Not to be mistaken with the recurrent carnival in my dreams where things feel off at the edges.

In this dream, I ended up very, very far away from home, on a coastal town. I reached its main street, next to the beach. Every summer, in this corner of Dreamworld, they have a carnival or spectacle of sorts. From the outside, it looks like an additional enclosed space made of aluminium sheets, with spraypainted clowns and cartoon characters in highlight colours.

It looked kind of crude, but on the inside, it was longer and way more complex. It was structured like a huge corridor you could walk across, with all the fun things on each side. It had no roof, so you could see the sky, but it was hard to keep track of what was above of you with all the things happening to the sides. The entire place was dark, light coming from stage lights and reflected on the highlighter paintings on the walls, creating a blacklight effect. These paintings were similar to the ones outside, but instead of bootleg cartoon characters, they had a more abstract, zany and clownish theme, creating overall a very alienating yet mesmerizing effect. It's as if they helped convince you stepped in another dimension.

The place hosted two scenarios meant for shows, but at the time they were just empty staes, seats and lights. The carnival also had funhouses, jungle mazes, dark rides, tracks for kart racing and theatre-like side attractions. I couldn't join them for I was too old, but I peeked at them. I was not alone: the place was being visited by children and their parents, who were asking questions to off-duty performers.

Now, these performers were many and varied. You had your typical clowns and costumed mascots (these being all the cartoon characters you expect to see in this kind of places), but there were also men walking on stilts, and puppeteers who, instead of controlling their puppets with their hands like usual, these were intermingled with their bodies in such a way they had to flex and contort to make them move, so a weird hybrid between a puppeteer and a contortionist. I remember specifically a lady with a snake puppet wrapped around her, and another person who layed down on a cart, disguised while he controlled a bird puppet with his feet.

I just kept walking, admiring everything happening around me. In the end, I accidentally reached the backstage - it wasn't disguised at all, just a place at the end of the "corridor" where the glitz and glam abruptly ends. It was lowly lit, like a warehouse, and it had a bunch of sofas and tables for the staff to chill on. They were dressde like normal people (except one drag queen). When they noticed me, I told them I was expecting an exit at the end of a corridor (it was a dead end) and that I was sorry to stumble upon what seemed to be a private zone. They politely redirected me to walk my way back out.

When I got outside, I was immensely distressed, for it was getting dark and it was so far away from home. A nice policeman (large and round, with a maroon outfit) told me where there was a subway station from which I could get back home. On my way walking there, I saw another crude aluminium structure, but smaller, and apparently hosting a shark tank.

In this dream, my boyfriend found a place in Spain to stay in for a visit. It was like he rented a house and a piece of territory around. The house itself was humble, but pretty and cozy. It had a patio partially covered in green vines that provided some shade. Overall, the place was colored in white and light green. It had your usual table and chairs to chill outside at the patio, and two doors: one to the exterior and another to further inside the house.

Inside, there was a small but cozy living room, with a sofa, a coffee table, a cabinet for books and stuff, an entrance to a small kitchen and stairs that lead upstairs, to presumable the bedrooms.

Now, there was another place that was technically part of my boyfriend's house, but also of "public domain", somehow: you could reach from there to an extensive piece of land, the kind that is mostly compacted dirt with barely any grass. It was used as a sportsfield, but in a casual way: the kind of place you'd go to kick a football with your buddies, not necessarily a professional, stadium-like affair.

Here I got alarmed, because there was a team of archers, practising archery in fursuits. They all wore the same character, as if it was an uniform: a white bear in in pastel pink and green clown makeup. But these weren't the cutesy colours an internet person would decorate their blog with, more like the drabbish pastels for people who hate colour you'd find at a store.

I dreamt with a similar dream home; this time, an actual one from a person I know in real life. But in my dream, her home was way bigger and had some strange things in it:

• Two pools: the smaller one was meant for pets
• A whole ass amphitheatre with huge Greek/Roman statues and an infinite pool. The owner said she regrets getting the statues, because they look like people standing up at night.
• A wagon system straight out of Minecraft.

