This Paranormal Life - #238 Have You Ever Dreamed of This Man?

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

In 2008, a website appeared online with a simple question - "Have you dreamed of this man?". The website included a black and white sketch of a strangers headshot, along with an elaborate backstory  that claimed that this mysterious individual had been appearing in peoples dreams. Who was this bizarre man? What does he have to do with the Willamette Valley Dream Survey? Time to investigate...Support us on Patreon.com/ThisParanormalLife to get access to bonus episodes!Buy Official TPL MerchFollow us on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTubeJoin our Secret Society Facebook CommunityAdvertise on This Paranormal Life via Gumball.fmEdited by Kami TomanResearch by Amy GrisdaleIntro music by www.purple-planet.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why are cacti so prickly? Why don't they want us to touch them? What happens if you wear shoes on your hands? All of these questions you can find the answer to on This Paranormal Life! Hello everyone and welcome back to This Paranormal Life, the comedy paranormal podcast where every week we investigate a brand new paranormal tale, case, claim, beast, and come to a conclusion at the end of the show as to whether or not it is truly paranormal. My name is Roy Powers. Across from me sits Kit Greer. And as you know, we are two men who have been involved unwillingly in the paranormal for our entire lives.

Since we were born, we have been surrounded by ghosts, goblins, ghouls, and it's followed us until now when we are no longer babies, but bigger babies. My first birthday party turned into an exorcism. It really went downhill fast. My upper sixth formal at school. An exorcism. Yeah, they didn't get it. They didn't get it the first time. Yeah, so it actually hung around. Your wedding day? I won best demon at my upper sixth form on my wedding day.

We've talked about it before. We booked the wedding venue and it turned out the venue itself was haunted. That's not even a joke. No, it really isn't. And it's also not even a joke to say that Rory broke into the haunted part of the castle at about 2 a.m. Well, it's not a lie, but it is classified because I think the people who own the hotel might listen to the podcast. Statute of limitations.

Yes, it happened a long time ago. And in my defense, I was very drunk. That's not a defense. Can you be arrested for that? I think you were smoking cigars at the same time too. Kicked down the door to the haunted house with a martini in one hand and a cigar in the other. Like Winston Churchill. Listen up you ghosts. Get him out of here. It's the hotel manager's office. Look, I know it's fun to have a little joke, a little teehee at the start

of the podcast. Sure. But this is not a podcast to be joking on. This is a serious case and we haven't had a serious case in a while. It's true. Not since the floating pumpkin UFO. And we need to try it because we need to bag that double yes. Exactly. We know you guys love your laughs and your cackles and your jokes, but also you love your hard hitting paranormal stories. And that's what we're going to give you today. Our story today begins in 2008, when a strange website appeared online. The website was called thisman.org. And it asked just one question. Have you dreamed of this man? The website claimed that in New York City back in 2006, a woman had gone to visit a psychiatrist, complaining that she'd been having weird dreams

recently that were unnerving. Now these weren't your regular scary dreams, where you're naked at school, or your teeth fall out, or you're being chased in a big field with people who have lobster claws that all look like your mother. This woman was dreaming of something very specific. Or should I say someone? I'm feeling this may link back somehow to the thisman of thisman.org. Possibly. Not to be confused with thisman.com, one of my favorite websites. What is that? What is that? It's mostly pictures of men's thighs. Oh, right. It's kind of like a rate this thigh type situation. Sexy. It's like penisland.com. You ever been to Pen Island?

No, I haven't. No. Spell it out, guys. It's not what you think it is. That got me in trouble in high school because I love all my pens, my BICs, my Biros. And a kid was like, hey, if you love pens, you should head on over to penisland.com. You actually own the URL penisland.org for your, just a blog about your pen collection. The school found out about penisland.com and weren't best pleased.

Yeah. It's penis land, guys. I feel like some of you weren't getting it. It's penisland.com. I feel like some of you weren't getting it. It's penisland.com. And the pens are meaty. For weeks, if not months, she was dreaming about the same man. This man would turn up, listen to her talk about her problems, and on several occasions, even offered her advice on how to deal with things in her personal life. Weird. This is some kind of dream therapist? Yeah. He doesn't have like a face made of spiders

and and knife fingers he's just showing up in his dreams and listening to her problems which i guess is a pretty good dream invader to have yeah yeah because the problem with dreams is we don't get control over what happens in them really yeah unless you're lucid dreaming. So you better hope that whoever does come to visit you in your dreams is at least a decent house guest. The strangest part about this story was that she had never met this man before in her life. As she told her story, the doctor listened intently, suggesting that it might help if she sketched the face

that she was seeing every night. So that's what she did. When she was done, the psychiatrist looked into the man's eyes. And are you absolutely positive that you've never met this man? I swear! The psychiatrist was a little skeptical, to say the least. Because, I don't know if you know this about dreams, but there's actually an interesting theory that the faces of the people we see in our dreams, even strangers, are always people that we've seen in real life.

Right. I think I might have heard that before. Yeah, I think I'd heard it in the past and I was like, wow, that's an incredible fact to know and whip out of parties. And then when I Googled it before doing this episode, there was a lot of people that are like, no, you f***ing idiot. That's such a stupid thing to say. How on earth would anyone prove that that fact exists? Humans have like 40 dreams a night or something ridiculous like that. Yeah. That they forget almost immediately upon waking up. How could you ever say that a human has never dreamt of a face they haven't seen before?

