Seeing Faces & Hearing Your Name (Type Yellow)

#11 PAREIDOLIA

Suggestion #11:

If you hear your name being called out of nowhere or see an image or face in an abstract form, avoid labeling these experiences as “psychic.”

Whether wide awake, falling asleep, or waking up, hearing your name called is common and not a psychic experience. Hearing other things like tones, instruments playing, and even hearing the phone ring as you’re waking up or falling asleep are normal experiences.

While psychic experiences can happen when you’re awake, and often when you’re drifting in and out of sleep, unless the experience has some recognizable usefulness, it’s usually best to just shrug it off.

Whether wide awake, falling asleep, or waking up, seeing images of things or faces of people or animals in abstract forms is also normal. For example, seeing a ”ghost” image or face in a blurred photo or an image with light distortions, seeing the image of Jesus on a burnt piece of toast, or seeing little faces when staring at a textured wall.

These are just as normal and have the same cause as seeing shapes in the clouds. It’s called pareidolia. The fact is, our brains are hardwired to see faces in everyday objects.

Our brain is constantly trying to understand and explain what we are seeing, and in doing so, it is regularly looking for things we can recognize. Faces are something our brain is always looking for, so when we see something that looks like a face but isn’t actually one, we might see a face in a random object.

When we are waking up or falling asleep we may have many images from our day flash in front of our closed eyes including faces that may shift and change from one face to another. Images can also include the faces or forms of animals and a lot of other stuff.

The more creative you are, the more familiar you will be with these experiences. In fact, many famous artists throughout history used pareidolia to help in the artistic process from inventing new landscapes in paintings to sculpting forms from stone.

Pareidolia can become more noticeable when you are stressed out or anxious because you are on and your surroundings more. Also when anxious, the once pleasant faces you see can become distorted and be “evil” or scary-looking – like an evil-looking bell pepper.

This is because as a result of seeing more faces and forms in objects due to anxiety (fear and stress), your mind is “grasping at straws” and ends up finding faces in random things that don’t even really look like faces at all.