And I also dreamt of a more mediocre house: a smaller apartment with yellow and grungy walls. Everything was darker and filthier, there was less furniture, and the neighbors were noisier.

And finally, of my own home, during a huge storm. There was ear-splitting thunder like that one time my (real) house got struck by lightning.

I was travelling with a friend I have to meet yet, we were going to visit a relative of mine, while making sure I went to work, too. Her house was far away, you had to go via car or subway and there was a palm grove, but all the tree trunks were shaped like human torsos.

Her house had two or three floors, all to herself, and a garden. I find that to be quite luxurious. The walls were rose colored - it looked whimsical and colorful, yet still elegant anda acceptable for those beige-and-grey minimalism lovers who get an aneurysm when they see more than two bright colours put together. The floors were cherry-colored wooden planks (as in, that vivid wood shade, not bright red. Back to the walls, they had a decoration on the underside, like a white strip that surrounds the entire middle of the wall, and the lower half (of the wall) was painted in a colour that acted as a transitionary color between the pink of the wall and the wood of the floor. On the corners, there were "bride details": green and yellow ondulated lines that crossed paths, and in the spaces they left in-between, it was decorated with fabric roses and fake pearls.

The lower floor had more "functional" rooms - like bedrooms, living room, kitchen, bathroom, etc - they were modest and minimalist, but with a few decorative touches, like a wooden rocking horse.

The upper floor had a lot of quirky but cozy places. One of them was a tiny cozy library, up to the walls with shelves filled with books, a big comfy couch and rugs. Another was a toy gallery of sorts - it had Neopet toys I had never seen before. And one of the biggest rooms was for her pets. Inside, there was a big glass tank, looking almost a tiny zoo exhibit, holding a giant tortoise with all the environment recreation and commodities it could ask for. There was also a big cage holding 2-4 little parrots. She also had a dog, one of the fluffy, curly, mop-looking ones, in white, black and brown. It had no area dedicated to it in the Pet Room because it was a free-roaming pet. It was very cute.

The house owner was also covering a trapdoor (on the second floor!), and making sure we didn't notice it. I never learnt what it lead to.

I love this dream. I wish I had a house like this, with the walls painted something other than white, and big enough to host all the things and pets and people I love. A place where I can enjoy living in and where I can thrive in.

I couldn't find my own home in my hometown. I recall it being at the edge of town but couldn't locate it. When I did, there was a "rich" part of the building with pools and palmtrees that was constantly pouring water, and I felt that should give us more humidity problems than our neighbors in our same economical situation. I complained about us living in squalor when a much better life was literally next door. Our building also had some sort of wagon/elevator system inside that I tried and felt very unsafe. I was inside a little wagon cart and i went through a spiral tiny track and I could see all the gears and shit.

In dreams, my town used to have a carnival, a funfair. It was a small one but full of charm, with rides you just don't see anymore because they were made differently. It felt more theatrical and old-timey, and it was lovely. Shops used to surround this carnival and it was good business for the town.

However, something tragic happened a long time ago, and it had to close down. Something involving the death of a child, I think. They were the twin of another kid, and nowadays, this kid still roams my town, without aging a day since that accident, always dressing like their deceased twin.

If you know where to look in the dream version of my town, all the rides are still there, covered in tarps. They are still lovely, but they run a risk of being damaged due to age and weather. I wanted them to be at least restored and sent to some place where they might not be functional, but admired in all their glory. Kinda like a museum.

In my dreams, my university is arranged more like a big mall, with separate floors and big open spaces between them. Kinda like how you can see the shops below on a higher floor of an actual shopping mall, you get what I mean? It also had several cafeterias outside that felt.. a bit more "bougie" than your average school cafeteria. In this particular dream, they were hosting an enclosure with "live phoenix birds".

Of course, these weren't the mythological fire beast that is reborn from its own ashes, but a name given to an Earthly species of animal. They were huge, flightless birds - like ostriches, but their bodies were smaller and their legs and necks were longer. In particular, their legs were easily as tall as an adult human being, so they towered over people.