Yeah, they say that like dream, I remember reading somewhere that dreams on average last seven seconds. Right. In the real world, in the non-inception world. And again, how could you prove this? I have no idea. It's just one of those little nuggets of information

that sounds so believable. Everyone just wants to believe it and believes it. Yeah. And I'm sure there is some justification where they're like, usually the people you dream about are people that you do know because that's why you're dreaming about them is because they're a conscious thought in your head. Which is kind of messed up because that would be fine back in hunter gatherer times. But now we live in a kind of uh metaverse of pop

culture references so okay the person who passes me in the street and flips me off might be my uncle or it might be the monopoly man right or the guy could it be the guy on the the tub of pringles or was it barney the dinosaur i don't know we're seeing a lot of faces our brains can't tell which people are real and which aren't that's interesting that yeah because we've been exposed to so much media our dreams compared to the dreams of a caveman are probably so much wilder yeah caveman dreams were definitely really like um like beautiful and layered with meaning there's like berries that are just out of reach. And every time he goes, the branch like lifts up.

And the next day he's like, I just couldn't get these berries. Maybe a saber tooth tiger runs up to attacks him, but then it shapeshifts into the form of his, you know, mother. And it's like, wow, what could this possibly mean? Yeah. Last night I dreamt Abraham Lincoln was having sex with Wolverine. I dreamt that Hugh Jackman was teabagging me in a capture the flag match of Halo 3. How is that fair or good or meaningful? Our brains are...

Yeah, what's the meaning behind that? Should I stop playing Halo? Well, they continued to talk about this man together, what he wanted, why he would be showing up, until... The session timer buzzed. The psychiatrist wished her well and said that he'd see her next week, leaving the bizarre sketch of the man carelessly on his coffee table. Later that week, the psychiatrist had another patient in the office. They took a seat and went to begin the session.

Good to see you, doctor. Yes, how have you been feeling lately? It's been a while since we last spoke. Not too bad. I've been trying- The man glared down at the drawing on the table. Where did you get this? Oh, I'm sorry. That's from another patient. But I dream about this man all the time. The doctor couldn't believe his ears.

Another one? How could this be? The patient swore that he didn't know this man in real life and had never seen anyone like him on film or TV. What the heck? This is getting weird, right? I told you he's going to get paranormal today. I mean, even as a fully trained psychiatrist, this has got to be a situation that you were not prepared to deal with. You know, you've probably heard some complicated things, people dealing with issues from their past, but at no point were you expecting

to deal with a Freddy Krdy krueger a dream hopper yeah yeah yeah yeah like someone walks in hey doctor oh great to see you how you've been doing lately well i thought we were making great progress in our last session and then i'll be honest i kind of dream terrorist entered my mind last night and uh started just hitting my memories and dreams uh with a sledgehammer all night long so we have a lot more work to do today like someone is inside his patient's mind sabotaging his very work and the doctor's grasping at any straw i can find he's like did it look like your father yeah nope did you see this guy from your childhood i'll be honest it was kermit the frog oh jesus did you ever watch i got nothing for that uh i also uh love the lack of

patient confidentiality just leaves the page sitting there and the next person comes in and he's just like what is that oh just Oh, just something a f***ing psycho drew in my last session. Anyway, come on in, you psycho. Oh, crazy Susan's drawings? Imagine if you were the next patient and you were like, you know, saw someone leave. And you're like, oh, nice to meet you. Yeah, I'm heading in for my session. You walk in, sit down on the coffee table.

And there's just a drawing of i don't know somebody f***ing a tally tubby on the table and it's like oh don't don't mind those don't mind those it's like whoa yeah uh just one of my previous patients drew that it's like that's a magazine that's that's a that's a centerfold of a magazine well the psychiatrist was so intrigued at this point that he decided to copy the drawing and send it round to some of his colleagues, making an effort to select sleep specialists that would have patients suffering with reoccurring dreams. I like this line of inquiry, taking it to experts who might know a little bit more about this than he does. Exactly, maybe this isn't his specialty. Within just a few months,

he and his colleagues came across four others who had seen the exact same man in their sleep. This is weird. I mean, if you were the psychiatrist in this situation, as you say, you're grasping at straws here. Like, what do you think it could be? Like, I feel like my first instinct would be like this is like i say a face from pop culture or history that i just can't put my finger on right or something right yeah i mean there probably have been times in history where people have had dreams of the same person but it would have been a prominent individual in pop culture it would have have been, you know, a celebrity or a singer. When I was a child and I had that very vivid dream of meeting Lizzie McGuire,

and then I awoke before I could get her phone number in the dream, I'm sure I wasn't the only child at the time dreaming of Lizzie McGuire. Or maybe I was. Maybe she only came to me in my dreams because she knew I was special. I'm going to go ahead and assume

because the Lizzie McGuire movie had just come out and Hey Now, Hey Now, her single was trending across the world, that there were a lot of children dreaming of Lizzie McGuire. That's a good analogy. Was it too far for my parents to bring me to a psychiatrist and draw Lizzie McGuire for him? I think so. And then for that drawing to subsequently leak to the school, making the laughing stock of our class. Yeah, I think that was a little bit too far. Was it too far for us as your friends to invite you to a hypnotist show and then prime the hypnotist beforehand all about the Lizzie McGuire story,

