Seeing Things

When I was a child, I shared a room with my sisters, and the room was entirely papered in giant neon yellow green and orange flowers. The paper had been chosen by the previous owners, who seemed to have chosen the best quality and most fashionable wallpaper in the early 70s, and in the 90s it was still in such good condition it looked brand new, and now in 2015 is still there and still in terrific shape (although it's been through teenage kid poster-hanging abuse).

 Well, all those patterns made faces. That is, you lie awake in the almost darkness, and open your eyes, and there on the wall is a shape, and we humans are kind of made to find faces in all abstract ideas, so instant face. We saw beautiful ladies and garish skulls and everything in between.

 .......Fast forward........

 Now I have kids of my own, and our walls are neutral. But the face pattern search continues. :)

Like on the stairs.

Hello person with wild eyebrows.

Hello dancing man.

 Although maybe more abstract. So Henry tells me he doesn't know why "somebody made a picture of a sad boy all alone." For my life' I looked around the room, and couldn't find any pictures of any sad boys alone. I was even looking through my children-eyes, trying to imagine what he could be imagining. I asked which little boy? He said the one wearing the hat. I didn't find a hat!
So he showed me. There it was. A hat.:

As part of the wonderful pastel that his talented Aunt had done years ago: 

a copy of a National Geographic picture, which was part of an article describing a trip in a reconstruction of a Greek boat the author took on a possible route for Ulysses... 

What has been seen cannot be unseen.

Dear Tante C. reminded us there's a word for this. Copied "whole hat" from wiki:

Pareidolia (/pærɨˈdoʊliə/ parr-i-doh-lee-ə) is a psychological phenomenon involving a stimulus (an image or a sound) wherein the mind perceives a familiar pattern of something where none actually exists.