Their enclosure was less of a proper animal enclosure, and more of those patches with flowers and palmtrees they put at malls - but, for some reason, they didn't leave the area designated for them. The "enclosures" had trees tall enough for them and feeding trays filled with spices in red, orange, yellow and green.

Unlike ostriches, "phoenixes" had dexterity on their feet comparable to parrots, and they liked to grab fistfuls of spices and smear them on their bodies to give them brighter colorations. Warm tones, especially red, were their favourites. The phoenixes were yellow, but I don't know if that was their natural coloration or if they were adorned with spices.

A temporal marketplace that's only available on the weekends. Instead of being an open street like usual markets are, this one was inside an apartment, as in, you had to enter the building, know the right door and call to enter.

It's held by my teachers, who sell their products (not necessarily related to education) here: baked goods, dairy products, horse meat (?). It was also a good way to catch up with the teachers and ask what to do next in school.

This is the place I ran away to in my nightmare "A Possible Prequel to Fish Where Fish Don't Belong". I think I visited this place before in a past dream, and that I didn't remember until this one.

It was a huge garden, with old buildings scattered here and there, a landmark of that town. It was very green, and very peaceful, with paths paved with flagstone. My plan was to walk all across its perimeter, to get my mind away from the nasty incidents at the supermarket.

I came across people who were chopping wood and selling small bundles of it. I had a chat with them about how I wished I could do more things with my own hands, instead of with a screen. I also said that handwork was underappreciated, yet as important. I got this impression there were more people in the garden doing other activities like beekeeping or gathering fruit and selling part of their work to visitors.

Later, I entered oneof the buildings that was in my path. This one was a bit modernized so it'd be suitable for people to enter, it had glass pannels, informative screens, several floors and a clean, shiny look to it. Less of the old building it used to be and more of a museum explaining the past of that place. It was mostly empty, but maybe because there weren't many visitors at that moment.

I also remember it had a small cafe and some "slides" that were actually mechanical stairs. They were rainbow coloured and you were encouraged to "slide" down them. Some kids even asked me to join them, so I slid down the rainbow stairs twice. It was fun, and also a part I think I remember from a past dream.

The gardens also hosted a graveyard, but not a creepy or scary one, but a peaceful one instead. The kind that gives meaning to "rest in peace". At the end of the dream, I ws going to venture myself in the big open space they left for more graves. Nothing dug yet, it was just a huge grass field. I was a bit afraid, maybe of getting lost, maybe of trespassing, but there was nothing to fear, and nothing to doubt.

(Note: Date is about latest dream I had about this place but I'm sure I dreamt with this place much before.)

This dream is about a city. Not a very large one. The focus of this dream is a "main" corner (like, it makes a corner but instead of being isolated like the word "corner" would suggest it's a very visited area, lots of people going there) where there's several shops, but the most prominent one is a jewellery one that is pretty wide and has two exits, one for each street that makes the corner.

Further down one of the streets, there is a tall building used as a youth club: a place for youngsters to meet, make homework together, plan activities... For some reason, it was videogame themed, but instead of using recognizable videogame characters, each floor was vaguely themed after a "genre" of videogames... and then, not really. Each floor had an arcade machine, containing a game made by people that used the building. I only remember a "horror" floor and another arcade machine that felt very... slot machine-y, even if it wasn't really a slot machine. I talk about that tacky aesthetic the images decorating a slot machine have: you know, all those backlighted images of questionably dressed cartoon ladies. You know what I mean. This one machine was on the first or second floors (five floors total), and I remember those being... stinky (the floors not the machines).

Apparently, there was a more proper "playable museum" or "arcade" in the town too, but it was further away than what we planned to do that day - which in my case, was sitting outside the jewellery store and watching over my dog. I also remember an artist making caricatures of people for 6 bucks each. He deserved way more.

