THE MAN OF OUR DREAMS…LITERALLY!

Before we dive into the article, Look at this image carefully,
Have you ever seen this face in your dreams? Try to remember. If you haven’t or you probably don’t remember seeing it then it is alright because it is said that once you have seen this face, there are chances that it might appear in your dreams tonight!

Within this article, you would get to know everything about it.

But, if you do remember seeing it in your dreams, then trust me, you are not alone! You are one of those thousands of people around the world who have seen this face in their dreams. Confused? Let’s dive into the article now.

THE STORY BEHIND THIS FACE

January 2006, New York. A woman visits a well-known psychiatrist’s clinic. The woman desperately explains her distressing issue which did not sound conventional.
A man, whom she has no idea about and has never met in her lifetime, repeatedly appears in her dreams. Peculiarly, on more than one occasion that man has given her advice on her private life. Within some dreams, this man shows up as a lifesaver and on some occasions, it turns her dream into a nightmare!
As per the woman, this man somehow knows about all her private life and secrets, from simple ones to the darker ones.
The psychiatrist understands her situation and concludes her problem that the particular person she is dreaming about might be symbolizing certain stress or anxiety she was going through. The woman contretemps with the psychiatrist and draws a rough figure of the face that she has been dreaming about.

THE SHOCKING PHENOMENA

The psychiatrist keeps the sketch with himself. That portrait lies forgotten on the psychiatrist’s desk for a few days until one day another visiting patient recognizes that face kept on the table. Shockingly, the patient admits that the man from the portrait has often visited him in his dreams. He also claims he has never seen that man in his waking life, just like the previous woman at his clinic.
The psychiatrist decides to send the portrait to some of his colleagues that have frequent patients with recurrent dreams as an issue. Within a few months, four patients recognize the man as a frequent presence in their dreams!
All the patients refer to him as THIS MAN.

MORE AND MORE PEOPLE COME FORWARD

The portrait was then circulated all over the internet to find out more people experiencing This Man in their dreams from all over the world. It gets even more terrifying when it was found out that in many cities all over the world more than 2000 people have claimed to experience the presence of This Man in their dreams often.
Check out these creepy sketches people have drawn from all of over the world referring to the experience they were going through in their dreams.
As you can see, all these portraits are similar to one another, signifying that it was not just 2 or 4 people experiencing the presence of a common face; rather, this face was a widespread phenomena over the globe.
At the moment there is no ascertained relation or common trait among the people that have dreamed of seeing this man. Moreover, no living man has ever been recognized as resembling the man in the portrait by the people who have seen this man in their dreams.

WHAT HAPPENED IN THOSE DREAMS

To understand who this man is and why he appears in an apparently pattern-less array of situations in the dreams of such diverse human subjects; the experience suffered by the people dreaming This Man was recorded by an anonymous person, here are some of the recorded words:
“I have had this recurrent dream for some years now. A tall, dark man shows me a picture and asks me if I can recognize my father in it. The man in the picture is this man I have never seen before, he looks nothing like my dad, nevertheless, I inexplicably answer that I do recognize my father. At this point, I usually wake up feeling very peaceful. Other times the dream continues, I am standing before my father’s grave, I place some flowers on the ground and I realize the photograph on the tombstone is missing.”

Another person said:

“I fell in love with him from the very first time I saw him in my dream. Even though I think about it I must admit he’s really ugly. And yet every time, he sweeps me off my feet with his romantic gestures and sweet words. He buys me flowers, jewelry, he takes me out to dinner or to the beach to watch the sunset.”

One more person stated:
“The first time I had a dream about this man I was having a hard time at work. I had a dream about getting lost in a huge and deserted shopping mall. Suddenly this man appeared and I started running away from him. He chased after me for what seemed like an hour until I found myself against a wall in the kids’ area in a supermarket. At this point, he smiled at me and he showed me the way out towards the cash desks and I woke up. Ever since that night, this man has appeared in all of my dreams and he always gives me directions to get out of the dream and wake up.”
As we see, the plot of all these dreams is divergent but the only point at which it converges is at “This Man…”.

