“You’ve finally woken up. It’s an ordinary day in 2006."
"You’ve finally come back. It is now the year 2000."
"You’ve finally woken up. It’s an ordinary day in the year 2004.”
A few weeks ago, my friend Casey Valentine sent me a New York Times reel introducing me to something called Chinese Dreamcore. I thought it was interesting, so I went looking for more and eventually found the full article it was based on. Both described the same thing: a growing trend in China where people were making nostalgic edits about growing up in the early 2000s.
The article kept calling it “Dreamcore,” but the Dreamcore I was familiar with leaned much more toward surrealism—bright, hazy images, floating objects, cryptic text, images that felt like they were pulled straight out of a dream. At first, these videos didn’t seem to fit that idea. They looked much more like the nostalgic edits I’d see all over TikTok—the ones that say, “POV: October 2006” or “Wake up, it’s 2004.” Except instead of reminding me of my own childhood, these videos were showing me someone else’s.
The apartment buildings were unfamiliar. The schools were unfamiliar. But somehow, the feeling wasn’t. It felt like I was looking through a window into someone else’s childhood. Different places, different memories, but the exact same nostalgia. That’s when I realized I had to see more.
At first, I checked TikTok, but I wasn’t finding what I was looking for. Most of what I found were reposts, people talking about Chinese Dreamcore, or edits inspired by it. I wanted the original community—the people in China who were actually making these videos. So, I figured I’d have to go where they were being posted.
I already knew about Bilibili and Xiaohongshu (better known as Red Note). But the second I opened them, I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to read anything. Menus only translated when they felt like it, and searching around in English obviously got me nowhere. I had no idea what I should be looking up to find these videos, and that’s when I realized I couldn’t do this alone.
Enter Kai.
A few years ago, Kai reached out asking if he could translate one of my videos into Chinese and upload it to Bilibili. I thought it was a really cool idea, so I said yes. Since then, he’s translated several of my videos and introduced them to an entirely different audience. We hadn’t talked in a couple of years, but if anyone was going to know where these videos actually came from, I figured it’d be him.
To my luck, he was super excited to talk about it. He clarified a lot of things, explaining terms like:
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中式梦核 (Zhōngshì Mènghé): Chinese Dreamcore
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千禧核 (Qiānxǐ Hé): Millennium Core
This was perfect, and I can’t thank Kai enough for his help. I was now able to search for it on my own using the original language.
Typing in those terms, I was immediately met with everything I was hoping for: tons of nostalgic edits that I found truly fascinating. A slideshow by one creator seemed to capture some of the most iconic pictures. Each of these images feels strangely immersive—like being dropped into a single moment from somebody else’s childhood.
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A long, covered concrete walkway overgrown with vines feels incredibly distinct; I can almost hear the wind, smell the plants, and imagine the light filtering through the vines overhead.
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A stairwell with months written in both English and Chinese looks so ordinary, but it feels like something that would instantly transport you back to elementary school.
~ sb (+ adv./prep.)to make sb feel that they are in a different place, time or situation 使产生身临其境的感觉
The book transports you to another world.
。
~ sb (+ adv./prep.)(in the past) to send sb to a far away place as a punishment （旧时）流放
British convicts were transported to Australia for life.
。
- Another post with the caption, “Are you awake? There’s no one here anymore,” shows a series of quiet scenes.
Instead of showing famous landmarks or major events, the trend focuses on tiny, ordinary moments: a CRT television left on in the living room, sunlight coming through the window, a dining table after breakfast, or an apartment that’s suddenly gone quiet. It’s such a specific memory that I’ve never personally experienced in that exact place, but I immediately understand the feeling it’s trying to capture.
My favorite videos were from a creator whose handle translates to “The Millennium Lifestyle: Eating, Drinking, and Having Fun.” This page features similar images, but each video feels a bit more curated, carrying a light narrative attached to specific memories—like one captioned, “You’re back. Today is the first day of school in 2008.”
What surprised me most wasn’t actually the images; it was the captions. Instead of simply describing what you’re looking at, they invite you to participate:
“Walk through the corridor, class has started.” “What lunch box did you use today?”
You’re no longer just looking at someone else’s memories—for a moment, you’re living inside them. I especially like the point-and-click adventure style that some creators use; it adds a lot and really makes it feel like an art form.
What I found so interesting were the common motifs across these videos: games, school, food, apartments, and celebrations. Reading the comments, I learned these are very specific, “deep cut” images. Some users specifically remembered having the exact pencil case pictured or visiting the exact location shown.
One thing I couldn’t stop wondering was: Why? Why nostalgia for this specific time period? It seems very Gen Z-specific, and it’s something I’ve wanted to know since the beginning.
