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Andrea Natella: It was during the winter of 2008 when This Man popped up in a dream. He invited me to create a website to find an answer to his own appearance. I used facial composite software and I took the first one I could find and designed his face: round shape, bushy eyebrows, thin lips, and a receding hairline. I circulated this draft among the colleagues of mine at my advertising office and among some international artists I know who all liked the project concept. I collected feedback and hints and so I built thisman.org, following This Man's instructions from that dream.
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I'm afraid we don't have acknowledgment of his voice. Usually in our dreams we tend to remember more the visual part and rarely the audio one. It's very rare to find someone remembering a voice; at best they can remember a song. Usually This Man never speaks; sometimes he just stands by a door, and if he does speak, he uses a native language of dreamers.The sketch on your website kind of looks like what I stereotypically imagine when I think of a pedophile. But he also kind of looks like a dentist I used to have. Have you ever seen someone in real life that you thought could be This Man, or heard significant stories of people who have?
We receive thousands of [letters in the mail] each month. One third of them are about who This Man resembles. The most common associations are The Man from Another Place from Twin Peaks, the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the English composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, or The Twilight Zone Dummy. A lot of people are confident they are themselves This Man like the Indian guru Arud Kannan Ayya who uses him as proof of his powers.In many of the accounts of his interactions with people, This Man seems passive, like his presence alone is stronger than anything he could say or do. And yet that inactivity, the repeating appearance, seems somehow active in itself, violent even. Throughout the reports you've received, have you heard of any examples of concrete actions taken by This Man?
Actually we have two big categories of dreams. The first one concerns typical nightmares where This Man scares, chases, kidnaps, and sometimes kills the dreamer. The second category is totally different. Here, This Man is friendly, he just stares at the dreamer sometimes helping him in such a way. It seems like a gnostic struggle between evil and good but it could also be a complementarity, as Yin and Yang.
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Andrea Natella: We constantly try to understand this point, but we have no clue about what This Man wants, or if he wants something at all. One thing seems clear: This Man is a kind of wormhole. Some people are confident he is just my invention, but I am only a point in a time loop. This Man was dreamed even before I could draw his face. Even before the first patient identified him in New York.We have evidence of people dreaming about him 30 years ago. Every day we receive news about kids who have begun dreaming about him somewhere new in the world. I believe it's not This Man who does time traveling, but it's us who moves through a fourth dimension. It's a loop with no chicken, nor the egg.I think the key factor of This Man's success on the web is his ability to represent an extra dimension. As we travel in the global space with a click, we can also "time travel" with a dream. He is a kind of star in the nights of Captain Ahab who help us to catch our inner whale.Is there anyone people who have not dreamed of This Man could train themselves to find him in sleep, or even in person, or online?
Of course we could induce ourselves to dream about This Man. Dreams are made of thoughts and daytime facts. Everyone who saw the design sketch could dream about him. Once, someone even attempted to increase the number of dreams by putting a picture of him on the bedside table and this appeared to work well. Perhaps they don't really dream This Man, they only dream a simulacrum of him.So we should prefer people that have recognized him only after having really dreamed him. We actually don't really know if This Man is a set of dreamlike facts, or if he is a man at all, or a simulacrum of himself. But if This Man really is a wormhole among dimensions, maybe this distinction is futile.Follow Blake Butler onTwitter.