The Sunken Place

– I saw a video on Insta or TikTok in first-person perspective (like in video games), a descent down a closed slide, and at the end of the slide, you arrive in a place resembling a completely empty dentist’s waiting room, with tiled floors, artificial lighting, etc. In the comments section, users were responding in mass: “I’ve had this dream before, it’s crazy, it gives me chills.” Personally, I feel like I’ve also experienced this dream, and what is particularly unsettling is realizing that it seems to belong to a collective memory.

I never found that video again, like most information on Instagram, which is ephemeral. I even seem to have doubted its existence, but it really left an impression on me.

At some point, many similar images started appearing with the hashtag #LiminalSpace. This term describes: a place of entry to an alternative reality.

Users continued to talk about their dreams and this destabilizing sensation of dreamlike familiarity, symptomatic of a collective intimacy.

This wave of images presented very artificial spaces, partly composed of interstitial spaces that seemed to have no other function than to be traversed. These were totally empty spaces, transitional non-places where one moves from one state to another.

What if several people were to take this tunnel and be swallowed, like you, into this artificial boundary, this border with the subconscious? Without ever meeting? Perhaps this strange cognitive impression belongs less to fiction than we think.