When 20 Words Turn Into 600 Likes: Pareidolia, Hypnagogic States, and Why Your Brain Shows You Demonic Faces

 

I didn’t expect it. A quick reply to someone’s TikTok about massage and seeing demon faces in her mind’s eye suddenly took off. The comment itself only got about fifteen replies, but it racked up nearly 600 likes. Most of the replies were people thanking me for putting logic into something they didn’t quite understand, and a few massage therapists even chimed in to say, “Yes, that’s exactly what it is.” Honestly, I was both surprised and amused — it wasn’t a lecture, just twenty words in passing. But it struck a chord.

Here’s what I explained there, and what I’ll expand on here.

When you’re lying face-down on a massage table, relaxed, and your body starts drifting toward sleep, you’re moving into what’s called the hypnagogic state. It’s that liminal space where you’re not fully awake, but not fully asleep either. Your brainwaves shift gears from fast, alert beta waves, through calmer alpha, and into dreamlike theta. In this twilight zone, your sensory filters loosen. Fleeting imagery appears, phantom sounds bubble up, and sometimes you even feel your body jolt or float. It’s dream-processing starting to leak in while you’re still aware enough to notice.

Layered on top of that is pareidolia. This is the brain’s built-in habit of finding familiar patterns, especially faces, in random shapes or noise. Evolution hardwired us for this. Spotting faces quickly once meant survival. That wiring never went away, which is why we see faces in clouds, the “man in the moon,” or even the front of cars.

Put the two together — the loosened filters of hypnagogia and the face-seeking bias of pareidolia — and suddenly those flickers you see while half-dreaming take form. To the person experiencing it, they may look ghostly, even demonic. But what’s really happening is the brain doing what it always does: connecting dots and filling blanks with something recognizable.

The original TikTok poster had asked directly, “Why demons?” And that’s where the physical context matters. She mentioned that while the massage was deeply relaxing, some of the knots being worked on were painful. Pain is a powerful input, and in the hypnagogic state, body sensations don’t stay separate from the mind — they fuse with it. Pareidolia ensures you’ll see faces, but discomfort and tension can warp them. What might be neutral in a calm state twists under stress into something sharper, darker, or more threatening.

On top of that, the amygdala, the brain’s fear and threat detector, ramps up when you’re in pain or stress. During hypnagogia, that influence can tint fleeting faces with menace, making them appear grotesque or “demonic.” In other words, the faces reflected not an external reality, but the body’s internal state.

So the answer to “why demons” isn’t mystical. It’s the brain mirroring the combination of relaxation, pain, and evolutionary wiring. The massage triggered a state where body and mind blended, and the images matched the tension she was feeling.

What surprised me most wasn’t just that people resonated with the explanation, but that so many were relieved to have words for something they’d never quite understood. Nearly 600 people quietly clicked “like,” and several took the time to say thank you. It’s proof of how universal these strange moments are, and how empowering it feels to replace mystery with understanding.

If you’ve ever seen faces flicker as you drift off, heard phantom voices, or felt yourself floating as you relaxed, you’re not broken, and you’re not haunted. You’re just human. Your brain is doing what it’s designed to do: transition into dreaming while still trying to make sense of random input.

And sometimes, twenty words in a comment section can be enough to make hundreds of people stop and say, “Finally, that makes sense.”