Interview: Artist Jared Pike on Dream Pools and the Allure of Liminal Spaces

Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re speaking with artist and designer Jared Pike, whose Dream Pools series seems to be entangled with our collective unconscious.

Sun-splashed white tile. Aqua water. Shadows plunging into unseen depths. These are a few of the key elements artist Jared Pike uses to construct the Dream Pools.

Pike’s chosen visual language is spare, but he crafts images that seem to plumb the depths of a greater collective unconscious. Comments on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook reveal recurring patterns: Why do I have the feeling that I know these places? I’ll never understand how you can see my dreams…

When Pike posted the first Dream Pool in 2020, he had around 300 Instagram followers and no expectations for the series. Today, with over 90,000 Instagram followers and widespread recognition in liminal spaces communities, Pike’s Dream Pools have arguably become modern classics in the liminal spaces genre.

I was curious to learn more about Pike’s story, his art practice, and the experience of encountering tributes, fakes, and facsimiles of his work in everything from TikToks to video games. To my surprise, he was gracious enough to hop on a Google Meet with me.

This interview has been lightly edited for concision and clarity.

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Michelle Delgado: I noticed on your website that you’ve given a talk about accidentally starting a cult. I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t start there.

Jared Pike: [There] was this liminal spaces generalists Facebook group with a lot of members. In maybe 2022, they had taken a liking to the pools as that whole craze started to hit off. People kept posting my work to that group over and over, and the regular members who were in it for a while were starting to get sick of it. They’re like, “Stop posting this! We’ve seen this so many times.”

So, the response to that was to start making memes out of it. I have a collection of tons of different memes. The spiral staircase is the most well-known one, so just lots of different memes based off of that image.

I do really like that one! It’s definitely a standout.

People kept posting the memes. And then they were like, “We need shirts! Can you make us shirts?”

I would also occasionally post in there, and then they would realize, oh, it’s the guy who made them. So they started to, quote unquote, “worship me” at one point. Some guy at made a GoFundMe to actually build the pool in real life, and he didn’t talk to me about this at all. So I’m like, “No! Don’t do this! Why are you using my image for this? Please take this down.”

I’ve seen a lot of interviews with people who have either become a meme or their work does, and it seems like it would be potentially a really disorienting experience. What did that feel like?

It was definitely very strange. I never intended for my work to get that much attention. I originally just posted on Instagram—just as a kind of portfolio, or to post whatever I was making in Blender. I had no intentions of gaining a following. I was not trying to boost my posts or use the trending hashtags. I was posting my work to this random Instagram. So seeing it expand and grow to such a large audience was very strange.

I don't personally like it. I think it's discouraged me to continue posting more. There's a lot of pressure now of posting to my Instagram—like I have to one up my last post, or it's not worth posting. So I find myself like discarding a lot more work through my process because of that pressure.

It's also self-inflicted. It's within myself to want to post better stuff. No one's ever posted a hate comment, like, “Oh, this is wasn't as good as the last one.” No one's ever said that. But it just feels like there's pressure there.

I’m not sure what your job looks like or how social media fits into your income, but I imagine for creators that can also become a difficult situation. If you want to go in a different direction or try something new, there might be some risk there.

It’s always been just a little bit of side hustle money. I'm not making substantial income off of it. I probably could, if I actually put effort into it. I don't really promote my store at all. You really have to be interested in it to find it, and I rarely update it. I don't add more products. If I put effort into it, maybe I could make it more sustainable.

But I think for me, I purposely don't want it to be a job, because I think that would make me hate it a lot more. Not thinking about it like a business is very important for me to enjoy doing it. So I've intentionally not put effort into it.

If you’re forced to be creative on a schedule, it’s tough. I don’t always produce good work and I have large periods of time where I’m not happy with the stuff I’m doing, so I just won’t post it.

I saw in one of the interviews that you were up to 42 Dream Pools. Do you still track how many you’ve made, or have a ballpark of how many you’ve published?

I currently have 43, although the first one isn’t like any of the others, so it doesn’t really count.

