A few months ago, I was in hospital for a major surgery. It went OK, I saw family but was going to be in for a few days to deal with recovery. Heavy painkillers.
After a few days, I woke up just after sunrise and discovered an eerie silence. I realized that I had been kidnapped and put on a train to some foreign country - they had been coming in every few hours to interrogate me and check my papers as we passed through different territories - but now the train had stopped and I was completely alone.
There was a strange city outside the window and I knew that it was my job to escape - I am a security operative and I'd been taken against my will.
They were putting drugs in me to keep me sedated - I ripped the IV out of my arm and made my way to a closet area where I ripped through supplies until I found street clothes (I realized that there was another sedated agent in the train car as well - he stirred, but I managed not to wake him.)
I snuck out of the train and into the landing tube, which was empty except for some thugs at the far end; I snuck the other way and had made it to the elevators before I was caught.
And gently led back to my hospital room, had the blood cleaned from my arm, and put back into my hospital bed. Where I woke up a few hours later, with memories of this strange dream.
But it wasn't a dream - I did rip out my IV and try to escape from a hospital. There was a strange city outside my window - I had to travel for surgery. And I was conscious when I made my escape and completely and utterly convinced that what I thought was reasonable and real. Of course I was such a valuable individual that they would kidnap me - and that there was an external "they" (or to put it another way "the other") that was doing something to me.
I believed this completely - it was as true to me as my cat (or what I like to think of as my cat, if you prefer) throwing up on the carpet in front of me right now.
But now I know that my cat is not doing this on purpose, nor was he poisoned by the NSA.
Andy, I'm very sorry that you're going through what you're going through, and my experience informs me that what you feel is absolutely real is what is real to you - but there are objective and subjective realities and if you can externalize yourself from the situation you find yourself in, you may discover that coincidences are coincidences and you don't need to find a hypothesis to fit a random pattern.
I think that pareidolia can be applied to situations and feelings as well as visual artifacts. Humans pattern match compulsively.