Do you feel nostalgia for places that you’ve never seen before?

One of the more recent trends that the internet has conjured up are video compilations of eerily familiar looking interiors, often in states of abandon and distress. The common theme seems to be that all are empty, coming in a wide range of contexts, from uncomfortably colorful canteens to claustrophobic, dark staircases.

Posting creepy images on the internet is no new phenomenon, however- I’m sure you’ve seen your fair share of ‘cursed’ images and classic creepypastas like slender man. But these images feel different, the reason the topic is so popular is because of the intense nostalgia and unrest that these pictures cause us to feel. The closest definition I could find was the German word ‘Fernweh’ literally meaning ‘farsickness’; or the feeling of homesickness associated with places you’ve never been, it’s very odd- you feel like you recognize the place from some distant memory made a long time ago.

Some have pointed out that images in this style remind them of places they have seen in dreams, due to their empty, seemingly nonsensical layout and style. The absence of detail has left me wondering if the reason for the nostalgic feeling originates in our own subconscious memories of dreams we had when we were very young. Ever heard the idea that your brain can’t create new faces from scratch, so inserts people you’ve already seen into your dreams? It’s similar to that. When you dream, your brain builds settings based off a mesh of places you’ve seen before- therefore, it follows that your dream settings as an infant would have been made up of very abstract combinations of a limited number of places.

As i mentioned earlier, none of these images contain any life whatsoever, which breeds this sense of isolation and abandonment- possibly also a theme in the dreams of an infant, who has only ever seen their mother and father as the other beings in their life, additionally, children under the age of 5 (on average) don’t have the ability to perceive from another person’s point of view, and will therefore struggle to project accurate representations of other people in their dreams. For these reasons, I reckon that the origin of the emotions that come along with these pictures are because of distant memories of the abstract dreams of our infancy. (bear in mind that there is no scientific evidence to support this, it’s just an idea!)

This has reminded me of a faint memory of a reoccurring dream I had when I must have been very small, all I can remember was that I would walk up a narrow, long corridor that went upwards into an almost bare room styled like it was straight out of the 1920s. The dream always scared me, but I never knew why. It makes sense now, it felt exactly like these pictures do- empty, lifeless, but oppressive; much like the pictures above.

Pretty much all the videos with pictures like the ones above are accompanied with deliberately unsettling music, so the feeling must be at least partially attributed to that too. Regardless, I had a lot of fun watching them and thinking about the cause of their atmosphere- it’s always entertaining discovering a new internet niche! I highly suggest you check out some of the videos on YouTube.

If you’ve read this far, I’d appreciate it if you could press the clap button on the left of your screen.

Thanks :)

All picture credits go to YouTube user ‘float’. But I don’t know who took the originals.