Have you ever dreamed about this man?

Have you ever seen this man in your dreams?

According to the story, which is now more a creepypasta than real news, this man, as seen in the pic related to this article, has been appearing in people’s dream for ages, without anyone noticing. There’s something strange and off-setting about his facial features and his expression, both relaxed and unreadable.

The story goes that in January 2006 a woman from New York told his psychiatrist that she had been seeing a strange man in her recent dreams. The psychiatrist asked her to draw the face of the misterious individual and then forgot about the picture for days. That is since another one of his patients suffering from recurrent dreams saw the strange face and noted that he too had been seeing the man. The psychiatrist, amazed, proceeded to sending the picture to other colleagues with similar patients and people from all around the world started recognizing this man.

The news soon hit the Web and “This Man” became more and more famous, so much that even a site was created with the goal of spreading the news and helping people with similar dreams to get in touch with each others.

Many theories were made: either he was just a face with common traits that our brains were making since it was easily recognizable and generic in dreams, or it was a case of common hysteria. There were even some more eerie ones: the man was God himself, or an angel, an herald of misfortune, some kind of superhero who could manifest himself in people’s dream.

However, noone has been able to identify or find this man in real life and many people claimed it was just a hoax. Wanna know the truth?

Well… It was actually just a nice joke! The whole story and the fake news and website have recently been debunked: it was a psychological experiment lead by sociologist and marketer Andrea Natella to see how people could cope with “subversive hoaxes” and to see how fake news could take roots in the Web and in people’s mind.

So, now superhero jumping from dream to dream, just a clever business man and a lot of gullible individuals.