Why does the same person appear in people’s dreams all over the world?

We can see four to six dreams a night, experts say. However, only a small part of what we dream is remembered – only five percent of what we dream.

Meanwhile, Swiss scientists have found out that dreams help us learn. Even the strangest and most frightening of them make the brain feel and generalize everything that happens to us in everyday life. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine that some fantastic scenarios drawn by our imagination could appear in someone else’s head.

What does the man look like who thousands of people around the world have allegedly seen in their dreams? Why do many people think that this is a real person? And how does science explain this phenomenon? Tells “Mysteries of Humanity” program with Oleg Shishkin on REN TV.

Either a man or a vision

Those who believe in the existence of this man post his photofit on social networks and ask users: “Look closely. Look into his eyes. Remember the sly half-smile. Suddenly you will remember that you saw him too.” Already 8,000 people claim that they dreamed of him.

How a Patient’s Drawing Spawned a Global Mania

In 2006, a patient at a New York psychiatric hospital woke up in terror again. As soon as she closed her eyes, an image of a man appeared in her head. The same one who haunted her every night. She didn’t know him and had never seen him in real life.

The doctor asked the woman to draw a stranger, hoping it would help her. But it got worse. And for other patients.

“This drawing remained on the psychiatrist’s desk, and by a strange coincidence another patient appeared who, as it turned out, had seen the same man in his dreams. This story confused psychiatrists in Europe, America and Asia. They tried to show this portrait to their patients, and it turned out that this same man had been dreaming of their patients as well,” said neuropsychologist Svetlana Kolobova.

The man came into the dreams of patients in psychiatric clinics and behaved like he owned the place: he gave instructions, was sarcastic, swore… But he didn’t tell anything about himself.

“He appeared in such a hat, a torn jacket and told them, ordered them – go north. And his people called him He or This One. And so they say, This One also dreamed of me,” – General practitioner Sergei Dlin reported.

Solving the mystery of “that man”

All this could be considered mass insanity among already mentally unstable people. Until It happened in a dream to the Italian sociologist and marketer Andrea Natella.

“This man who came to him in a dream and ordered him to make a website about him. Andrea Natella was very surprised by this, but he did it anyway. And after some time, a huge number of comments from different countries of the world began to be left on the website about how this man had been seen by completely different people and absolutely healthy people, that is, who were not mentally ill,” – noted general practitioner Sergei Dlin.

Two years later, Andrea Natella confessed: he made it all up. The hoaxer made up a composite sketch based on the drawing of that very patient of the American psychiatric clinic – the doctors posted the image on the Internet. But the mysterious stranger did not appear in his dreams. And Natella created the website to attract attention to his art project. The Italian planned to make a documentary about the phenomenon of This Man. A marketing ploy.

But what about the thousands of users who visited the site and wrote in the comments that they also saw a scary man?

“This film, despite the fact that it was somehow widely announced and made almost the entire world wonder, this film never came out on the screens. On the other hand, this amazing man continued and continued to appear in people’s dreams all over the world,” – said neuropsychologist Svetlana Kolobova.

False recognition syndrome

No one actually dreamed about him, scientists say. All this is just a vivid manifestation of false recognition syndrome. Our brain is designed in such a way that it divides dream characters into two categories: main and secondary.

So, the main ones are us and our loved ones. And the secondary ones seem to have no face, it is as if blurred. But when a person tries to see the features, the brain “finishes” them – and takes those images that people have already seen: in magazines, on TV, on the Internet.

“As an example or metaphor: there is a computer, and it lacks some software, and so they are filled. Our brain also fills some voids, for example, with images or some people that we have seen somewhere on the Internet, or in a movie, or somewhere else. And they appear there randomly,” – explained general practitioner Sergei Dlin.

Most likely, those who allegedly dreamed of this man had already seen his photofit on the Internet, but did not attach much importance to the strange story at that time. And then the memorable image materialized in a dream.

The pareidolia effect

And here the effect of pareidolia kicked in. This is what they call a visual illusion when people see people’s faces in a variety of objects, and recognize their friends in passersby on the street.

Here too: those who dreamed of someone even remotely similar to the mystery man, looking at the composite sketch, convinced themselves that it was him.

“The image of a mystery, which, on the one hand, is frightening, on the other hand, excites people’s imagination. And people, let’s say, who are worried, who are not exactly sick with something, but who have, let’s say, a well-developed imagination, imaginative thinking, of course, could be included in this false memory,” – neuropsychologist Svetlana Kolobova clarified.

By the way, according to anthropologists, pareidolia is a wonderful evolutionary mechanism. We inherited it from primates, who also have this feature. Pareidolia helped our distant ancestors establish social connections with strangers, because they saw some “native” features in them.

“It is better to have a highly sensitive system inside yourself that clearly recognizes, but can make mistakes, than not to have it. This allows us to understand “friend or foe”. For example, we interact with a person, I know that he is my friend, I recognized him, and another person, for example, he is my enemy – that’s it, I recognized him too. This actually provides a basic need for security,” explained general practitioner Sergei Dlin.

This mechanism works flawlessly in infancy: the child learns to recognize the parents’ faces, and when he sees a “stranger” he cries loudly. After all, the baby has a direct connection: unfamiliar, therefore dangerous. And with age, the peculiarities become more and more apparent. Today, the abundance of visual information especially affects this.

“We really like looking at people’s faces. Our brain likes to compare faces with each other, correlating it with familiar faces, say, from our company. This is exactly what the creators of social networks play on again, when the endless feed that some not quite conscious comrades scroll through in the evenings, but they get their portions of dopamine, including from looking at faces for a long time,” – noted neuropsychologist Svetlana Kolobova.

The theory of “dream surfing”

But, of course, impressionable people are not so easily convinced. Many believe – This person exists in real life and penetrates into other people’s dreams to convey some important information. Based on such speculations, even the theory of “dream surfing” was born.

“This is a situation when a person has certain abilities, knows how to penetrate the psyche, the head, the dreams of different people in a certain way. In fact, there is such a science – psychology, a really strong science, and if you delve into how they work with people, a lot of changes that are made in the psyche, they are made with the help of certain images that a person imagines under the guidance of a psychologist,” – explained general practitioner Sergei Dlin.

Prophetic dream or rich imagination?

But there are times when dreams do come true. A year ago, an American woman named Nadia shared an amazing story with her subscribers: she dreamed of a man for several nights in a row. He said his name was Julius. Nadia had not seen him before, but a week later she met him… in a store near her home. Even the name matched.

“There is even such a concept as a “prophetic dream”. There are people with a certain sensitivity, intuition you could call it, who can take images that are in the subconscious, they are pulled out in the form of images already. And if these people understand that they have a special, well, this is, in fact, a special gift, sensitivity, which they understand how to read, they can also read these dreams, interpret them in a certain way,” – noted general practitioner Sergei Dlin.

Or maybe the Julius Nadia met in the store is just the namesake of the man from her dream. And a rich imagination, as in the case of the composite sketch and the thousands of people who saw the mysterious stranger in their dreams, filled in all the missing elements.

By the way, many Internet users do not lose hope and continue to search for This. They publish images on social networks with the hope that he will turn out to be someone real, and not a figment of fantasy.

You can learn about incredible events of history and modern times, about amazing inventions and phenomena in the program “Mysteries of Humanity” with Oleg Shishkin on REN TV.