'Tis the season to be pranking, and there appears to be a good one underway: 'Ever Dream This Man?' ... more about that in a minute.
Earlier this week we covered viral cross-media campaign 'Birds vs Humans', created by agency Holler Sydney for - disappointingly enough - 5 Seed Australian cider. (Read that story here.) It started out mysteriously, with anonymous blondes delivering weathered metal boxes full of bird eggs and post-apocalyptic polaroids. A genuinely sinister story opening that ultimately fell flat due to its inevitable product related reveal.
So when news began to filter through to us over the past few days about a shadowy man - known only as 'This Man' who appears in people's dreams throughout the world, we dug in with heightened skepticism. Is this urban myth, viral hoax, or genuine supernatural phenomenon? Here's what we found out ... you be the judge.
One of the earliest blurbs about this appeared on Presurfer on October 13:
"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. 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. 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."
That post was picked up by Neatorama on October 14, and Really Good Magazine ran with that today. That's when we decided it was time to weigh in.
It didn't take much digging to discover that the website promoting the tale (www.thisman.org) has been registered to a woman man in Italy since January 2008. By itself, not enough to discount the claims (although This Man is reported to have been a recorded phenomenon since 2006).
A little more tunneling, however, quickly undermined the credibility of the source. According to Logicpunk at Metafilter, "The registrant of thisman.org, Andrea Natella, is the director of guerrigliamarketing.it, an advertising agency that uses non-conventional communication techniques, like the creation of fictitious events or campaigns reaching the limits of legality, through which they 'fuck the market in order to enter it'."
So there it is, a perfectly creepy, subversive, cross-media narrative, unravelled because a marketer failed to spend an extra seven bucks a year to mask the WhoIs information through the domain registrar.
At this point, the mind-screw - if you still wish to engage - is trying to figure out what the hell Natella and Guerriglia Marketing are actually promoting here. If it ends up being cider, I'm going to be pissed. If, on the other hand, it's a mind-screw for giggles alone, it still deserves some marks ... although points are coming off for the sloppy execution with the domain.
Keep your eyes open for the root of this undertaking, and let us know what you find.
As a parting note, someone with Youtube username giddycarousel posted this video version of the This Man poster with about ten minutes of 70s synth horror music. No idea if they're in on it or not, but I can assure you that if you watch the full ten minutes, you will see This Man in your dreams.
