The Dream Pool Backrooms

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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Zeitgeist

A low-res image of a roughly drawn, or maybe carved, golden sun shape with protruding rays, and a corona around it with more rays. The surface it’s carved into appears to be white or pale blue stone.

Still from Zeitgeist (2007)

This film was circulating the internet when I was a teenager. It’s a conspiracy theory-style documentary that connects recurring themes throughout many of the world’s most prominent religions, some still practiced, some not. We passed it between us like contraband, thinking we’d been given a clear-headed, logical way to understand much of the totality of human history.  I mean, we had been given a logic, but it was off.

A pixelated astrological wheel with images of the different star signs (the crab for cancer, the scales for libra, etc) in black on a mustard browny yellowish background. Over the top is a faint network of something white - maybe stars joined by lines? Labelled in green writing that we can’t read.

Aside from being fundamentally irrelevant to the actual point of religion, many of its claims are totally factually incorrect. For one thing they equate ‘the sun’ with ‘the son’ (referring to Horus, Jesus, and other figures) because said out loud, they’re the same word. In English. Which didn’t exist five thousand years ago. A quick check of the Aramaic and they don’t seem so related…

The sun | שמש | “shmash”

The son | בר | “bar”

A pixelated astrological wheel with images of the different star signs (the crab for cancer, the scales for libra, etc) in black on a yellow background. A glowing light has been layered on top, in the right hand corner of the diagram.

But now I worry I’m falling into an ancient rabbit hole. Can a deep debunking of a conspiracy theory become apophenic? I have to stop.

A low-res photo of an artwork, probably a mosaic. In orange, red and brown earth tones, a person in a headdress is at the centre, two cows, or maybe bulls, are to each side of her.

I find myself thinking about the warped, low-res audio and image of this film, and of the layered diagrams and crafted depictions of deities. It’s an aesthetic that I think is still with us, if a little updated. I’m very much holding it in mind as I work on this piece.

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Apophany vs Epiphany

It’s a ‘collotype’, which basically looks like a fuzzy x-ray, of a pelvis. Smudgy black and white, it’s not immediately obvious to non-medically trained eyes what we’re looking at, but after a while it seems that it’s upside-down, with the little tail bone sticking upwards, hips curling inwards.

This is at the core of what I’m working on. 

Jenn Ashworth proposes the idea of apopheny vs epiphany in her 2019 memoir Notes Made While Falling. In the book, she describes a traumatic birth followed by a mental and physical unravelling. Part of this is apophenia – a kind of logic that connects patterns; names; numbers; anything, which consensus reality would say is not actually connected. Most often it’s applied as a pathology, often in reference to conspiracy theories. Jenn says ‘I can’t stop connecting things’, and rather than self-pathologising, sets this beside her religious background to think about this experience of apopheny alongside the experience of epiphany – the realisation of a profound and real truth. But how do you know which is happening within you?

This idea has been on my mind since I read the book (and reread it, and reread it), and it’s the heart of the work I’m making for Vital Capacities. The work I make here will also feed into a solo show of mine opening early next year, so it’s really good to be able to delve in deeply in this public way – a rare chance to be able to share the intricacies of a looottt of research, experimentation, and thought.

Image Credit: This image is featured on the front cover of ‘Notes Made While Falling’ More info: A woman’s pelvis after a pubiotomy – to widen the birth canal for a vaginal delivery of a baby. Collotype by Römmler & Jonas after a radiograph made for G. Leopold and Th. Leisewitz, 1908.

Image Description: It’s a ‘collotype’, which basically looks like a fuzzy x-ray, of a pelvis. Smudgy black and white, it’s not immediately obvious to non-medically trained eyes what we’re looking at, but after a while it seems that it’s upside-down, with the little tail bone sticking upwards, hips curling inwards.

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