Was this harrowing enough? Well, not yet.

As This Man picks up popularity over the internet. Several theories were developed to explain the mysteriously recurring presence of This Man in the dreams of different people who are not related in any way. The following theories are the ones that elicit the greatest interest among the dreamers themselves.

ARCHETYPE THEORY

According to Jung’s psychoanalytic theory, this man is an archetypal image belonging to the collective unconscious that can surface in times of hardship (emotional development, dramatic changes in our lives, stressful circumstances, etc.) in particularly sensitive subjects.

RELIGIOUS THEORY

According to this theory, this man is the image of the Creator, that is to say, one of the forms in which God manifests himself today. This is the reason why his indications and the words he utters during the dreams should be decidedly followed by the dreamers.

DREAM SURFER THEORY

It is the most interesting theory and the one that has the greatest implications, but it has also the lowest scientific credibility. According to this theory, this man is a real person, who can enter people’s dreams by means of specific psychological skills. Some believe that in real life this man looks like the man in the dreams. Others think that the man in the dreams looks completely different from his real-life counterpart. Some people seem to believe that behind this man there is a mental conditioning plan developed by a major corporation.

DREAM IMITATION THEORY

This is a scientific psycho-sociological theory that claims that this phenomenon has arisen casually and has progressively developed by imitation. When people are exposed to this phenomenon they become so deeply impressed that they start seeing this man in their dreams.

DAYTIME RECOGNITION THEORY

This theory states that the apparitions of this man are purely casual. Normally we do not remember precisely the faces we see in our dreams. The image of this man would thus be an instrument which, in the subject’s waking life, facilitates recognition of an undefined oneiric image.

Now as I mentioned before at the start of this article that This Man might appear in your dreams once you have seen him. Well, it might not be true in most cases but it did haunt a fair chunk of people who came to know about This Man. The theory which supports it is the ‘Dream Imitation Theory’.

THIS MAN – A HOAX?

Upon This Man’s initial widespread exposure, there was suspicion from netizens that it was a guerilla marketing stunt, as they discovered the website called ThisMan.org, where for the first time the article about This Man was published.

The website was created in 2008 by Italian marketer Andrea Natella. The website was named Ever Dream This Man?

This website was the first to introduce This Man to the world, a person who was claimed to have been repeatedly seen in dreams by the whole world since 2006 but was never found in the real world. Natella created the site in 2008, but it was not until October 2009 that it gained attention from the press and online internet users.

This website was hosted by the same company that also hosted a site named guerrigliamarketing.it. “A fake advertising agency which designed subversive hoaxes and created weird art projects exploring politics and advertising,” described Natella.

A paper was published in 2012 where he wrote titled “Viral ‘K’ Marketing” finally confirmed that This Man was not real but rather a stunt.

However, while Natella admitted ThisMan.org was simply a marketing ploy, he never revealed what it was promoting; however, some sources suggest that it was meant to promote a film of the same name by Bryan Bertino, writer and director of The Strangers (2008).

Ghost House Pictures bought ThisMan.org in May 2010, who announced that they were writing and directing a film about This Man, with Bertino contracted as writer/director. No further announcement has been made about the film since.

CONCLUSION

So finally, we can conclude that This Man is just a hoax and a kind of marketing stunt performed by an Italian marketer Andrea Natella. Well, whatever this was, This Man did terrify a lot of people by the created dark story behind this spine-tingling creepy face.

But still, there are a lot of people who claim that they have seen this face in their dreams even after knowing the fact it’s nothing but a hoax. Their claim is very valid as the theory ‘Day time recognition theory’ does give the claims a reasonable reason.

Well, that was it for the article, thanks for reading, comment, like, share, subs- oh wait; after reading this article, you already might have 🙂
Well which theory do YOU believe in?
Let us know in the comments below!