses for pareidolia and an entire universe of scientific knowledge that can be applied directly to your lucid dream life.
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