Glossary
The genre's vocabulary. Several of these words come from John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — an invented dictionary of emotions that had no name, which the internet adopted as if they'd always existed. Which is, in itself, pretty dreamcore.
The two fundamental words
Nostalgia for a time you never lived. Missing the summer of 1987 when you were born in 2008. It's THE dreamcore emotion: the image promises you a memory that isn't yours, and you recognize it anyway. (Koenig, Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.)
The atmosphere of a place usually full of people that's now empty. School in August. The office at 11 p.m. It's THE liminal emotion: the emotional echo people leave when they're gone. (Also Koenig.)
The rest of the dictionary
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Liminal | From Latin limen (threshold). What's between two states: neither in nor out, neither before nor after. In anthropology, the middle phase of a rite of passage; on the internet, empty places of transit. See liminal spaces. |
| Noclip | In video games, the cheat that disables collisions and lets you pass through walls. Backrooms mythology uses it as a verb: "to noclip out of reality" = falling below the map of the real world. |
| Backrooms | Founding creepypasta (4chan, 2019): an infinite maze of yellowish offices you reach by noclip. The horror branch of the liminal. See history. |
| Poolrooms | Visual subgenre: white-tiled rooms with still water where there shouldn't be any. The infinite pool as an impossible place. Probably the most dreamcore branch of the Backrooms. |
| Uncanny valley | The revulsion produced by the almost-human (or the almost-right). It explains why cheap 2000s renders unsettle more than photorealistic ones: they're close enough to fail. |
| Entity | In Backrooms mythology, the creatures inhabiting the levels. Important: in dreamcore there are no entities. If something's chasing you, you've got the wrong genre. |
| Jamais vu | The opposite of déjà vu: something extremely familiar suddenly feels strange — your own street seen as if for the first time. A central mechanism of the liminal image. |
| Oneiric | Relating to dreams (from Greek óneiros). The highbrow word for "this looks like a dream" that we use to seem serious on a site with Comic Sans. |
| Monolith | The black rectangle standing in the field. Inherited from 2001: A Space Odyssey, adopted by dreamcore as a door without a wall. In this archive, monoliths lead to random pages. Try it. |
| The eternal 3 p.m. | A homemade term (of this home) for the canonical dreamcore light: high summer sun, absent shadows, time stopped. The universe's nap time. |
| Analog horror | Horror genre in VHS / analog-broadcast format. A dark cousin: shares texture, not intent. See sister aesthetics. |
| -core | Suffix inherited from hardcore punk via the internet: turns anything into a catalogable aesthetic. Dreamcore, kidcore, corecore (yes, it exists). |
| CARI | Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute: the collective that catalogues consumer aesthetics (they named "Frutiger Aero"). The taxonomists of this zoo. |
| Found footage | Fiction presented as a recovered real recording. The format of the Kane Pixels videos that brought the liminal mainstream in 2022. |