A computer generated image of a room covered in white tiles, from ceiling to walls to floor. In its centre is a circular hole in the ceiling through which a pillar extends, and a staircase spirals around. The room is half full of turquoise water. In the background, a tunnel leads elsewhere.

Since I went to Bath, I’ve been dreaming about its backrooms. Divots in sandy stone filled with green water that I can slide my arm into, an exact fit. Semi-organic cave networks getting darker and deeper, pools of water deep and shallow suspended and plunging at different levels.

Do you know about The Backrooms? They’re this concept of liminal spaces, usually devoid of living beings, that you can enter by leaving reality. There’s a Dream Pool genre of Backrooms that I’ve been following for a while, and earlier this year a game: Dreamcore, came out which holds a lot of these to explore. There’s something cyclical about recognising these as a pocket of your subconscious mind, then taking the images back into your sleep…

Another entirely tiled room. These tiles are pastel pink, and in the centre of the room is a hexagon shaped pool full of water. The room follows its shape and two doorways are opposite us, on two of the sides of the shape. One leads to darkness, it looks like a stairway downstairs. The other has a staircase upstairs, and an orange rectangular light from an unknown source illuminates it.
Another tiled space, this one dark and gloomy. It's the corner of a swimming pool from above, where the metal ladder leads into the water. It plunges down into an unrealistic depth, mysterious and dark.
A room in a 1960s minimalist style. An expanse of plain floor and ceiling space, marked only by the reflections of ripples of an oblong pool on the left. These reflections also pick out a large sphere at the back of the room, a plain sofa on the right, and some more ornamental sphere shapes, much smaller. Above the pool is a black expanse, perhaps a night sky, perhaps a blank ceiling.
A sunlit white tiled interior. The walls curve in a wavy line, a long thin pool following them, and a pillar that seems architecturally functionally useless. At least, according to waking logic.
A dark underground space, all tiled. It looks like a subway or somewhere corporate and abandoned - but only recently - a still living plant in a plant box at the right. The kind you find outside an office block. A stairway upwards leads to darkness, and an ankle-deep measure of water pervades throughout, strangely purple, showing ripples of movement from nothing we can see capable of motion. It seems lit by a torch, whilst the edges recede into blackness.
A dark white tiled space with a winding thin pool lit by spotlights from above. A rubber ring floats on its surface next to a metal ladder leading into it.
A very creepy pool interior. An abandoned public swimming pool - a colourful spiral flume at the left, and a converted industrial looking ceiling with institutional lighting. But they don't fully light the space, it's a bit too dark to be comfortable, and unnervingly misty.
A sunlit white tiled interior, half full of turquoise water. Two doorways on different wall in front of us fall back into a never-ending series of doorways behind them.

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