This Man

This Man is a person who has allegedly appeared in thousands of people's dreams since 2006, but has never been identified in the real world. He was the main focus of a website called Ever Dream This Man?, created by Italian sociologist and marketer Andrea Natella in 2008. The website claimed that the first person who reported dreaming about This Man was a patient of a psychiatrist in New York City in 2006, and that four other patients of the same had also recognized the same face. The website also claimed that more than 3,000 people had contacted the site to share their stories and drawings of This Man. The website offered various possible explanations for the phenomenon, ranging from the mundane to the supernatural. None of these theories were supported by any evidence or investigation.
The website gained attention from the press and online users in October 2009 and became a viral sensation. This Man's notoriety spawned several internet memes that spoofed flyers of the website, references in films and television shows like The X-Files, and a manga series by Weekly Shonen Magazine. It was later exposed that This Man was a hoax, and was actually a guerrilla marketing campaign by Natella's advertising agency. Natella admitted that he had fabricated the whole story and that he had based the original sketch of This Man on a photo of his father when he was young. Natella said that he was inspired by the concept of dream invasion, which he had encountered in some movies and books, and that he wanted to explore the power of the internet to create and spread urban legends and collective myths.
Story
Reported evidence of This Man appearing in dreams allegedly goes back to the 1980s. According to the Ever Dream This Man? website, the first image of This Man was sketched in January 2006 by a "well-known psychiatrist in New York," based on the descriptions of a patient who claims he was a recurring subject in dreams, despite never knowing a man like him in real life. Several days later, another of the psychiatrist's patients recognized the drawing and said he was a figure in his dreams as well; the psychiatrist sent the image to fellow professionals, and collected the testimony of four more people who claimed to recognize the man. Since then, more than 8,000 people from cities across the world such as Los Angeles, Berlin, São Paulo, Tehran, Beijing, Rome, Barcelona, Stockholm, Paris, New Delhi, and Moscow, claimed to have seen the man while sleeping.
Anonymous stories from alleged witnesses vary in his behavior and actions in their dreams, whose content ranges from romantic or sexual fantasies, to attacking and killing the dreamer, to giving cryptic life advice. His relationship with the dreamer varied between accounts; in one, he was the dreamer's father, while in another, he was a schoolteacher from Brazil with six fingers on his right hand. His voice was also unidentifiable due to the fact that he rarely spoke, as well as the difficulty in remembering sounds in dreams versus images. There were some recurring themes in his messages, such as telling dreamers to "go North."
In a 2015 interview with Vice, site creator Andrea Natella explained that he first dreamt of This Man in the winter of 2008, wherein the man "invited [him] to create a website to find an answer to his own appearance." Following This Man's instructions, Natella created the website ThisMan.org, including an identikit image of This Man created using the mobile app Ultimate Flash Face.
An actual living human that looked like This Man was never identified. Natella has received thousands letters and emails from people about who they think This Man resembles, ranging from fictional characters like The Man from Another Place (from Twin Peaks) and the dummy (from The Twilight Zone), to real public figures such as Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Stephen Hawking. Some people claimed they themselves were This Man, including an Indian guru named Arud Kannan Ayya, who cited it as proof of his miraculous powers.
ThisMan.org posited five theories as to This Man's origins:
The Archetype Theory: This Man is an example of Carl Jung's concept of the unconscious "archetypal image" people see during very difficult life situations.
The Religious Theory: This Man is a manifestation of God.
The Dream Surfer Theory: An outside force implants This Man in people's dreams, whether from someone's supernatural projection, or mental conditioning by a corporation.
The Dream Imitation Theory: People only dream of This Man after having already learned about the phenomenon and the image has left an impression on their minds.
The Daytime Recognition Theory: People poorly remember faces from their dreams, and they only assume it represents This Man after seeing the image.
Popularity
The story of This Man started gaining attention from internet users and the press in 2009. It was not until October of that year that views of the site skyrocketed. In a short period of time, it garnered more than two million visits and 10,000-plus emails from people sharing experiences with This Man and sending photos of those who looked like him. On October 12, 2009, comedian Tim Heidecker made a Twitter post about This Man, tweeting that it was "scaring the shit outta me." While Natella's previous marketing stunts only garnered local attention, This Man was the first time his work got international recognition.