getting you on stage, hypnotizing you into thinking you were banging Lizzie McGuire on stage in front of a crowd of 2000 people? Maybe. Yeah yeah i think that was too far because it was filmed as well and like i was i really i really thought i went for it as well i really thought i was yeah was it too far when uh 15 years later you guys apologized for it and said you wanted to make amends by inviting me to a backstage meet and greet with Hillary Duff herself and then I show up and y'all are just behind a dumpster with a stuffed pinata of Lizzie McGuire and me too far yeah I think it was too far imagine falling for that you're so desperate to meet Hillary Duff you'll believe any story yeah we're so sorry we tricked you in the past if you could come to this scrap yard

at 3 a.m for a backstage meet and greet with lizzie mcguire backstage of what backstage of the scrap yard for real lizzie's gonna be there yeah she's gonna be there all right told she she requested that you dress in a f***ing gimp suit, a ball and gag, and to do an Instagram live when you turn up. Lizzie said that? Doesn't sound like her. Like you're so obsessed, but you don't know anything about Lizzie McGuire. If you took one cursory look at her Instagram, you'd know she was on holiday in South America. According to the website, it isn't just people in New York that have seen the man.

People have claimed to dream about him in Los Angeles, Berlin, Beijing, Rome, Barcelona, Stockholm, Paris, Moscow, and more. Well, that is interesting. Again, this just further rules out the possibility that this is some kind of local person that for some reason everyone knows. It's cross-border, cross-community, cross-culture, cross-language. Well, one easy way to find out if that hypothesis is true, Kit, is to show you a picture of the man and see if you recognize him. This is terrifying. What if I don't think I've seen a guy and then I see it and it unlocks thousands of memories of dreams that I've hidden away in my mind yeah buried since

childhood i will say it didn't necessarily this guy wedgies me every single night as soon as i close my eyes are you ready i'm ready let's go okay okay i'm gonna go right ahead and say i don't recognize this man uh necessarily um he's a very he's a he's a very striking man if if you had seen him you wouldn't forget him you'd You'd remember this face. We're talking comb over, monobrow, little square head, really creepy little smile that goes almost across his entire face, and a little button nose and sideburns. He's so like, he doesn't look evil, but he definitely doesn't look good. He looks like the lead scientist of a bioweapon in a Mission Impossible movie. Right, right, right. He's like the kind of creepy, quiet, smart guy who lingers in the background. I mean, he does look like someone that secretly found out how to enter other people's dreams.

Absolutely. And has been doing that. Yeah, the phase fits the the the story like if you showed me a picture of ryan reynolds i'd be like this doesn't add up yeah that's why this case is weird because i mean i would never dream of someone like that i've never seen someone like this no no that is not a person in pop culture yeah there's some there is something creepy about him i can't even imagine that face speaking words i feel like he would open his mouth and twin peaks style like some kind of reverse audio like yeah yeah or just static noise yeah yeah it's

this case is kind of unsettling at times, I will say. Now, some people online have even documented their dreams about this man. One anonymous user wrote, The first time I had a dream about this man, I was having a hard time at work. I had a dream about getting lost in a huge and deserted shopping mall. Suddenly, this man appeared, and I started running away from him. He chased after me for what seemed like an hour, until I found myself against a wall in the kids area in a supermarket. At this point, he smiled at me and showed me the way out towards the cash desks

and I woke up. Ever since that night, this man has appeared in all of my dreams. All of them? And he always gives me directions on how to get out of the dream and wake up. Jesus Christ, man. I wouldn't go to sleep anymore. How do you give someone directions on how to wake up in a dream? That's very creepy.

It's extremely meta. Like, that indicates that this guy, he's a Freddy Krueger. He controls the dream world. Yeah, he has the keys to the dream. He's not an NPC in this world. He is the keys to the dream. He's not an NPC in this world. He is the architect. Yeah, we're diving into his little universe every time we close our eyes. Yes.

So what are the possible theories around the man? Well, there are a few of them, to be fair. Some people say that, as we said, it's a real guy who has the Freddy Krueger ability to just enter other people's dreams. Others believe, and this is a bit of a wild one, that the man's face is an image that some sort of giant corporation is forcing into people's dreams. Yeah, it's in the tap water. As if it's like some sort of experiment to see if dreams can be manipulated. Yeah, I could see that. You know, something people never talk about

anymore is subliminal messaging. Remember when people would talk about subliminal messaging a lot that everyone believed it was possible to like just on tv programs or movies or videos online you could just flash up images in a millisecond and that somehow that would implant ideas and memories in people's heads yeah it would be like us telling a story and I'm like, so the people who were there that night, Patreon, no one actually, Patreon noticed that there was anything wrong with the Patreon house. Money. Exactly. And it didn't help that sometimes on TV stations and movies, things do flicker up occasionally. Things go wrong and whatever. And that led people to believe that

corporations advertisers companies were trying to subliminally market to people i don't know maybe there is evidence for that but um that idea has died out a bit yeah maybe as media has changed a little bit yeah i do like the idea of dreams being weaponized you know because we've all had that before where you go to bed you have a dream about someone where they're an asshole in your dream and you wake up the next morning and you see them and you're like you little you sprayed me you punched me in the jaw last night while i was sleeping and i know it't you, but I haven't forgiven you yet. And it's going to take some time. What if one night all of America has a dream where they're like, the f***ing Canadians are assholes.

