This Man

[2] Anonymous stories from alleged witnesses vary in his behavior and actions in their dreams, whose content ranges from romantic or sexual fantasies, attacking and killing the dreamer, to giving cryptic life advice.

[4] Several people claimed they themselves were This Man, including an Indian guru named Arud Kannan Ayya, who cited it as proof of his miraculous powers.

[7] In a short period of time, it garnered more than two million visits and 10,000-plus emails from people sharing experiences with This Man and sending photos of those who looked like him.

[5] In 2010, Natella made a post on the website of KOOK Artgency, an art agency company he founded,[11] where he confirmed that he invented the story of This Man as a publicity stunt.

Natella said that he was inspired by the concept of dream invasion, which he had encountered in some movies and books, and that he wanted to explore the power of the internet to create and spread urban legends and collective myths.

"[12] Although Natella never confirmed whether the project had a commercial purpose, sources like The Kernel said it was "almost certain" that the site was specifically created as a guerrilla marketing campaign for Bertino and Ghost House's film.

"[13] io9 writer Annalee Newitz called This Man "Natella's greatest masterwork", reasoning that it was only "uncanny", "cheesy and a little bit scary" instead of having "artsy pseudo-intellectual 'politics' like a lot of his other art does.

"[10] Vice expressed that while This Man does not exist, he "properly looks like the kind of dude you might see in a dream", where "he pats you on the back and you feel warm and nostalgic.

"[13] A 2014 article from the fringe science website Mysterious Universe claims that people experiencing the same type of dreams is possible; it cites not only Jung's archetypal theory but also Ervin László's pseudoscientific theory of the Akashic Field, saying "should it prove true that our thoughts do not reside within our own heads, but rather exist in the ether, then couldn't some of us be accessing the same information in our subconscious during dreams?

flyer, replacing This Man's face with headshots of characters and public figures like Robbie Rotten, Karl Marx, and Barack Obama.