Everyone’s Dream Man: Why Everyone Believes They Have Dreamt Of “This Man”

Sigmund Freud believed that a dream is a window into someone’s subconscious. Freud argued that dreams reveal a person's desires and repressed emotions. No matter how absurd a dream, it is related to reality. Heavily altered, but a dream is made up of what the mind has already seen, felt, and buried. That is what makes the story of “This Man” so unsettling.  Why did so many people on the internet believe they had dreamt of the same man? Dreams are often based on personal experiences, and no one knows this face outside dreamland. Are the memories of that man so repressed that the conscious mind forgot? That would be plausible, but only if there were a handful of people claiming that.  But here it’s the entirety of the internet. If dreams are rooted in memory and experience, then the mystery of “This Man” is not just why people saw him, but why so many were willing to believe they had.

 

The picture above is of “This Man”. In late 2008 or early 2009, Italian marketer Andrea Natella launched the website Ever Dream This Man? It had a fabricated story, a psychiatrist who claimed that several of his patients had seen the same man in their dreams. Soon this face was all over blogs, forums and sites. People debated. Was it real and creepy? Or was it a hoax? It was that uncertainty that furthered this theory. It touched a universal fear of invading something that was most private to us: our dreams. How can anyone know what's going on in the back of your mind unless you tell them? The concept of strangers sharing the dream felt both intimate and disturbing. Many people believed it was fake. The creator himself later revealed that the entire project was a guerrilla marketing campaign. But by then, this myth had transcended beyond a hoax, taking on a life of its own through memes, parodies and pop culture references.

 

The original website

Have you ever woken up only to have forgotten everything you’ve dreamt? All you remember is bits and pieces that remind you that the dream did occur. This is because dreams are unstable, fragmented and illogical. Dreams are not stored with the same clarity as everyday memories, which is why people soon accepted the possibility of having dreamt of this man. When the photo of This Man was being circulated, with the caption of thousands of people seeing this man in their dreams before, people started to reinterpret their vague dreams. People began searching through blurred dream fragments to find the closest possible match. But the thing is, This Man isn’t that hard to match. He was designed to be a generic middle-aged man that everyone must have seen, but can't really give a name to. Finding a past dream character with similar features wouldn’t have been too hard for the mind. Especially, considering that the mind doesn’t store dreams like concrete evidence. Meaning that if the memory isn’t perfect, the mind can simply reconstruct the memory to have had the man in the dream now. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, dreams are based on what you see in reality. And now that this face was widespread, people actually began to dream of him.

 

Unstable memory and being easily influenced aren’t the only reason This Man got so popular. Humans naturally search for meaning, even in random experiences. If you were naked in your dreams, then it means you are afraid of being exposed, and if you were falling, that means you're anxious because you’re losing control. Sigmund Freud even has a book called 'The Interpretation of Dreams’ where he decodes dreams to understand the unconscious mind. Dreams are personal and strange experiences that belong only to the dreamer. This Man changed that by offering the possibility that even the most private parts of the mind could somehow be shared with strangers. That idea was disturbing, but also strangely comforting. Rather than dismissing dreams as fragmented nonsense, people could now imagine that their subconscious was connected to something. Giving a meaning to the meaningless.

 

Illustration of Sigmund Freud conducting a psychoanalysis session

Before the internet, myths like Bloody Mary or alligators in the sewers spread by word of mouth. Today, forums, blogs, Reddit and social media perform the same role. Every repost, meme and personal "I saw him too" story made the myth seem more authentic. The community became part of the story itself. This man started as a quirky marketing strategy, only to become a modern urban legend or conspiracy theory. The phenomenon is similar to the Mandela Effect because it demonstrates how memory is influenced by suggestion and reinforced by other people's confidence, such as how Curious George has a tail in people’s minds, when he was always illustrated without one or how Mr Monopoly is remembered to wear a monocle despite never doing so. Memory is reconstructive rather than a perfect recording. Seeing thousands of people claim they dreamt This Man may have strengthened people's confidence in their own vague memories.

 

In the end, "This Man" revealed far more about the human mind than about dreams themselves. The greatest irony is that the real mystery was never whether he existed in our dreams, but why we were so willing to believe he did. This begs the question: Have you dreamt about This Man?