I decided to ask Kai, who told me this trend didn’t just come out of nowhere. The people making these videos are largely those who grew up during China’s rapid economic growth in the late ’90s and 2000s. Now, years later, many of them are entering adulthood during a much more uncertain period. Finding work has become more difficult, and expectations have changed. Looking back, childhood isn’t just about remembering toys or television shows—it’s remembering a time when the future felt a lot more certain. Specific events like the 2008 Beijing Olympics and comforting routines like early mornings before school capture that feeling perfectly.
Listening to Kai explain it, I couldn’t help but notice how familiar it all sounded. Over the past few years, I’ve seen the exact same phenomenon online here: edits about Windows XP, old Cartoon Network commercials, videos about malls, or Scholastic book fairs. The details are completely different, but the feeling is identical.
Maybe that’s why these videos resonated with me so much. I never went to those schools or watched those television programs, but I did grow up during the same era. While the memories themselves are different, the experience of looking back at childhood feels strangely universal. It’s almost like nostalgia has become its own language. Every country has its own symbols and places, but once you learn to look past those details, you’re left with something surprisingly similar.
The more Kai showed me, the more I realized that this wasn’t just an internet trend—it had grown into an entire creative movement.
One of the first things he sent me was an art project called “Two Rich City” by digital artist Huang Heshan, a piece inspired by the same aesthetic as Chinese Dreamcore. It’s a massive fictional city built from ordinary places that many who grew up in China remember: apartment complexes, shopping malls, neighborhood restaurants, and storefronts. Rather than recreating one specific location, it preserves the broader feeling of growing up during China’s rapid transformation in the ’90s and early 2000s.
Kai kept sending me more—not just Dreamcore edits, but video essays explaining this entire corner of the Chinese internet. One video gave a brief introduction to several different “X-core” aesthetics in China:
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Dreamcore
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Weirdcore
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Nostalgiacore
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Foodcore: Centered around nostalgic food like birthday cakes, old snacks, and dishes people remember eating as kids.
Watching it, I realized Chinese Dreamcore wasn’t an isolated aesthetic; it was part of a much larger creative ecosystem.
As I kept exploring Bilibili and Red Note, I also noticed that the term “Dreamcore” was used for both nostalgic edits and more surreal, hazy videos closer to the Western definition. It felt less like a rigid definition and more like an evolving community of artists borrowing from shared ideas.
What really caught my attention, though, was Chinese Weirdcore. I asked Kai if there was more like it, and before long, he introduced me to Chinese Analog Horror—an entire rabbit hole on its own.
One of the last things Kai sent me was a game called Millennium Dream. It’s essentially a game about documenting your own childhood. Rather than giving you objectives or enemies to fight, you simply wander through a familiar world taking photographs of moments that feel worth remembering. As the Steam description puts it:
“You freeze tender fragments of days gone by, collecting lost shards of childhood.”
I picked it up and played through it myself, and I was surprised by how well it captured the atmosphere of these videos. You wake up in your bedroom sometime in the early 2000s, surrounded by artifacts of another era: toys, family photos, CRT TVs—everyday objects that immediately place you in time. From there, you just explore. You talk with family, visit your grandparents, wander through apartment buildings, bathhouses, playgrounds, and quiet streets, snapping pictures of whatever resonates with you.
As the game continues, these familiar places gradually become stranger. Reality starts to blur, ordinary locations take on surreal qualities, and the experience begins to feel much more like Dreamcore than simple nostalgia.
take on:
[no passive] to begin to have a particular quality, appearance, etc. 呈现，具有（特征、外观等）
The chameleon can take on the colours of its background.
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His voice took on a more serious tone.
It feels like walking through memories themselves—half-remembered, distorted, but deeply comforting.
In a video I made six years ago, I talked about liminal spaces and nostalgic images for the first time. At one point, I said: “The images probably only make you feel nostalgic if you grew up in the United States during the early 2000s.”
After making this video, I think I was only partially right. Those specific images are nostalgic because of where I grew up, but what I didn’t realize was that the feeling itself exists everywhere. Every country has its own apartment buildings, schools, shopping malls, playgrounds, and little pieces of childhood that become frozen in time.
Before this, Chinese Dreamcore just seemed like another internet aesthetic to me. But after talking with Kai and exploring these communities, I don’t think that’s all it is. It’s people preserving memories—sometimes through 30-second edits, sometimes in massive art projects, and sometimes through entire games. Different mediums, different memories, but all trying to capture the same feeling before it disappears.
Nostalgia is its own language. Looking back at a childhood that only exists in fragments seems to be something we all share, no matter what side of the world we’re on.
Thank you for watching! If you like internet investigations like these, I have loads more on my channel, so stick around. If you want to support what I do, I have an Etsy shop where I sell stickers, prints, and shirts inspired by Dreamcore and aesthetic art.
A huge thank you to Kai for helping me make this video—his social media links are in the description. I’m Meter and Gastly, and follow along for more weird stuff!