Images

My brain finds faces in almost all textured surfaces. Popcorn ceiling, marble floors or counters, the way a shirt is wrinkled, the way a blanket is kicked off to the side, the grain in wood, the freckles on my arms. My brain looks at these things and immediately finds the faces in them. If there just isn't a face to be found, then it finds something else. A fish, a tree, an arrow.

When I close my eyes, images flash across the inside of my eyelids. It's as though I am viewing a slide show of odd and irregular photographs. An old man with a beard in a rocking chair. A woman with long black hair, eyes open but lifeless at the bottom of a lake. A redhead in an apron and a gingham dress baking cookies in a 50's kitchen. Two young girls with bright smiles, arms thrown over each other shoulders in familiarity and conspiracy.

These pictures are still, the people are never moving. It really is as though they are someone's photographs in a slide show. They move towards me, slowly, growing bigger and clearer until they fade out and a new one fades in, smaller and further away. Some of them are disturbing, like the girl in the lake. but many of them are simply snapshots of someone's moment in time.

I can pay attention to the details in each picture. I am able to run my eyes across the image and look at different parts of it without it going away.

This doesn't happen every time I close my eyes. In fact, it doesn't even happen often. But when it does, I am always amazed. Where do these pictures come from? Is this my imagination conjuring up photos or is some deep recess of my brain showing me back images that it's been presented with in 33 years of life. Are these stills from movies I've seen, books I've read, photos I've looked through? Or is there more to it? Do other people experience this?