I’d say for every one that I post, there’s four that I don’t. I don’t fully finish them—[for some] I’ve sketched the idea that I have in my head, it doesn’t look good, so I’m not going to go finish it. Or I have this idea and I think it could work, but I’m not getting the technique of it right, or the lighting isn’t right.

For some, there’s one piece that I just can’t nail, so I’m just like, “All right, I’ll come back to it.” And then I never do.

I have such a graveyard of drafts and pitches. That’s so real.

To take us in a different direction, there’s a thing that happens in articles about liminal spaces. The journalist always defines it by saying something like, ”It’s a threshold, it has a little eeriness and a little nostalgia.” But what does that really mean? That spectrum is so vast and so personal.

What does that calibration look like for you? What’s your reaction to liminal space imagery?

Yeah, it's such an ambiguous term. And I think that is really evident in the Facebook groups or even Reddit. People are constantly like, “Oh, this isn't liminal. Why are you posting this?” Or, “I feel this is great, totally liminal. What are you talking about?” So there's great debates on what people consider to be liminal in terms of the aesthetic.

For me, I think it's complicated, because I feel a lot more numb to these images than I did when I first discovered them. I've seen so many of them and been staring at them for so long that it doesn't really have that kind of emotional effect as much as it used to.

But I would say that it leans more eeriness for me. A lot of my inspiration comes from submechanophobia and urban exploration of abandoned places, which tend to be a lot more creepy with a lot more unknowns. So it's not necessarily a very inviting atmosphere, in my mind. At least for the work that I am creating.

Aesthetically, they’re so gorgeous to look at—the way you do the lighting, the way the water moves. I didn't know if it would be offensive at all to say, “Oh, they're a little bit creepy!” Because that's what I respond to. I love anything that gives me that prickle of unease.

No, they’re supposed to be like that!

Okay, good!

Talking a little bit more technically: When you're composing an image, how do you create that effect? What are the elements that you like to play with? How does it function?

I have a formula that I didn't intentionally set out to create, but it's like, kind of a set of rules that I have followed subconsciously and later realized.

[Editor’s note: Jared graciously gave me a peek behind the scenes and screenshared one of the Dream Pools in Blender while we chatted through this question.]

I always start off with this camera. It's usually a 24 or 35 millimeter lens, about eye or waist level height. I try to set it in a place that looks like, realistically, someone could be taking a photograph, and then I basically compose the scene around the camera. For this particular one (43), I knew I wanted to cover some of the unfinished, unlit area towards the back of the scene, so I positioned the camera and columns to do that.

Everything not visible by the camera doesn’t matter—it can be totally nonsensical, because no one’s ever going to see it. Pretty much all of my scenes look like this. They just kind of end, and there’s actually not much exciting about them. They’re all incomplete in some way. Ideally, some of the scene is exposed in sunlight, and then I’ll intentionally try to create a dark area.

I’m trying to create elements of intrigue and exploration. I want people to imagine what it's like to be floating around in this pool. How far does it go? 

Each one is a little bit different, but it starts with this camera. I compose it, I block it out in this [grayscale] view, and then I start adding details. If it looks good here, then I'll start to build it out. And if not, I'll scrap it and move on to the next one.

I do think there's something really effective about the organic motion of the water combined with the very hard-edged tiles, and then the sunlight and the shadow.

It's a stripped down visual language, but it's very high contrast. There aren’t a ton of elements, but they can be combined in so many different ways. I just find it mesmerizing. There's just really something that works about it.

I think it's just enough to feel realistic, but not too much to feel ultra realistic. Everything's very clean and perfect, and that's not how the real world is.

Part of that was just out of laziness—I don't want to make this ultra realistic, because that would take too much time. But it also adds the effect, the surrealness of, “wow, this is way too perfect.”

I recently played the game POOLS. Overall, I think they did a good job of crediting their inspirations—but some of it looks identical to your work. So I'm curious about what your relationship is to that game, if it was a surprise to you, and if they reached out ahead of time and got your blessing.

That's a good question. So, I don't have any involvement with this game. I don't know if the creator reached out to me. It's tough because there are a lot of these small indie game creators, and a lot of them just message me like, “Hey, can I reference your work?” What's complicated is that so many of them just never see the light of day, so I never know which ones to give attention to.