And they all wake up collectively. And the next day, America's like, we're invading Canada. Yeah. You're like, yeah, it's about time. Those sons of bitches wiped their maple syrup asses with the American flag in my dream last night. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's absolutely true. If one person's dreams have such a great effect over their life, what could coordinating a nation of people's dreams do to a country? Imagine if all of a sudden every night you're dreaming of people doing bad shit to you. It's a pretty easy way to manipulate you into not liking those people. Interesting. So you're saying one of the theories is there could be some kind of shadowy government or corporate agent at work here trying to shape people's minds. a huge corporation like Disney beaming Lizzie McGuire into my head so that maybe I would become obsessed with her enough that I would book to see her live tour, go to see the movie a bunch of times. Maybe I was the victim in all of this. And it did work. You followed her around the country like it was the Grateful Dead. You were doing acid in the car park of every Lizzie McGuire show in the country. Surrounded by 11-year-old girls.

I'm tailgating. I got hot dogs grilling out the back of the Disney Stadium shows. Selling weed to children who thinks it's sweet. A much simpler theory is that some people believe this man represents sort of an archetypal image, like a blurry combination of the faces that we see in our everyday lives. Yes. And we have touched on these kind of things in the past.

This is like Carl Jung's archetypes that we've evolved over so many millions of years that we all share certain memories. Yeah. And this is illustrated in things like whenever people have like psychedelic trips they often see the same imagery people will see snakes lions tigers trees forests things that we have clearly evolved with and i think i mentioned in a previous don't know if it was a

main episode or a bonus episode but i talked about the joker uh that there's this kind of little jack-in-a-box uh clown that shows up that showed up in one of my trips uh and other people have seen him too so it's not outside the realms of possibility it would be incredibly disappointing if you took a large dose of a psychedelic for the first time and you're like you're like i'm excited man like i've heard people say that they've like seen this joker before you kind of like roll back close your eyes and you're like you're like i'm excited man like i've heard people say that they've like seen this joker before you kind of like roll back close your eyes and you just hear who did that who did that you're like oh i guess is this is the dmt joker that everyone sees the one that uh has been ingrained in human psyche for millennia and you just hear you see batman oh god yeah oh no i mean what you're experiencing now is to be removed from the shackles of society you're like oh this is oh i'm in arkham

asylum again i'm getting red pilled by the f***ing joker you're at a music festival you know on a sunny day on a hill with all your friends you just take one shroom going like all right let's see what all this peace love and happiness hippie lifestyle is all about you close your eyes all your friends are holding hands dancing together feeling the the universe and you're just sitting with a beer beside the Joker. Just be like, am I even tripping? This is so kind of normal. You think you're at a music festival, do you?

I've planted two bombs at the festival. You're running around, eyes like fucking saucers, ripping apart the speakers at the music festival. I gotta find the detonator. When the kid Leroy sings his final note for Stay, the bomb will detonate. You're gonna rush on stage. No! Grabbing Justin Bieber and the Kid LAROI.

Look, I'll be honest with you. The main theory behind this is that it's a hoax. What? I know. I hate when we have to do this. You just showed me the first piece of evidence. As I said, most of the info on the man comes from this website that was set up in 2006 by an Italian marketer named Andrea Natella.

Oh, here we go. Andrea came out and said that it wasn't real. Sure. But never explained why he created the site or what, if anything, it was supposed to be marketing. He just came out and said it wasn't real. Interesting. Also in the years since he created the website, multiple people totally unrelated to the site have come forward saying that they have had dreams of this man and told their stories about it. Who knows if that's because of seeing him online and then having dreams about him or having the dreams prior and then seeing the picture and recognizing him. Yeah. But look, this first story aside, the big question for today is could there possibly be some type of outside factor whether

it be a person or an organization affecting our dreams get ready for a roller coaster kit because we're about to uncover some paranormal shit you said that 20 minutes ago and then 20 minutes later said that was all a hoax but wait till you hear this one this one is a hoax is it real who knows because you were clearly withholding that information for the whole time we're about to deep dive into a world of the unknown and there's no red pill there's no blue pill there's just two sleeping pills. And you're taking them both. So you're not taking one? I'm going to hit myself with this hammer.

I don't believe in sleeping medication, so I'm just going to hit myself with a sledgehammer instead. The only sleeping medication I've ever taken is melatonin gummies, which you can't even get here in the UK. You can only get them abroad. I usually buy them when i'm in america but even them i'm like they're not like drowsy medication apparently they just make you have better sleep yeah it's just a hormone it's like not even a drug yeah and i'm knocking these gummies back 20 30 at a time they're fucking delicious it tastes like strawberries yeah and sure once i

slept for like three days but it was pretty good sleep and I would probably do it again. Dehydrated. How good can the gummies be? Even if you had a bag of f***ing Haribo's, you wouldn't eat 30. Flash forward to 2015. A Portland local is walking through a town one day, minding their own business, when they spotted a peculiar flyer stapled to a nearby telephone pole. It was an A4 size page with a worn look and

dirty edges. At the top of the page in a large font, it simply asked, Have you been having strange dreams lately? Below that it reads, The Willamette Valley Dream Survey is investigating a spike in bizarre, unexplainable dreams. If you've been experiencing any unusual dream activity, you can help by reporting a summary. Please call 971-258-1465 with a brief description of your dream. This is a picture of the poster. All right, this is cursed already. The page looks borderline bloodstained. This is bad.