There is a house. A house that looks similar to [REDACTED]'s, but it's bigger, non-Euclidian, MC Escher-esque and has some secret rooms and passages. Also it's apparently far away from where I currently live, and part of my family lives there when we're not there. It has a large garden too... I called it my home in-dreams.

For those not in the know, Lidl is a supermarket chain in Europe, famous for its low prices, products available only for two weeks themed around countries or holidays, and for being my main source of glitter pens.

In this dream, I entered a Lidl from a different angle than I use to. This changes the store's layout entirely and makes it bigger on the inside.

It's quite crowded and I mostly fool around looking at the stuff that's for sale and eating sweets before paying for them (I do NOT do that in real life, mind you). I get worried about eating too many, but then I realize I'm in a dream. Eventually, the people there is too much for me to handle, and I leave the place pretending I'm a wheelchair user so I can leave faster (!?!?).

In front of the Lidl there's this driving school that was making fun of me because I was on a wheelchair. I got (understandably) mad and I (not-so-understandably?) insult them and demand them to bring me a complaint form.

After that, I go with two friends to be met yet through a farm area. It's kind of dry and desolate and grey, but there's still makeshift huts and pens, with horses, goats, and chickens. One of my friends mentions that pigs will start to grunt when they see us. Apart from my two friends, we do not see any other people, only animals.

My other friend was having a discussion with a third person (fourth? do I count?) over the phone. She tells us that her friend (the person at the other side of the phone) is currently obsessed with vampires to an overwhelming degree. I tell her that they're playing all Twilight films on Disney Channel nowadays, and she tell me she (phone friend) wants a Dracula for herself NOW.

A student's exchange at Coney Island, but this one has nothing to do with the actual Coney Island. First one, this one is a legit island on one corner of the UK. It was very close to the mainland, but you still needed to use a boat to get to the other side.

The island was one small town in the center surrounded by countryside, mountains and forests, except the necessary harbors. My "college" was a big fancy mansion that had bedrooms for the students and whatnot.

People kept telling me Coney Island was a tiny place inhabited by old people and without much to do for "the youth", like me. But I was really excited and invested in checking thrift stores and stuff like that. Apparently, I would be able to travel across the entire town area by foot, as long as I don't end up on the mountains, countryside, or forests.

A waterpark, close to a forest area, where you could see the tree branches near and above you as you slided past. I liked to leave my belongings near the "landing" zone (the pool at the end), and made sure they didn't get wet.

I guess this is not viable in real life due to safety concerns and cleaning. Oh well, it's nice to dream.

I only dreamt of this place once. I was in some sort of country, similar to where I lived, but the rules were different.

• "Everything worth something costs money"
• "You're free to take anything from anyone, anytime, but they can also take anything from you anytime"

In other words, everything worthy should have a price tag (so intangible things like kindness and creativity were scoffed at), and stealing was encouraged. It wasn't a good time. I got stalked in that dream.

Overall, this place felt like it was made either of old, undesirable beliefs; corrupted current beliefs ("Sometimes, good things cost money"; giving as much as you take when it comes to relationships), or "the worst traits of capitalism and communism put together" (!?). It also felt like some sort of made-up "bad place" they create in old cartoons to punish a misbehaving character and teach moral lessons.

I was travelling to a beloved real place of mine, even staying at the Hotel (yes, the one that's mentioned below), and I finally got to eat from its bouffet, and visit lots of places full of good memories. During my travels, I met a girl in a train station.

Apparently, I met her in another time before, too. She was a gal who made me a small star-shaped henna tattoo which didn't quite looked well so she offered to make me another henna tattoo for free (this happened in real life). I never got her name in real life, but in the dreamworld, it was Amanda but preferred to call herself Jennifer. I invited her to hop on the train with me, but we were going to the wrong train. I realize this, and I hopped over the train tracks, towards the right one, while yelling at Jennifer about going there instead.

She tripped, and fell, and got hurt and couldn't advance anymore. I had to call a train assistant to help her, but the dream told me this was a train assistant who specialized in travelling to other dreams and media (are memories a separate category?). That, from that station, I could even go to "cereal worlds".

