This Man

This Man, often called the Dream Man, is a conceptual art project and hoax created by Italian sociologist and marketer Andrea Natella. In 2008, Natella created a website called "Ever Dream This Man?" describing a supposed mysterious individual who has reportedly appeared in the dreams of numerous people around the world since 2006. The story gained widespread attention in the late 2000s. In 2010, Natella revealed that the site was a hoax as part of a guerrilla marketing campaign.
According to the story on 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, the site claims that more than 2,000 people from cities across the world 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, 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 claimed that he first dreamt of This Man in the winter of 2008, wherein the man "invited [Natella] 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 of 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. Several people claimed they themselves were This Man, including an Indian guru named Arud Kannan Ayya, who cited it as proof of his miraculous powers. Many people each year have reported of seeing this man in their dream, and some even say they know who he is.
ThisMan.org posited five theories about This Man's origins:
The story of This Man started gaining attention from internet users and the press in 2008-9. 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.
The most common version of the meme was in the form of a flyer featuring the identikit image, the web address for ThisMan.org, and the following text:
After This Man's initial burst in popularity, users on forums such as 4chan, as well as blogs like ASSME and io9, became suspicious 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." At the time, in late 2009, 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 agency company he founded, where he confirmed that he invented the story of This Man as a publicity stunt. 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. 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 legitimate. Several hours after 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, saying "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."
io9 writer Annalee Newitz called This Man "Natella's greatest masterwork", reasoning that it was only "uncanny", "cheesy and a little bit scary", and "doesn't smack of 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, saying "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".
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 characters and 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.
Filmmaker Bryan Bertino, director and writer of The Strangers, was allegedly inspired by the viral story and used it as the story 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."
According to Mymovies.it, Ghost House Pictures' option on the movie rights has since expired. The story was subsequently proposed to various Italian producers, who did not pick up on the project.