If I saw this pop up in my neighborhood, I would move. Yeah, it's a very strange thing to see advertised. There's no such thing as the Willamette Valley dream survey. Also, that question is so loaded. Have you been having strange dreams recently? Sounds like you know I have, or you think I should be having them, and you need confirmation of that.

Like, imagine I just walked in today and I was like, hey, what's up, man? How you doing? You haven't had any f***ed up dreams recently? Would you not just be like, why would you ask me that? Yeah, this is just wrong in every aspect. I don't want to know who's on the other end of that phone, and they don't want to get calls from the the other end of that phone and that they don't want to get calls from the kind of people who would respond to this ad maybe they do who knows

i feel like you call that number and you're gonna be like hello hello have you been having strange dreams all right i'm gonna hang up no please don't go well dreams are such a dreams are such a weirdly kind of personal thing as well so to be like yeah i'll call this random number and tell a person about the dreams i've been having yeah it's so bizarre it feels this phone number it feels like a bizarre squid Game style phone number. Like a shadowy organization picks up the phone and is like, Tell me what happened last night. Yeah, yeah.

Have you dreamt about the man? Well, obviously the first thought that people had was that this is some sort of immersive art project or old ARG that someone had set up. But callers were surprised that when they called the number on the poster, it actually worked. Once it was dialed, this is what you heard. Taking a weirdly long time to pick up. Yeah. Should be an automated service. There's no way.

No one. Thank you for calling the Willamette Valley Dream Survey. Please leave a detailed account of your dream after the tone. Pretty nuts, right? Why would anyone tell their story? What can you possibly gain from this? At least, at least say, hey, we're research scientists doing important research into dreams and how it might affect um the medical um potential of of studying um

neuroscience and dreams um we desperately need volunteers in which to give their opinions on this thing it needs context yeah we need context for why this number exists and why I should give it to you. Not just a phone ringing for a minute straight and then, tell me about your dreams. Tell me about the nighttime realms where you go when your head reaches the pillow. Also, if you tell me, I own you. I own your personality. I own your dreams, your hopes, your ambitions.

Leave your message after the tone. Also, if you're the pizza delivery guy, use the back exit. The front one is locked and we don't have access. And while you're here, take a little nap. Rest those weary pizza delivery boy eyes of yours. This is f***ed. This is scary and weird And I would be surprised if anyone called And honestly told them a descript retelling of their dreams

This is illegal It should be illegal It feels like it should be illegal, right? Do you have the copyright to your own dreams? I mean, that's an intro question right there Who owns my dreams? Have you had any spooky dreams that you can recall vividly? If you saw this on a flyer in town, you would be like,

I should call because I have had a weird dream recently. I mean, you did have that dream that you talked about on the podcast where a cat stole your eyes. Yeah, a bit rich of me to stay quiet there for a second thinking when i have very publicly on a public forum shared one of my more strange dreams to be fair in my defense it hasn't got any stranger than that i don't really recall anything on that level for quite some time okay i mean that was setting the bar pretty damn high to be fair yeah a cat stealing my eyeballs and then saying it would be your eyes moving forward. Yeah. I'll be your eyes now or something like that. Yeah. Uh, yeah.

Other than that, can't think of much. What about you? I actually had a weird one about a week ago or so that was quite funny. My brother was in it and, uh, I don't remember what was happening specifically in the dream, but it was something that was so I was with my family and whatever was happening was so unrealistic that in the dream, I realized it must've been a dream. So then internally in the dream, I stopped being stressed and scared because I was like, Oh, this is so stupid. This must be a dream. And I was talking to my brother in the dream and he was like, what are you talking about? And I was like, oh, this is going to sound nuts, but I'm dreaming

right now. So like, none of this is real. That's why I'm not worried about it. And he was like, what? And I was like, yeah, like you're not, it's like, you're not my brother. You're, you're a dream version of him. So, you know, you're not real. And it's like, what the f**k did you just say? My brother in the dream started freaking out he was like well what happens when you wake up and i was like well it all goes away i this isn't real and he was like what the f**k do you mean it isn't real and then he grabbed me and then i got stressed and then i woke up and he disappeared he was like you f**ker i'm gonna make you stressed again how dare you not be stressed? And then I was genuinely worried to go to sleep the next night

because I was like, what happens if I fall asleep and then immediately I'm back getting shaken by him? And he's like, where the f*** did you go? You have gone for nine hours. Or it's like, I don't know if you remember that Flash animation game back in the day, which was really like thought provoking, man, where it was like a shooting game or something. You stick figures, you shoot these characters. Right. And then, you know, you play it once and shoot all these characters.