This was a candy store that had two glass displays at the sides of the entrance, displayed in a way you could see the product but not access to it from the outside. They sold sweets and a pretty big deal of toys.

There was also a small library behind one of the glass displays, just a regular library where everybody could come in and borrow books. The owner told me it was to keep the previous owner happy, who got involved in a drug deal. I don't know what one thing has to do with the other but I guess he saw what he was doing was wrong and wanted to make something good for the world before moving on.

This was the name of a club that got refurbished as a parking lot and a store, located in a very far away, kind of rural Spanish town/village (lots of white houses and uphills) that I sometimes visit in dreams.
Located on the outskirts of said town, I was curious about what it sold, but felt it was too cursed to enter inside.

Thing is, I don't quite remember what were they selling. Satanic cult memorabilia? Maybe? Truth is, I have no idea.

This was some residential place I was on a student exchange in either London or Finland. They had an indoors parade with people in costumes and the new students, to welcome them. I joined in and had fun.

The place had some interesting areas:

• Four conference rooms: each one with a star pattern and color-coded for a different purpose:
• Blue for official announcements
• Red for experiments and math demonstrations
• Yellow for fun events
• Green for general announcements
• Assorted communal rooms
• An aquarium room (this time, a benevolent one!): what is usually the "walls" of a room was the actual place where the fish and other sea animals lived, and the "space" of the room itself had beanbags and other seats to sit and watch.
• The vault: a huge room full of books, videogames, blankets and plushes, which you could borrow showing the number of your room. Oddly enough, the items within the vault were often things you either lost, left behind or wanted.

After grabbing things from the vault, I come back to my room to see two friends yet to be met sad. One missed his girlfriend, the other wanted to play games but apparently his luggage got lost and his games along with it. I told them about the vault: for the former to "grab a blanker that reminds you of her", and the latter so "now you can try some new games".

I notice this rough kid who was checking my bag and found a cuttlebone. I grab it because it looked smooth and interesting. He said something like "I've never had one of these, I saw them on bird cages, but never had one of my own". And then he bites it, and the dream ends.

In this dream, I sneak out of a family dinner with my bf, a cousin and a friend to be met yet to a fancy-ish restaurant, "so they would know I can be independent".

Said restaurant was surrounded by greenery on the outside, and dimly lit on the inside. They had wood counters, and walls, and clothed tables, and they served fancy food.

We fumbled the main courses, because we couldn't understand/pronounce the words of the meals correctly (they were written in a foreign language). However, as a dessert, we got an assortment of cake slices in all sorts of flavours. My favourite were two that tasted like daisies and dandelions. They kinda tasted like those flowers smell, very delicate.

Since we were supposed to eat with our families instead, I asked my buddies to keep this escapade a secret. The Friend To Be Met Yet agrees, but only "as long as you shake off your reptile tendencies."

A recurrent dream of mine that lasted in my memories of the waking world.

I dream I was driving with my mother through a road with forests and lakes at both sides, in the sunset. As I watch through the window, I notice there are huge dinosaur statues or animatronics between the trees, in a state of decay, overtaken by moss and lichens. Some of them are even in the lakes, "plesiosaur" ones, of course. I remember a little scene of a T-Rex "attacking" one of the plesios, half submerged in water, and one of the plesios missing its head (not because it was intended, it just got so deteriorated it fell off). The trees around these lake created hand-shapes, and I got this enormous feeling of dread, urging my mother to drive faster and leave this area as soon as possible.

I've always been a fan of attending "dinosaur expositions", which are some sort of temporary, "travelling" show that showcases 20-50 life-sized dinosaur sculptures. Some of them even have sound and moving jaws/necks/arms/tails. They are always displayed in settings with fake rocks and plants, and of course, visitors are not to touch the dinosaurs.

