“Ever dream this man?“, did you dream of this man? This phrase at the turn of the 2010s began to become a sort of catchphrase online, thanks also to the association with the strange identikit of a balding man with thick eyebrows. Looking at him, numerous users claimed to have actually dreamed of him at least once in their life… but who is he really? And why do so many people claim to have seen it in dreams? To better understand how this urban legend was born, we must start from the site thisman.orgthe portal created to try to identify him.
Thisman.org, online dissemination
According to what is reported on the site’s homepage, the first portrait of the man was created in New York in 2006 by a psychiatric patient who claimed to frequently see this person in her dreams. The psychiatrist kept the drawing and only a few days later a second patient identified it as “dream man”. A coincidence? Possible, but in a short time more and more people confirmed that they knew him and, after putting the photo online, reports began to arrive from all over the world.
This was how the portal was born thisman.org and flyers like this began to appear around many cities around the world, inviting people to share all the information they had, so as to solve this “mystery” once and for all.
No one on the blog was able to answer this question with certainty: according to some users it would have been the face of Creator, according to still others it would be a person with “supernatural” powers able to move from one dream to another. In short, many theories, many identikits – as visible in the image below – but no answers. So, who is really the man of dreams?
Who is really the man of dreams? Origin of the legend
Like all “mysteries” of the web, there is often a lot of explanation simpler than it seems. In fact, some users became suspicious and began to think that this story, in reality, was nothing more than a hoax. They then tried to verify the IP address of the site and realized that it belonged to one Italian companythe Kook Artgency. But not only that: they also discovered that it was already managing another site called guerrigliamarketing.it.
The image of the man of dreams, therefore, was nothing more than part of an advertising campaign or, better said, a social experiment which – later – was discovered to have been orchestrated by the creative Andrea Natella. The identikit of the man was supposedly obtained through a simple software, combining some of the most recurring facial features: this is why many experienced a strange sensation of déjà-vu!