And then you'd like finish the level and go to replay the same level again. But all the characters were just dead and you're walking around and they're still dead. And you're like, oh, that's weird. And then you refresh your browser and the characters were just dead and you're walking around and they're still dead and you're like oh that's weird and then you refresh your browser and the characters are still dead this is that's a great idea for a game yeah oh my god that it was like kind of permanent like yeah you go back into your dream and everyone is just dead you're like the plug was pulled from all their heads yeah just like you said like the matrix uh that one was extra funny because the morning after it happened i texted my brother and uh i was like i was i texted him and i was like man i had this i had this nuts dream last night and within 30 seconds he texts back and was like did you get

stabbed and i was like what are you talking about he's like did you get stabbed in your dream last night i was like no i i didn't he's like he was like we both got stabbed in mine and the same night he'd had this nuts dream where some like foggy person that he couldn't recognize had broken into the house and stabbed both of us and he woke up when he got stabbed of course as you do if i had been walking to the studio the next day and seen this poster on the wall maybe i would have called maybe i would have thought there could have been no way that this is a coincidence with like you said just a tiny bit more context maybe you would have yeah yeah say

hey we're gonna use this uh as research in a student paper that we're writing or we're gonna sell this to the walt disney company so they can market you based on your dreams well hey i just want to know hey we're the dream police there's been a rise in dream stabbings lately we're trying to get to the bottom of it well as the post garnered more and more attention portland-based users were joining the discussion many freaking out because in the last few weeks they had been been having weird dreams. Oh, this is in Portland? This is in Portland. This makes a lot more sense. One user said, I've had two dreams that I can remember in my entire life before this week, but this week, I've had so many that I've woken up in a full panic sweat believing that they were real. Good lord. Similar posters appeared in Utah as recently as

2020 and were linked to a company in Portland called Futel. Now this company is weird. They are a company that sets up free phone booths around the city for the public to use. Sounds great. Very noble. They want to connect the world through free access to telephone lines. What are they getting out of this, though? Well, that's it. I've never known a company to do anything out of goodwill. There must be some sort of angle. And, of course, one way you could have that angle is a lot of these old payphones have, like, a directory service.

Right. So you can work with companies to have their number or facility in the directory, which means they're able to access it with just the click of a button. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. One of the numbers in that directory kit is the Willamette Valley Dream Survey. Hmm. Which means from any of these free pay phones with almost the click of a button, you can access this company that wants to hear about your dreams. Why on earth would that be one of the necessary facilities? Yeah, one of the select few services available in these phone booths.

So bizarre. I'm starting to think that that's the phone number you call and that gets you through to fucking Cypher who's in Zion. He'll like he'll like pull you out of the matrix if you can get to the hard line yeah if you're like hey i had a dream that like i don't know maybe this isn't the real world you can warp down through the telephone lines now with a little hunting users online did find that there was a man named kelly bulkhealy in portland who says that he's a psychologist of religion specializing in dream research okay uh and he does actually run something called the sleep

and dream database hmm i couldn't find any mention of the willamette valley dream survey but i did look into the sleep and dream database this thing is nuts i didn't know that there was something like this online this is a huge database of a written collection of submitted dreams yeah we're talking thousands and thousands of people all over the world submitting their dreams into this database yes and it's uh been archived so well that you can even search for locations and keywords topics and things and find out what people kind of thing exactly yeah i out of curiosity uh searched both of our names because i was like hey what if someone's having dreams about kit and rory and yeah i did find some some hits not about us specifically or this paranormal life, but it was still weird to hear someone be like,

I dreamt about Rory again last night. And it's their own life and their own story, you know, weird dreams. Oh, I get you. I get you. It wasn't like Rory Powers was loading bunny rabbits into a meat grinder again last night. No, no, no, no. That would be a weird dream. I don't know why anyone would think that that i would ever i would ever do that i got the bunny burgers legally perfectly legally from a manufacturer yeah so there was sure there was a pr kind of smear campaign i think is the way that you would say it yeah and the photos allegedly of me in the factory you should regret eating the burgers they're like it's not it doesn't make it an okay animal to eat even if you had sourced the meat responsibly you must know bunny burgers aren't good it's not a good thing to try and serve at easter you kids like chocolate eggs yeah you love

the little cuddly f***ing bunny that brings them yeah well here he is in a bun you're not gonna believe how good he tastes that That is interesting, though. I have to say, I was very skeptical about the concept of any kind of dream database. It seems in the age today of GDPR and people's personal information and data harvesting and big data, it seems a bit suspect to want to harvest that much personal information from people. But actually, it is true. If you are some kind of dream researcher, dream specialist, or just any kind of social anthropologist and want to understand people's

hopes and dreams and fears, it would be fascinating to know what the correlations are. Do we all share the same dreams? I always think that when I look at even dogs, dogs, you know, dreaming, they're running in their sleep and stuff. It's like, what the f*** is in there? Animals dream. They dream just like humans. And as we said, it's, they're going to be very different types of dreams because of their, uh, frame of reference. Um, until we can make some sort of doggy helmet that we can slap on with an HDMI out into a television and see the dog's dreams, we'll never know what that even looks like. Until then, we just have to assume that your chihuahua is dreaming about going to whatever the dog version of Lizzie McGuire's concert is.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. And, you know, if you do want to ensure that your dog has a good solid night's sleep and a healthy diet, there's only one way to do it. With Roy Powers patented bunny burgers. No. For the small pipes. Sorry, let me just finish. I thought we got past this. good solid night's sleep and a healthy diet there's only one way to do it with roy powers patented bunny burgers no for the small pipes all right let me just finish we go past this let me just finish the advert and then we'll decide whether or not we're going to keep it in the pr backlash to you simply being photographed eating a bunny burger was so large but you're not

i i see doubling down and actually marketing the bunny burgers. These bunny burgers have come out of the hole. So hop to it and get yourself a couple of bunny burgers for the small price of, I disagree with this. Just give me a small amount of time because I spent all night staying up writing the copy for the ad. So much time went into the PR for this. I'm losing cash. The longer it takes to do the ad the more bunny burger sales i okay i'm vegan by the way like we're not putting this out in the show there's no way well just don't buy the bunny burgers then i don't know what to say for you you see i got bunny blood on my hands by simply listening to this our cow burger is just not for you tired of chicken you want to

you you want to you want to tell a chicken burger to cluck off? You're clearly freestyling. You didn't stay up all night. You didn't. The stutter is intentional because it makes the ad read feel normal. It feels anything but normal. This is normal. People will respect it because people stutter and fucking swear in real life.

