Ancient Web: This Man Turned a 2009 Dream Portrait into a Global Hoax

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

The website presents a blunt question beneath a peculiar portrait: have you dreamed about this man? Its story claims that strangers in different cities kept seeing the same unfamiliar face while they slept.

Visit the preserved This Man website.

The site's history page tells of a New York psychiatrist whose patient sketched a recurring dream visitor in 2006. Other patients supposedly recognized the face, and more than two thousand dreamers worldwide allegedly reported similar experiences. These are claims made by the campaign, not verified clinical findings.

The elaborate navigation builds credibility by repetition. There are dream accounts, competing explanations, portraits, news, a guestbook, and downloadable posters in multiple languages. Visitors are urged to print flyers and put them up around town.

The legend had a real-world publicity team

In November 2009, El País reported that the story was a fabricated internet legend associated with Italian communications specialist Andrea Natella. Far from a confirmed pattern in human dreaming, the mysterious figure belonged to an intentionally constructed campaign.

Artists Eva and Franco Mattes later documented their participation. They describe working with Natella and putting hundreds of posters around American cities, including New York, Memphis, Nashville, Austin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Their photographs provide a rare record of a webpage's message being seeded physically on street corners.

The preserved site's news archive links international coverage from October 2009 onward. It even contains a denial that the project has a hidden marketing agenda. That denial is part of the performance, not an independent assurance.

This is a later historical exception with a clear reason for inclusion: an internet-age urban legend manufactured through a website, posters, and online repetition, then documented by contemporary reporting and its collaborators.

The site survives in a directory marked oldsite. Its sections still show how the mystery was presented before explanations of the hoax became easy to find. Visiting it is an exercise in recognizing narrative design, not evidence of shared supernatural dreams.

Browse the original site alongside the artists' account.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.