Jared Pike’s “Dream Pools” has taken on a life of its own. By imagining swimming pools as surreal, discomfiting places, he has captured the imagination of the internet and found fame in the process.
Jared Pike dreams of pools, and so will you.
If you’ve ever found yourself in very specific corners of the internet, you might be familiar with Pike’s work. “Dream Pools,” his surreal, unnerving images of swimming pools, have become a viral phenomenon since he first started posting them on Instagram in 2020.
He’s racked up tens of thousands of followers and hundreds of thousands of likes by creating an array of 3D rendered images of white tiled pools that sit on just the other side of strange. The denizens of the internet have even created lore around “Dream Pools” –– what they are, why they exist, who (or what) inhabits them.
“Dream Pools” no longer belongs to Pike.
“It’s definitely taken on a life of its own,” Pike says. “A lot of people have expressed seeing this type of imagery in their dreams. I don’t know what that is, but I used to have a spreadsheet of comments saying, ‘I’ve seen this in my dreams.’ … I don’t personally dream about this stuff, but I have now since I’ve looked at them for so long.”
Where did “Dream Pools” come from? Pike, a graphic designer who graduated from Northeastern University in 2016, says the project started as a way for him to develop his 3D modeling skills. After randomly posting his first pool image at the tail end of 2020 to little fanfare, his second pool, which he released a week later, quickly took off online.
It had all the aesthetic elements that have made “Dream Pools” –– and the broader poolcore genre that he helped establish –– successful. The light source is unclear, the tiles are almost too pristine and uniform, the scale of the room is daunting and, most importantly, there are shadows lingering at the edges.
“In a pool [you’re] usually [there] during daytime, it’s well lit, there’s people around,” Pike says. “So, when you see one in isolation with dark corners, that feels unsettling. I try to lean into that and purposefully create dark areas.”
Encouraged by the success of his second pool, Pike dove headfirst into the project.
With Blender, a widely used software tool used by many visual effects artists, he models and maps out his scenes. He also uses LuxCoreRender, an add-on for Blender that excels at rendering water and refractions. He uses all these tools to compose a scene like a photographer might do in a real-world setting, except he can fully control the light, dark and objects in these 3D rendered spaces.
“It’s kind of a juggling act of creating places for light to hit but also for places for light to bounce off of and plays for light to be excluded,” he says.
Pike draws inspiration from the liminal spaces aesthetic that became popular on the internet in the late 2010s and during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, he’s also drawn on his own fears to imbue “Dream Pools” with a certain kind of unnerving energy. Pike experiences submechanophobia, a fear of man-made machinery submerged underwater.
“There’s often a grate at the front of a wave pool where there’s machinery to pump the waves into the pool,” Pike says. “Just knowing that you shouldn’t touch that or go near it –– what is even behind these grates? –– that inspired a lot of what I try to bring into my work.”
His work has also inspired others. “Dream Pools” have become incorporated into the Backrooms, a fictional setting created by the contributions of countless online users. The Backrooms usually involve mundane yet unnerving images of places like empty offices –– or pools. Over the years, people have collectively created lore around the Backrooms that have transformed them into an extradimensional, endless, maze-like space with horrifying creatures.
Pike’s “Poolrooms,” as they’re called in the Backrooms, have become part of this collective story. According to internet lore, they are on level 37 of the Backrooms and are “an expansive complex of interconnected rooms and corridors submerged in undulating, lukewarm water.” The Poolrooms are “entirely devoid of life” and contain traces of Epsom salt that provide a “naturally relaxing effect” when submerged.
Pike has enjoyed watching his work get adapted and transformed through the internet grapevine, but the success of “Dream Pools” has been a double-edged sword.
“It’s really cool to have your art be something that’s so well known in this niche corner of the internet,” Pike says. “On the other hand, it’s anxiety-inducing. Now that I have a following on Instagram, I feel like there’s more pressure to only post good content, and I would be letting myself down if I let that quality bar drop. Or if I explore something different, are people going to be upset about that?”
Pike isn’t ready to step away from his successful project entirely, but he says he is eager to find new creative ground to explore, including 3D motion graphics for concerts. He’s ready to dream of something other than pools –– and find himself in his work again.
“It’s really cool that [‘Dream Pools’ is] now ubiquitous and everyone knows about this concept, but on the other hand, a lot of people don’t know the original origin or associate me with it,” Pike says. “It’s just kind of this thing that exists on the internet. … I think that’s just the nature of virality. It’s part of the process.”