No one wants to tell a chicken burger to cluck off. I think they do. Do you want to tell beef to bucket? Hey, beef. They'll beef the buck off and chicken to cluck off because there is a new bouncing bunny burger in town. And these bunny buns are pretty brilliant. I don't want to get into the weeds of this, but rabbit is famously completely devoid of nutrients. Many people throughout history

have died trying to survive off eating rabbit meat. Between you and me, brother, that's why the meat's so cheap. So you know it's bad and you know it's wrong and illegal. I know it's affordable. I can't afford cow.

I can't afford chicken. I definitely can't afford pork. I tell pork to go pork it's affordable. I can't afford cow. I can't afford chicken. And I definitely can't afford pork. I tell pork to go pork it somewhere else. Pork itself somewhere else. Because there's a new sheriff in town. You had to pause for a few seconds there. Not if I edited it right. Thinking about it.

Not if I edited it right. I didn't pause at all. Do you understand? It's all going to come together. You didn't write it. In the edit. Look, I'm just saying. If you want beef to bucket and chicken to cluck it, there's only one meat that can't be beat. Bunny burgers.

I'm going to. Bounce into flavor. You know what? I'm going to let this ad run on the show because I'm willing to bet that precisely zero listeners want to tell chicken to cluck it, beef to bucket, and pork to pork it. Suck it, actually. I'm going to say suck it. I know it kind of ruins the onomatopoeia, but I think it's catchier. It's, yeah.

Yeah. Just let me, sorry, give me, last time, just one more time. You're getting so close to swearing and being crude, you kind of might as well do it at this point. I'm not. It's all PG. It's all fine. If you want beef to bucket, chicken to cluck it, and pork to motherfucking suck it.

Okay, so motherfucking pick up. It's absolutely not. Hop into flavor with a money burger. Are you done? The longest ad read. That's all it was. That's all it was. I don't know why you got so worked up about it.

Because it's done now and we can move on so hop into flavor everyone hop into flavor do you have anything else you want to add to it no our careers are over you don't know that it depends on the bunny sales right uh look that's um you know that's just one of our ad reads for this week um we need to get back into the story um i know about dreams so no more procrastinating kit no more plugging your garbage products on the podcast it's time to conclude i'm not gonna be gaslit the bunnies are actually gaslit that's how i heat the pot so just a fun fact about how the bunnies are cooked it's a bunsen burner that's not a way of cooking that is not a way of

the meat is so nutritionally devoid you okay never mind it's mostly bones you have to kind of grant you have to kind of bash them up yeah it's very little uh your burger is is a gross we have to move on we have to move on okay you're right i'm just i'm digging a hole for myself much like the bunnies do when they hear that bunsen burner fire up they're burrowing into the ground trying to get away um sorry i'm just rambling now because i'm nervous you can see the fear in my eyes like that of the bunny's eyes when i enter the slaughterhouse move on okay sorry don't you you're not allowed to say the b word again i'll move on like many of the no animals have oh my god moved on to another afterlife sorry i'm just nervous you clearly

don't have any any you're clearly out of evidence you're clearly done with the case you clearly have no confidence in where this is headed because you're vamping about bunny burgers for way too long i'm not i have evidence you know the most logical thing right now is for us to just take a nap and see what happens, but it's one o'clock midday. So I'm not, I'm not feeling that sleepy. You literally have a monster energy drink. I have a monster energy drink, which I call my, which I earlier referred to as my morning beer before I have my evening beers uh but i did bring 30 melatonin gummies so if we do want to uh i don't want some first-hand investigating that will be we could do it uh you know people go crazy online for these kind of stories uh especially when you get companies as bizarre as fatale involved

and this strange organization the willamette Valley Dream Survey. People have deep dive into the possible theories and connections between these companies. One explanation that our great YouTuber managed to discover was an apparent link to some sort of doomsday cult. Whoa. Yeah, really came out of left field. Apparently, this cult believed that the world was going to end on September 5th. And I believe some members of the cult were having dreams about the world ending. So their intentions behind the poster was to be like, hey, are you having any weird dreams?

Let us know because the secrets to surviving doomsday might be in the dreams of someone that we don't know about yet. Well, it would make sense if the poster was created by nutters that would track. It is impressive that the line actually leads somewhere to something that seems like it is actually recording and documenting the calls. Yeah. It's not, sadly, it's too weird to just be like student art project. Yeah. I mean, it would be fun for us to I don't know how complicated it is to set up a line like this. Yeah. But that could even be fun for this paranormal life. Yeah. Like, hey, do you have any paranormal stories? Call into this this line, tell us the story and we could listen to it on the podcast, you know, like a call in show. I love that idea. Pretty cool cool that's an interesting idea who knows and we'll make some blood splattered

posters and put them around london or like if we put up some posters and it's like do you want beef to bucket chicken to pluck it okay yeah and pork to suck it no one wants pork to mother suck it or whatever you said earlier call this number and order your bunny burger you know just hypothetically if we didn't want to do the other idea that was pretty good as well we could do we could try and offload some of these bunnies and you would have to sell direct to consumer as well because no shop will ever stock that exactly it's a very uh dark web kind of deal that i got going on here in the shadows uh Some people say it's illegal. I think it's sexy. So it is illegal.

