Playing dress up with dream costumes

This image is hosted here just so I can post it on LD4all. I used Azalea's Game of Thrones scene creator to illustrate two costumes from my dream last night. These character creators can be a nice and quick way to make dream illustrations without spending too much time and effort on it.

When the mind wanders, it sees faces...

A few days ago, I had the unfortunate experience of being stuck for a while in a room that was in need of renovation. There was nothing to read, nothing to do, and I couldn't move. My eyes had nothing else to look at than the stains and holes in the floor. Before long, the shapes started to take on meaning. There was a baboon, there was Mickey Mouse, and right before me was a fire-breathing dragon!

Mickey Mouse

It is interesting how we all see patterns in random things like clouds and stains. Who has never looked at clouds drifting across the sky, and seen people and animals? I often see maps of familiar countries and fictional worlds in the clouds. Trees and mountains can have faces and bodies, so clear that I can clearly understand where the myths of Trolls come from. 

This is called pareidolia. It is what happens when the brain interprets a random image as a familiar pattern. The single most common pattern generated in this way is a human face. Pareidolia is the phenomenon behind the "face of the moon", the inkblot test, and some say it is the reason why we can see a smiley icon as a smiling face. 

Naked woman throwing a hammer

There are many communities and blogs out there dedicated to pareidolia. All of them, at least the ones I have found, are filled with images of things that look like faces. All it can take is a pair of dots, and the human brain will interpret it as "looking at you". Even the word "look" contains a pair of eyes when we look closely at it! 

When I was a child, my bedroom had curtains with large brown flowers on it. That pattern gave me nightmares, because my young eyes saw a witch in the flowers. She was wearing cat eye glasses and a scarf. I couldn't understand why my parents' couldn't see the witch, when she was clearly staring at me from every flower on those curtains. In fact, I couldn't even see the flowers back then. I could only see the witch and some random swirls. 

Dragon breathing fire on the ground

A couple of years ago, my parents were cleaning in their basement and found those old curtains from the 70s. They took them up and draped them over a chair in the living room, because they thought I might be interested in taking them with me. There was the witch, staring at me! 

I don't have a picture of the curtains; they are in my parents' house. I do have pictures of the stained floor and its strange inhabitants. 

Pareidolia wikipedia article

Photo collection on Google+

The Tetris Effect stole my sleep

The bedroom is quiet and cool, the bed is soft, the sheets are smooth. I lie down and relax, so sleepy that not even a daydream will stay in my head. I drift off...only to see the game I played before bed vividly in front of my eyes. It repeats over and over and over again forming the same patterns.

I have been playing a clicker RPG on my phone for the last few days. It is a game where your damage is determined by how fast you can tap the screen, and you have a team of followers who deal constant DPS. The numbers rise exponentially with each new follower. Last night, I entered an in-game tournament. This made me spend more than an hour on it directly before going to sleep.

It looks like that the pattern of taps and numbers has gotten stuck in my brain. All night, in the non REM sleep stage, where I should have been comfortably unconscious and resting, has this game been playing in my mind. Where I should have seen random scenes and lines of sleep, I have seen coins explode out of beaten enemies. Even in my dreams, things kept increasing exponentially; tens, then hundreds, then thousands, then millions...

Yesterday's game isn't the first game to cause this for me. The most annoying side effect was from Diablo 1. I was constantly going down to lower levels for several nights. Ingress has also had a strong effect. I was making lines and triangles not only in my half sleep hallucinations, but in my nightly dreams.

This is called the Tetris Effect. It isn't limited to computer games. My mother has told me about how she has spent entire nights with visions of knitting after learning new patterns. Psychologists think this has something to do with learning and subconsciously forming memories. I think it means that I played that game too much yesterday.

That isn't yellow! That's blue-orange!

LED lighting has become hugely popular. I can understand why. They consume little power, and come in all kinds of sizes and colours. LED bulbs can even replace "old fashioned" bulbs in any kind of lamp. After my country banned the sale of incandescent bulbs, LED replacements are sold everywhere.

Most of them come in the colour "warm white". It is warm, that can't be denied, but it isn't white.  It is a combination of blue and yellow. The LED itself produces blue light. It is covered in a yellow fluorescent material, and the mix between the yellow and the blue wavelength is ideally seen as white by the human eye.

Humans, on the other hand, come with different colour vision. Some are colour blind. Others, like me, have a more sensitive colour vision. I'm especially sensitive when it comes to tones of yellow. Very few sources of artificial light can produce a true yellow colour, and that is especially true for LEDs. The yellow component of cheap warm white LED light lies on the orange side of yellow, so the mixed colour comes out as "orange-blue". I can see both the orange and the blue in it. "Yellow" decorative LEDs are even worse. To my eyes, they are orange-blue, similar to a street lamp. It is an interesting colour, but it is far from yellow!

I have great difficulties explaining this to my SO. To his eyes, white LEDs are white and yellow LEDs are yellow. There is no such thing as yellow-blue or orange-blue to him. I call street lights purplish orange. To his eyes, they are orangeish yellow. This comes from a passionate hobby photographer, who is far from colour blind!

To make matters worse, my phone camera can't capture yellow-blue, orange-purple or any of those mixed colours. On the picture of Christmas tree lights above, the light to the left is a blue-orange LED and the one to the right is a beautiful yellow incandescent bulb. My phone camera captures both of the colours as "yellow".

The photo of the building was taken in bright purple-orange light. It shows up as yellow in the photo. The phone's "eye" has a colour vision more similar to my SO's eyes than to mine. This could be part of the reason why he is a so much better photographer. (No, just joking, it has something to do with talent too)

The painting below gives a better idea of what street lights look to me. It shows both the purple and the orange, although in real life the purple also shines through the bright orange light from the bulbs. It is impossible to mix this colour in a digital painting, because the screen can onyl produce red, green, and blue wavelengths. It can't do purple-orange.