However, the dinosaurs in my dream... they weren't part of any exposition, they were just left there, in the middle of the forest. Unnatural, yet blending in with the environment. Abandoned statues, exposed to thhe elements of nature, sunlight, wind, water and forces of gravity and material degradation slowly but surely making them decay. "Wild" statues, statues nobody was taking care of, statues you could just reach out your hand and touch, because nobody was there to stop you. Obviously inert, yet looking so natural, like a wild animal in their environment, that you fear they will turn their decrepit heads towards you and hurt you with their degrading fiberplastic claws, teeth, tails or limbs.

Since then, I feel an enourmous special kind of dread when I see real life photos of scenarios similar to the ones I've described in this dream, one that I never feel when looking at other photos of abandoned places or objects.

Dream in which I visit a carnival set in a parking lot the floor of which was covered with hay, with less actual attractions and more side shows like a freak show amd an actual puppy mill. I talk with the freakshow manager, who tells me one of his freaks (all animal freaks) managed to kill and eat one person, and that now he has more space than before. The puppy mill has puppies for people to pet and sell. There's also an area with squirrels and praire dogs, but the fence is busted and they escape. They are severely understaffed and can't keep track of everything: the small animal owner was practicing a heart surgery on one of the praire dogs! I think there was a bouncy castle/slide thing too? Also elephants and horses

It was a beach, and a house on a small island not very far from it, connected by a natural bridge of sand.

My mind used to focus on "Halloween stores": costume shops that would always carry a lot of Halloween-themed items including some oddities that I've never seen in real life. You'd have your usual masks, fake corpses and paper cutlery, but also bootleg Halloween ponies. I remember at least three: a stand-alone one, one that could be find at the shoreline, and another inside a mall.

This place is some sort of seafront that had one of those wooden plank piers, but instead of sticking out of the shore, it surrounds it, giving people a place to walk and set stores. The planks were white.

Apart from the aforementioned Halloween store, the stores there often sell clothing and/or jewellery (not the fancy kind).

By the end of this shoreline, there is a fairly big restaurant that specializes in seafood. It's white with big windows so you can see the sea while you eat, and off-season it's empty, but open so people can walk across and access the other part of the shoreline

This one lacks the wooden pier, and has a lot of short, white, empty buildings, similar to the aforementioned restaurant. I always feel disappointed the "kiosk" is closed.

This place is a town that has a lot of hills so you're always walking upwards or downwards, and you can see a huge valley and mountains from there. Its main street has shops, cafés and restaurants on one side, including a shop for home furnishings, accessories and other daily household items, decorations and toys. I always find something interesting in there, and it's mostly tinted a blue-ish teal. It's big, it feels kinda empty when it's not (it's because its corridors are very broad), and it's got strange opening/closing schedules.

On sort of one side of the mountain but also on the valley too, you can see a funfair, with all its colors and lights. I always want to go there, but the dream doesn't last enough for me to reach it. Fireworks are frequent, but not loud.

On the other side of the valley, I think there is a natural trail with lots of trees and some wooden signs. It feels equal parts rural and "jungle adventure"-ish, with some vines and dangers. I think there's also a restaurant somewhere along the way.

Sometimes, this carnival is the one seen from the Mountainside. Sometimes, it's just in a city, accessed through a series of narrow empty grey streets. Maybe it's just the same carnival but from two different perspectives. It's loud, colorful, and cheerful, as any funfair should be... but something always feels off, yet I can't pinpoint what. The "outer" edge of the carnival is what feels the offest.

This hotel is big and spacey. It's got warm wood tones and plants growing inside, feeling a bit "summery", but also cozy.

It functions kind of like a pier, an airport or a train station: it is a place from where to go to other places. The Hotel can be anywhere, and lead to anywhere.

Parts of the Hotel include:

• A buffet I always try to access to, but never get to do (except one time on 17/03/2021).
• A bar. This is the place I frequent the most and it can offer snacks and a small selection of meals, like soup and spaghetti.
• A "secret Chinese restaurant" that it's kind of hidden and out of sight. It has pretty traditional art on its walls, but everytime I visited it, it seemed empty and unused.
• "Infinite pools": huge pools surrounding the hotel to the point you could practically swim all the way around the building. There's also a smaller personal pool on each room's terrace, that is arranged in a way that it "cascades" into the Infinite Pools but not in a way you could just drop down from the terrace to the pools below.