It is definitely legal, 100%. Look, we've just about reached the end of our case. What are your thoughts, Kit? And I know that this is a scattershot of wild ideas and theories, but I think what we should come down on today as a question for the episode is, could there possibly be some type of outside

factor, whether a person or an organization, affecting our dreams? It's a bloody pity that the first example of the man, thisman.org, happens to be a hoax, because that is definitely the coolest, kind of most compelling example of it um the concept that lots of people spread across nations have all seen the same person that would definitely indicate some kind of subtle subconscious force going on out there creating like a new vision of this guy for the first time because if that had been happening happening all throughout history surely we would already know about this guy people would have talked about it it seems like this one just came out of nowhere um so that would have been cool if that was real we did um you know in a similar theme we have done

an episode on entities like the tall hat man which is i think where we talked about the psychedelic joker where it's you know not something as specific as this particular dude with this face but uh a shape a creature a figure that appears in people's dreams all over the world and the tall hat man was a good example of that that isn't something from fiction that is something that has a widespread appearances i suppose the biggest obstacle to giving this case a double yes, the biggest case to saying that there's definitely something going on here is that we're dealing with absolutely giant numbers. When we're talking about a phenomenon that can happen to any human or mammal on earth, something that can happen in a dream. Yeah. We're dealing with numbers that are

so hard to comprehend. There's billions of people on earth. Of course, people's dreams are going to overlap and the same things are going to happen. And because we all live similar lives in general. Yeah. So we're going to have the same influences. We watch the same shows on TV. We have similar co-workers. There's kind of different versions of the same people all over the world so that's what i struggle with the most how can we say if two people have a similar dream that that's not just coincidence versus some kind of ghostly actor behind the scenes yeah and especially onto the larger questions at the end with the willamette valley dream survey the most logical theory is that it is either some sort of weird arg or some sort of as we talked about some sort of dream database where they're just

collecting the information not necessarily some sort of shady organization manipulating dreams if people were having weird dreams at the time probably a coincidence i don't see any evidence in any part of this story to think that they were putting shit in the tap water or like they had satellites beaming into people's bedrooms at night uh affecting their brain waves you know there's not really any evidence of any of that bunkers conspiracy stuff and is that bunkers kind of conspiracy stuff you know the idea that i don't know that someone could be convinced through programming their dreams to assassinate someone or something like that but yeah i don't think we have evidence of that today yeah it's kind of entering um mk ultra territory of like manipulating

someone's braves to kind of weaponize them don't get me wrong i'm not saying they haven't tried to do this i'm just saying they haven't succeeded. Yeah, I think I think that's it. From the cases that we're seeing today, the Willamette Valley Dream Survey and the story of this man, they're no, it's a no, they're not paranormal. One is almost definitely fictional for a start. So this week I'm going double no. No, but I thought it was an interesting case. You know, even kind of knowing the implications of the first one being a hoax i thought this was a great story to cover uh we have covered other stories in the past

that are um simply creepypastas like the russian sleep experiment for example uh and slenderman they're great stories if they're great stories we do love to cover them so i hope you guys enjoyed this week's episode i know i I did. That was very fun, even though the first story did turn out to be not true. I mean, let's face it. If this paranormal life has proved anything over the years, we've realized that most of the fun stories are not true. There's a direct correlation. I can draw you a graph. Versus how real it is. Thank you so much to Amy Grisdale for researching this week's episode and Cammie Toman for editing. If you enjoyed this week's episode of the show and you want more, you enjoy this paranormal life, you want to support the show, the best way to do it is over on Patreon.com. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Patreon, Patreon is a website where you can subscribe to certain tiers and get a bunch of rewards.

An example of that, by signing up on the five bucks tier, you get access to a huge amount of bonus episodes from this paranormal life. Stories that were too hot to tell on the main podcast. Classified information that could land us in prison. The ingredients and recipe for bunny burgers. Okay. All of that is locked behind the scenes and uh a little little spoiler little insight for you guys for the recipe for bunny burgers but not a lot of bunny in there oh god so so it's more of like a smorgasbord whatever

whatever i can find in my house there wasn't anyone buying these things is you're dashing any hopes of that. But if you want to find out more about the show, if you want to hear more paranormal stories, the place to go is patreon.com. So check it out. The link is in the description of this podcast right now. So thank you once again for listening to this week's episode

of This Paranormal Life. We love you. We appreciate you being here. But beef, you can buck off. Okay love you. We appreciate you being here. But beef? You can buck off. Chicken? This is not the coming of you. It's embarrassing. You can cluck off. You've tried to shill a lot of products over the years, but this really takes the cake. It's the most

offensive and weird. And pork can puck it. You've changed it so many times. At first it was pork can pork it somewhere else. And then you said they can motherfucking suck it. Pork's got me squealing because it's so bad. How about that?

Are we done? I think so. Get some money burgers. Chow down. Hop into flavor. And we'll see you next week for a brand new episode of This Paranormal Life.