It's hard for me to keep track of which creator is the creator of POOLS, and did they message me? I could go through my archives and check, but I'm not actually sure. I'm typically not really associated with any of these games or the creators, and I wasn't involved in that one specifically.

How do you feel about it? I'm sure on some level, it's flattering. But then, on the other hand, people might not always offer credit or a licensing fee.

I have complicated feelings about it. On one hand, yeah, it is flattering. I think it's really cool to see my artwork take forms and other mediums. I think [it’s] really cool to see how other people interpret the concept.

I have thought about making a game myself, because that's a comment that I got constantly on Instagram when I was posting on there frequently. So I explored that idea. I have the skillset to do that, but I personally didn't find it compelling. To me, a big part of my work that I find the most compelling is that you can't see around the corner. It's really important that you can't see everything, because the reality is actually really boring. Going around that corner, [it’s like], “Wow, more tile! Oh no!” Your mind creates much more interesting possibilities than any video game could replicate.

I think I'm clearly in the minority with how well these games are selling. So maybe that was a mistake. I don't know.

But yeah, on the other hand, it is disappointing to feel like my work is being taken and without proper credit. I did appreciate that POOLS actually did include me in their description, because there's a couple other ones that are a lot more egregious about their copying of my work, and they have not credited me in their descriptions, or anywhere that I know of, anyway.

Honestly, I try to disconnect from it. A lot of these creators are young, and it doesn't matter enough for me to be chasing down these kids who are, I assume, doing it out of passion and not out of malicious intent. And I appreciate new ideas made by these new creators, it mainly stings when there’s direct copying of my designs.

Whereas, like, if A24 was making the Backrooms movie without Kane Pixels, that would be a problem. Or if Ubisoft was ever like, “Hey, we have a Dream Pools game, and we're calling it Nightmare Pools!”

I think that would be a different story. But yeah, like a lot of these younger creators, I learned most of what I know doing exactly what they are doing. So I understand where they're coming from, and I don’t want to discourage them from being creative because it’s not that serious.

Do you have any kind of narrative in mind when you're creating these images, or the series in general?

Generally, I don't have a narrative in mind. I think I wanted to at one point, like with the video that I posted on my YouTube. That was intended to be a proof of concept and a test of, like, “Can I imitate this found footage style with my kind of work?” The plan was, okay, after I do this test, let me storyboard some kind of narrative and then actually make a video that makes sense.

But I'm just not good at writing. I don't have that kind of mind, or I haven't been able to come up with something that I've been really happy with. I think the better story for me to tell is just to let other people fill in the blanks themselves. That's more of where the mystery lies, rather than trying to tell my own story.

If there's any opinion that I have, it’s that there's no monsters in the world that I imagine my work in.

I always see urban exploration videos where the cops show up, or it turns out there's squatters living in a building. But I think it's much scarier to think of a house that people just left one day and nothing has intervened but time.

Yeah. It's kind of like the self isolation type of thing. Part of the fear is that you are alone, and you're painfully alone.

Recommended Liminal Space Viewing

Dario Argento’s 1977 masterpiece, Suspiria, pops up in online conversations about liminal spaces fairly often—but Inferno has the keys to the liminal spaces in my heart.

The 1980 film primarily takes place in an art deco apartment building in New York, and there’s more to this building than meets the eye. Characters slip into submerged, flooded rooms and find hidden floors between the building’s levels, all in pursuit of an ancient and powerful trio of witches. It rules.

Up Next: Behind the Scenes With Phantasmag

Two interviews in a row! How lucky are we? Next week, we’ll kick off our Pride celebrations with the ingenious team behind Phantasmag, a queer horror magazine that’s made for the outsiders, by the outsiders. It’s my very favorite indie magazine and a major inspiration for this newsletter.

Phantasmag has a very exciting announcement coming out next week, and I’ll have the details for you then!

Also: Scare Me! is now on Instagram. Follow along to see updates about all the spooky books I’m reading and what my cats are up to. 🎃 

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.