My immersive experience design SubDream is set in a surreal and distorted version of the New York City subway system. To me, the NYC subway feels chaotic and emotionally charged. Its aging infrastructure, unreliable schedules, lack of mobile signal, and cryptic graffiti and the odd encounters that take place within it create a space that is difficult to navigate yet strangely magnetic. I often found myself physically lost but mentally detached—trapped in a state between anxiety and dreams. I wasn’t sure if I was moving forward or stuck in a loop. That sensation became the core metaphor behind this project. I began imagining the subway not as a transit system but as a collective psychological space shaped by ritual, cultural tension, and subconscious impulses. The line between public infrastructure and inner life began to blur.

SubDream doesn’t re-create a real-world transit system. Instead, it constructs a dreamlike public space shaped by symbolic elements, sensory overload, and subconscious logic. The subway becomes a fragmented narrative space, where perception bends, time is distorted, and meaning surfaces through intuition rather than reasoning. SubDream explores the way immersive environments can reveal not just physical systems but internal states. I use fragmentation, contradiction, and sensory overload as narrative tools to ask what it means to get lost—and whether disorientation can become a way of understanding.

See more at jadeinblue.com/work/subdream.