This paper examines how underground movement, through spaces such as metro systems and subterranean tunnels, has been imagined and encoded as a site of dissent that threatens power, as well as a site that is the object of desired state control. Subterranean spaces not only reflect but also refract the above ground world, allowing us to see both in a different light. Vertical divisions of surface, air, and underground and the relative permeability of these divisions can be as meaningful as the horizontal borders that divide surface spaces and territories. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the spatial triad, as well as numerous studies of the (post) industrial emergence of the subterranean as a realm of quotidian life, I consider the potential and limits of both the “underground” as a metaphor for the surreptitious circulation of dissident cultural artifacts, and the physical underground as a site of subversive activity that authoritarian regimes in the Middle East seek to control, flood, seal off, or quarantine. Focusing on works of Egyptian literature and film, including Metro by Magdy al-Shafee (2008), Yousry Nasrallah’s film Scheherezade, Tell Me a Story (2009), Mohammed Rabie’s Otared (2015), and Using Life by Ahmed Naji (2014), I argue that a comparison of pre- and post-Arab spring portrayals of underground spaces and movements reveals a crucial shift resulting from these socio-political upheavals. My reading finds that while works from the late-Mubarak era produce a realist depiction of a Cairo that has resigned itself to a present of corruption and vast wealth disparities, post-uprising works by Naji and Rabie provide a more speculative and often darker vision of the underground as a repository of dystopias and destructive utopian dreams with often devastating consequences. I argue therefore that the Arab spring and its subsequent suppression in Egypt has reinvigorated cultural representations of the underground, transforming this space from a mirror of the society above it that exposes but does not contest forms of corruption and dysfunction, to a space that nurtures and enlivens fantasies and nightmares of future social, spatial, and political transformations. Further, I suggest this shift represents the return of the metaphorical and physical underground as a site of dissent in the face of resurgent forms of political repression.