Filmmaker Bryan Bertino, director and writer of The Strangers, was allegedly inspired by the viral story and used it as the basis for a film, also titled This Man, to be produced by Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures. A press release from Ghost House said the film would be about "an ordinary guy who discovers that people he has never met are seeing him in their dreams. Now he must find out why he is the source of nightmares for strangers all over the world." Ghost House Pictures bought the ThisMan.org domain in May 2010. No further announcement has since been made about the film.
Exposure
Upon This Man's initial widespread exposure, there was suspicion from users on forums such as 4chan, as well as blogs like ASSME and io9, that it was a guerrilla marketing stunt. A reverse-IP lookup of ThisMan.org revealed that its hosting company owned another domain named guerrigliamarketing.it, "a fake advertising agency" founded by Natella that "designed subversive hoaxes and created weird art projects exploring pornography, politics, and advertising." Some sources still presented the debate between those claiming it was a hoax and those claiming it was a real phenomenon as unresolved and ongoing.
In 2010, Natella made a post on the website of KOOK Artgency, an art agent company he founded, where he confirmed that he invented the story of This Man as a publicity stunt. He elaborated on the topic further in a 2012 paper titled "Viral 'K' Marketing." Although Natella never confirmed whether the project had a commercial purpose, sources like The Kernel said it was "almost certain" that the site was specifically created as a guerrilla marketing campaign for Bertino and Ghost House's film.
Even after Natella's confirmation of the hoax, serious coverage of This Man continued into the mid-2010s. In 2015, Vice Media contacted the site for an interview, and Natella answered questions as if the site was not a hoax. On the same day Vice published its interview with Natella, it published a retraction clarifying that This Man was not real and admitting they had initially fallen for the hoax: "we run a story, it turns out to be something that was denounced in 2009 and could be easily verified as fake with a single google, a few people call us dickheads and the editorial team drown in their own tears. Sometimes we mess up."
Analysis
io9 writer Annalee Newitz called This Man "Natella's greatest masterwork", reasoning that it was only "uncanny", "cheesy and a little bit scary" instead of having "artsy pseudo-intellectual 'politics' like a lot of his other art does." Vice expressed that while This Man does not exist, he "properly looks like the kind of dude you might see in a dream", where "he pats you on the back and you feel warm and nostalgic. You wake up with an erection you can't explain." A 2014 article from the fringe science website Mysterious Universe claims that people experiencing the same type of dreams is possible; it cites not only Jung's archetypal theory, but also Ervin László's pseudoscientific theory of the Akashic Field: "should it prove true that our thoughts do not reside within our own heads, but rather exist in the ether, then couldn't some of us be accessing the same information in our subconscious during dreams?" Vice described the purpose of the hoax as "priming people to dream what they've never dreamed before," similar to "Inception but with memes."
In other media
Upon This Man's initial surge in popularity, internet users posted several internet memes spoofing the site's "Ever dream this man?" flyer, replacing This Man's face with headshots of public figures like Robbie Rotten, Karl Marx, and Barack Obama. Comedy Central also produced their own parody of the flyer that used Daniel Tosh's face.
This Man's identikit makes brief appearances in the beginning of the 2017 South Korean film Lucid Dream and The X-Files episode "Plus One", where it is on the upper right part of a photo of The Lone Gunmen seen previously in the show without it.
The MMORPG Rift has a set of collectibles inspired by This Man called "Twisted: The Dream Traveler" in its Nightmare Tide expansion.
In 2018, Weekly Shōnen Magazine began running a manga based on This Man and named after the hoax. Illustrated by Kouji Megumi of Bloody Monday fame and written by Karin Sora, it follows a police officer named Hakaru Amano and his case that involves the urban legend of This Man. The first volume ran from April 25, 2018, to April 3, 2019.
The 2019 video game AI: The Somnium Files included cameo appearances of This Man in two of its puzzle segments. Players are awarded a trophy should they see him on both of these occasions.
The design of the ventriloquist dummy in the 2021 chapter of the TV anthology series Stories to Stay Awake is inspired in This Man.
This Man appears in the music video of Good Nightmare by Akatsuki Records, a song about a mock TV advertisement for a shady brand of pillows.
The 2023 Film Dream Scenario by Film Studio A24 starring Nicholas Cage is inspired by 'This Man'.
References
External links
"This Man (Ever Dream This Man?)" at Know Your Meme
guerrigliamarketing.it, a site that was hosted by the same company that hosted ThisMan.com
2010s unfinished films
2018 manga
Internet hoaxes
Cancelled films
Internet memes
Promotion and marketing communications
Unfinished films
Unreleased films
Unreleased American films
Urban legends
The X-Files (franchise)
Creepypasta