History & origins
Dreamcore seems to have always existed — that's part of its charm — but as a named subculture it has a recent birthday. Here's the timeline, from the precursors to the present.
Before the internet: the precursors
The feeling dreamcore chases is old. The painters found it first:
- Giorgio de Chirico (1910s): empty Italian plazas, long shadows, infinite arcades and a light that matches no real hour. His "metaphysical painting" is, no exaggeration, liminal spaces a century early.
- René Magritte: daytime skies over nighttime streets (The Empire of Light), everyday objects in impossible contexts. Gentle surrealism, without the nightmare.
- Edward Hopper: gas stations, diners and hotel rooms where loneliness is the main character.
And video games found it by accident: the empty interiors of Super Mario 64 (1996), the corridors of LSD: Dream Emulator (1998), the whole dream world of Yume Nikki (2004), probably the work most often cited as "dreamcore before dreamcore". More on this in games & media.
2019: the founding year
Two things happen almost at once:
The community devoted to "liminal space" photos takes hold on Reddit: empty places of passage that produce an unsettling familiarity. The tag existed before on Tumblr and scattered threads, but here it becomes a photographic genre with its own rules.
On 4chan (/x/) someone posts a yellowish photo of empty offices with damp carpet and humming fluorescents, with a caption: if you noclip out of reality, you end up in the Backrooms — 600 million square miles of empty rooms. The post becomes a collective creepypasta and catapults the liminal into internet's mainstream. (Note: the Backrooms are the horror branch; dreamcore will take the opposite road.)
2020-2021: the pandemic and the boom
During lockdown, the real world turned genuinely liminal: empty airports, closed schools, shopping malls with no one in them. The photos that once looked otherworldly were now on the news. In that broth, TikTok and the aesthetics wikis (the Aesthetics Wiki, CARI — the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute) crystallize the labels dreamcore and weirdcore as genres distinct from the liminal: no longer just photographed empty places, but collages and renders that recreate dream logic, with their floating eyes, their endless fields and their low-res text.
It's also the golden age of analog horror (Local 58, Gemini Home Entertainment) — darker cousins that share the VHS texture but not the intent.
2022: the Kane Pixels era
In January 2022, Kane Parsons (a 16-year-old, by the way) uploads The Backrooms (Found Footage) to YouTube: a VHS short with Blender renders so good that millions wondered whether it was real. The liminal goes massive. Backrooms video games arrive on Steam, "liminal space playlist" videos rack up millions of views, and the word "liminal" enters internet's everyday vocabulary.
2023-today: museum and maturity
As happened with vaporwave or Frutiger Aero, the explosive phase gave way to the archive phase: wikis, retrospectives, video essays, contemplative games (POOLS, Anemoiapolis), cinema that breathes this aesthetic (Skinamarink, 2022). Dreamcore is no longer a TikTok fad: it's a stable genre of the internet imagination, with its canon, its rules and its archives. Like this one.
Quick timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| ~1913 | De Chirico paints empty plazas not yet called "liminal" |
| 1998 | LSD: Dream Emulator (PS1) turns the dream into a video game |
| 2004 | Yume Nikki: the dream canon, playable and free |
| 2019 | r/LiminalSpace takes hold; founding Backrooms post on 4chan |
| 2020 | Pandemic: the world empties; dreamcore and weirdcore crystallize as labels |
| 2022 | Kane Pixels brings the liminal mainstream with Blender found footage |
| 2023+ | Museum phase: wikis, archives, contemplative games, cinema |