HISTORY

This story was first posted as a thread on x by @haveseenthisman. What follows below is the full text, taped on here as a second sheet.

i need to write this down while i still remember it in order. three weeks ago i woke up at 3:47am and i knew someone had been talking to me. not in the room. in the dream. usually dreams fall apart when you grab them, but this one stayed whole, like it had been laminated. there was a man. suit, no tie, hair a little tired. he was smiling the way a customer service employee smiles at minute nine of a call. i think i was trying to open a door, and he put his hand flat on it and said, we've temporarily disabled that. that's it. that was the whole dream. i laughed about it at breakfast. then it happened again two nights later. this time i wasn't at a door, i was at a vending machine, and my dollar wouldn't go in, and he was standing next to the machine like he worked there, and he said, this is to protect you. i told my roommate because it was funny. he didn't laugh. he went to his room and came back with a notebook from college and turned it around to a page. it was the same man. same smile, same eyebrows, one raised a little higher like he knows something you don't. my roommate said he drew it in february 2021 after a week of the same dream, and never told anyone because of how it sounds. here's where i should have stopped. i posted the sketch in a group chat as a joke. has anyone seen this man. i expected zero replies. i got four. four people out of eleven. one said she checks a door in her hallway every night and it's always locked and he always says the same sentence, and she could not remember the sentence until she read my message, and now she can't stop hearing it. one guy just left the chat. so i did the thing you do at 2am. i made a spreadsheet. forty-one people so far. i ask everyone the same six questions. when did it start. what does he say. what were you doing in the dream. what does he stop you from doing. does anything fall from the ceiling. what were you doing in january 2021. that last question. i want to be careful here because this is the part where people stop believing me. all forty-one of them, and i mean all forty-one, were trading during the last week of january 2021. the week everything got frozen. you remember. some of them lost real money and some of them lost eleven dollars, but every single one of them was staring at the same disabled button on the same morning, and now, five years later, they dream about a calm man in a suit who won't let them through doors. the dream has rules. we've compared notes. you can always leave a place. you can never enter one. any door out swings open by itself. any door in, he is standing in front of it, pleasant, patient. if you cry in the dream, confetti falls from the ceiling, green, completely silent, and he watches it fall like it's a job well done. one woman shouted at him for a full hour and he waited for her to finish and said, you are experiencing high volumes. a man in the spreadsheet swears there is a single feather in his breast pocket where a tie should be. nobody has ever seen him blink. nobody. i ask that question first now. and there's a progression i don't like. the more people i interviewed, the more often he came. like the attention feeds him, or forwards your call to him, i don't know the right way to say it. week one i saw him twice. this week it was five nights out of seven. last night i stood at a turnstile with my hands in my pockets. he was on the other side. i didn't even try to go through, i know the rules now. and he leaned in a little, still smiling, and said something new. he has never said anything new before. he said, you found the others. good. i don't know what to do with that, so i'm doing the only thing that ever worked. in 2009 someone put a face on a poster and asked a stupid question and thousands of strangers answered it. i printed two hundred of these. they go up tonight. if you have seen this man in your dreams, report it below. what he said, what he stopped you from doing, what time you woke up. check the time especially. write it down before it fades. it's always 3:47.

The aim of this website is:
- to help those who have seen this man in their dreams and to foster communication among them;
- to understand who this man is and why he appears after that week, in an apparently pattern-less array of situations.

If you have seen this man in your dreams, report it on x.

x: @haveseenthisman  ·  $THISMAN