The True Origins of the Backrooms by Kevin Wikse

 

Let me begin by saying this. The insights and theories presented herein concerning the true nature of the “Backrooms” are the direct result of systematic exploration via Lucid Dreaming, Real-Time Projection, and Remote Viewing disciplines. These conclusions are further fortified through firsthand interrogations and exchanges with native intelligences encountered within these realms.

This includes reading books and graffiti-like messages scrawled across walls and interfacing with “technology” I found while engaging in non-ordinary realities.

To date, no comparable analysis — particularly regarding the intersection of the Backrooms phenomenon and the ritual event known as Hands Across America — has been disclosed or disseminated across any known public domain.

I assert unassailable intellectual proprietorship over these findings. Attribution is not a courtesy; it is a requirement. Any attempt to appropriate, dilute, or misrepresent this work will be regarded as an act of intellectual trespass and met with the necessary recourse.

In recent years, the phenomenon known as "The Backrooms" has slithered into popular culture, reduced to a meme or a hollow creepypasta by those who mistake the shape of the thing for its soul. What few dare to imagine is that The Backrooms are not a story someone wrote—they are a place we abandoned, a wound we forgot to heal. The premise is older than Reddit, older than 4chan, older even than the first broadband pulse that fired a thought into the net.

The Backrooms are the rotting skeleton of a dimensional fracture. A scar left open when our reality, stretched too thin, cracked and bled.

The Fracture of the 1980s and 1990s

In the early 1980s, and again in the mid-1990s, our timeline suffered catastrophic disruptions—not the Hollywood kind, but the quiet devastation that only particle accelerators, high-energy black projects, and human arrogance can unleash. CERN and its precursors tampered with the harmonic scaffolding of existence itself.

But even before CERN as it’s publicly known, high-energy experiments were happening (Brookhaven, Fermilab, early particle acceleration projects).
The idea is that intense localized manipulation of atomic structures at velocity could thin the boundaries between harmonically adjacent dimensions.
Result: structural "stress fractures" — not full collapse, but enough for neighbor dimensions (with nearly identical but slightly divergent constants) to flood support matter/energy to stabilize the parent dimension.

When the boundaries between dimensions splintered, our reality began to collapse. In the vacuum of stability, neighboring timelines—those closest to ours in vibration and nature—threw fragments across the breach to keep us from falling into the abyss. We survived, but we are stitched together with scraps not our own.

Memory faltered. History blurred. The Mandela Effect became the whispered symptom of something far more profound: we are not fully ourselves anymore.

What we now call "liminal spaces" or "backrooms" are emergent side-effects of reality splintering during critical moments, and the '80s and '90s were battleground decades for this.

Hands Across America: A Ritual to Repair Reality

In 1986, a mass human ritual unfolded: "Hands Across America." It was never about charity. It was about bioelectrical unification, an attempt to forge a living current strong enough to ground a ruptured world. Millions held hands, hoping to reboot the dying pulse of our reality.

It failed. Or perhaps it only bought time.

The wound continued to weep.

Hands Across America" was about human chains — direct bioelectrical conduction and symbolic unity. It didn’t fully work. The ritual flickered, then dissipated — possibly because the underlying collective trauma was too great to be bonded over a single superficial act.

The Internet: A Synthetic Astral Plane

The internet—gifted to the public like a Trojan Horse—was never just about communication. It was designed to birth a digital dreamspace, a synthetic astral web where fragmented consciousness could reconnect.

It worked for a while. Then it was corrupted. The internet became a battlefield of minds, accelerating the fracture it was meant to heal.

The web was the Plan B: to build an artificial, cognitive bridge between fractured consciousnesses before the old organic links (shared myth, culture, tribe) completely failed.
What is the internet if not an attempt to rapidly construct a synthetic astral plane?
(Of course, that synthetic plane got weaponized into memetic warfare and psychic fragmentation later... but that's another branch.)

The True Backrooms: Echoes of Dead Institutions

The Backrooms exist. I have walked them—not in pixelated survival horror games, but in full lucidity, in raw astral bone and nerve.

They are not simply yellow offices and flickering lights. They are the purgatories of our dead institutions: abandoned malls, shuttered schools, hollow hospitals, silent prisons, endless stretches of empty suburban homes. These places, soaked in human despair, grief, rage, and unfulfilled longing, cast shadows when they die. Those shadows become structure.

The horror of the human-built institutions left alive after their purpose died, humming in a twilight that is neither life nor death.

Every soulless corridor, every buzzing fluorescent hum, every locked door behind another locked door—they are built not of matter, but of suffering and unresolved memory.

The Backrooms are our unresolved existential crisis, congealed into architecture.

"The tension and angst of a collective, but unconscious, and shared existential crisis give both rise and structure to the “backrooms.” -Kevin Wikse.

The Cartography of the Forgotten

Others have glimpsed these forgotten realms in dreams and nightmares. But few realize: these are not just hallucinations or mass psychosis. They are maps. They are fracture lines where the dead breath of abandoned humanity still circulates.

These are not the cartoonish "levels" of Reddit lore. These are the haunted arterials of a civilization lost in its own Daedalic maze.

The Backrooms are not fiction. The Backrooms are the still-rebounding echoes of our own collapse.

It is time to awaken. It is time to redraw the maps. It is time to remember what was shattered—and to prepare for the fractures yet to come.

-Kevin Wikse