“Every night throughout the world hundreds of people dream about this face.
In January 2006 in New York, the patient of a well-known psychiatrist draws the face of a man that has been repeatedly appearing in her dreams. In more than one occasion that man has given her advice on her private life. The woman swears she has never met the man in her life.
That portrait lies forgotten on the psychiatrist’s desk for a few days until one day another patient recognizes that face and says that the man has often visited him in his dreams. He also claims he has never seen that man in his waking life.
The psychiatrist decides to send the portrait to some of his colleagues that have patients with recurrent dreams. Within a few months, four patients recognize the man as a frequent presence in their own dreams. All the patients refer to him as THIS MAN.
From January 2006 until today, at least 2000 people have claimed they have seen this man in their dreams, in many cities all over the world: Los Angeles, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Tehran, Beijing, Rome, Barcelona, Stockholm, Paris, New Dehli, Moskow etc.
At the moment there is no ascertained relation or common trait among the people that have dreamed of seeing this man. Moreover, no living man has ever been recognized as resembling the man of the portrait by the people who have seen this man in their dreams.” [Read more (http://www.thisman.org)]
I saw this a couple weeks ago. The web site has a page of theories, but I suspect the explanation is more mundane: something about features are generic enough that a lot of people recognize it, or more mundane: suggestion. If your psychologist asks you “Have you seen this man in your dreams?” you’re much more likely to say yes than if he asked you to describe the most common person in your dreams and have the results be recognizable very similar to this.
Your thoughts, Eliot?
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I agree, Stan. This would be more impressive if each patient worked with a different sketch artist and we ended up with a lot of independent sketches that all looked alike. The power of suggestion element in showing the picture leaves room for plenty of doubt.
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Call me crazy, but this ain’t nuttin’ but a website based on an unsubstantiated and quite possibly fictional anecdote. Stan’s mundane explanation may be just what the perpetrators are endeavoring to demonstrate.
Or perhaps there’s a profit motive lurking here?
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I don’t actually find this man’s face to be generic or commonplace but rather distinctive, and the dreamers comment on hiis appearance being unusual. However, I do agree, there are mundane explanations for most paranormal claims. I follow alot of the paranormal field for two reasons. IAs a student of the human mind, I am endlessly fascinated and amused by how easy it is for us to deceive and delude ourselves, to see evidence of what it is we wish to believe. But I am fascinated by the residue of seemingly inexplicable phenomena that point to the limitations of our current explanatory paradigms. The ‘paranormal’ is probably just the ‘normal’ that has yet to be explained. That being said, in this case the story goes that it was not, at least initially, the shrink asking the patient, “Have you seen this man in your dreams?” or even “Have you seen this man?”, but rather the patients noticing the sketch and offering unbidden that the man had visited them in their dreams.
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Why is anyone taking the undocumented origin of this story and giving it any credence? Discussing the phenomenon of suggestion is one thing, but referring to the precipitating event in January 2006 as an actual occurrence is beyond me. Does anyone know the “well-known psychiatrist” in the original fiction?
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And I’m going to sleep now. Perchance to dream. I’ll let you know who I see.
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Well, Abby?
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