This Man (Ever Dream This Man) — Black and white sketch of a man's face with thick eyebrows, dark hair, and a slight smile.

This Man (Ever Dream This Man)

2009creepypastaclassic

Published October 3, 2026

This Man, also known as Ever Dream This Man?, is a 2009 internet myth built around a crude portrait of a balding, beady-eyed stranger that thousands of people supposedly see in their dreams. Launched as a viral stunt by Italian marketer Andrea Natella, the hoax spiraled into one of the defining creepypasta mysteries of the late 2000s.

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Overview

This Man centers on a flat pencil sketch of a middle-aged guy with heavy black eyebrows, a receding hairline, thin lips, and vacant eyes. The pitch attached to the drawing claims that unrelated psychiatric patients across the world keep describing the same face appearing in their dreams, usually as a calm, almost helpful presence1. The site thisman.org collected these alleged testimonies and included a few additional sketches said to be drawn by other dreamers2.

The appeal of This Man is that it reads like a tidy supernatural puzzle. The original site framed it with Jungian terms, floating theories about collective unconscious archetypes, dream skippers, or even God, while readers argued over whether a shared dream face was medically possible1. The portrait itself does most of the work: it is bland enough to look like someone you half remember, which is exactly the hook the campaign needed3.

Origin & Background

Platform
thisman.org (source) / 4chan, Reddit, io9 (viral spread)
Creator
Andrea Natella
Date
2009

The copypasta and portrait first appeared on thisman.org, registered in September 2009 by Italian viral marketing specialist Andrea Natella2. Natella runs the Rome-based agency Guerrilla Marketing, which specializes in subversive hoaxes and provocative art stunts, and he eventually acknowledged the project as one of his constructions3. The site asserted that since January 2006 at least 2,000 people in cities including Los Angeles, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Tehran, Beijing, and Moscow had reported seeing the same man in their sleep1.

The setup described on the site is tidy fiction: a New York patient allegedly draws the face in January 2006, another patient recognizes it on the psychiatrist's desk, and the sketch is then circulated among colleagues who find more matches1. The campaign was later briefly linked to Ghost House Pictures, which optioned the concept for a planned horror film written and directed by Bryan Bertino4.

How It Spread

Through October 2009 the sketch jumped from thisman.org onto 4chan, Reddit, Metafilter, and the StraightDope and Facepunch forums, where users traded theories and tried to debunk it3. io9 covered the mystery that same month, asking readers whether they had dreamed about the man and reprinting both the backstory and sample first-person testimonies lifted from the site1.

As the story climbed, amateur sleuths pulled WHOIS records and started tying the domain back to Natella and Guerrilla Marketing, which pushed the discussion from paranormal speculation into viral-marketing autopsy3. YouTube uploads built on the hook with short mystery edits using the drawing and ambient music, including one of the earliest widely shared clips titled around the Ever Dream This Man? framing5. Curiosity bled over into Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers, where users asked flatly whether the man was real6.

The hoax hardened into a reference point for later dream-based creepypastas and influenced the 2024 Netflix horror film Dream Scenario-adjacent discussions, though the central site stayed online as the canonical artifact of the stunt2. Ghost House Pictures' option on the material tied it, at least briefly, to Bryan Bertino's horror pipeline4.

Timeline

2006-01

Fictional in-universe start date claimed by thisman.org: a New York patient allegedly draws the face for her psychiatrist.

2009-09

Andrea Natella registers and launches thisman.org as a viral marketing project.

2009-10-21

Io9 publishes 'Why Are Thousands Of People Dreaming About This Man?', pushing the story to mainstream readers.

2009-10

Threads about the sketch spread across 4chan, Reddit, Metafilter, StraightDope, and Facepunch; users begin unmasking Natella.

2009-10

Early YouTube edits using the portrait and the Ever Dream This Man? framing circulate.

2010-02

Yahoo Answers users still asking whether This Man is real, showing the hoax outlived its initial news cycle.

Frequently Asked Questions