I only got to eat at the buffet once. It had old foods I remembered and liked, and tried new ones, like:

• The Red Bread: It's too bad I didn't like this one because it looked so good. It was kind of like a preztel dough, but slightly redder like a sweet potato, and apparently you could make anything with it: bread, preztels, dumplings...
• "Cupcakes": These were goopier than regular cupcakes, as if their tops were made with custard instead of cream cheese. In fact, I'm sure they didn't even have a muffin underneath and it was just a pile of custard attempting to look fancy. They had sprinkles on top and came in three colours and flavours:
• Blue for that weird candy-blueberry flavour
• Pink for strawberry
• Yellow for lemon/vanilla. That one was my favourite

I don't remember much of what else I ate, but I'm glad I got to visit the dream buffet!

The Neon Cinema always appears in dreams that happen at night. Its most relevant characteristic is the long, bright corridors that flash lights and pictures as you walk through on your way to the food area and the movie you were going to watch. I never got to watch a film in this kind of dreams.

There's another cinema in dreams that doesn't have neon tunnels, but whose screen rooms are huge, and their seats are arranged in a semicircle, kind of like a Greek amphitheatre.

And the trilogy of Dream Cinemas is complete!

This cinema has a sailboat sculpture outside, all divided in pieces each containing a scene out of a movie. This cinema specializes in sci-fi films or films where space is extensively shown. They liked to put on Wall-E every 7 months. I'm not really sure if it actually had some device to simulate zero gravity while watching space films or not (I hope so).

Outside, theatrical music played. Apparently, each theater and museum has its own soundtrack, and it kinda felt like each area of the city had an overworld theme.

Nowadays, my subconscious prefers to focus on "hypermarkets". The most prominent one is the Mysterious Store. I could point you exactly where would it be located in real life, even if that spot currently has absolutely nothing on. This store is known for being larger than it looks on the outside, sometimes even going underground, and having unreasonably huge specific sections as well as things that don't quite belong on a hypermarket.
Examples include:

• Baskets of free goodies (often small trinkets like opened blindbag toys) outside the main doors
• Main section has an aqua-tealish tint to it, and mostly focuses on boxed goods (cereal, packaged cookies, soda cans), sweets, and common household items (bowls, cutlery, mosquito swatters)
• There's an unreasonably large and "ominous" meat section and a "secret" cheese section that only opens at certain hours of the day
• Deeper inside, you can find a book/DVD section that holds nothing but cartoon bootlegs (you know, books about "Peppy Pig" or "Winny & Poo" DVDs), with very few genuine ones mixed in.
• There is also an entire section dedicated to horror movies but instead of being relegated to a few shelves at most like a regular store, it spans an unreasonable amount of square feet. Worst of all, it is actually "decorated" like a horror movie and it looks dreary, dingy, with a slight red/brownish tint. It looks like something out of Silent Hill and it's very unsettling to walk through that section.
• An area where they sell international products and legumes.
• There are sections dedicated to selling cars and furniture. You know, things that are so big that often need their own stores and aren't usually sold "in person" inside a Wal-Mart kind of place?
• They also sold art, but not like, mass produced canvases, more like one-of-a-kind pieces you'd find at a gallery. It was mixed in with the furniture section.
• Corridors that run at the side of the actual store sections. They're meant for staff and youtubers (!?) but they're good to go through if you want to skip sections or avoid people.
• It also had a sprawling system of "resting zones" - places located just kinda "outside" the main product areas, and they appear more frequently underground. These places are tinted blue, have blue sofas and dark brown/black low tables and are meant for people to rest, tend their children, etc.
• I also remember some sort of concert hall near these resting zones where they hosted shows regularly. They had up to three of those.

The Mysterious Store seems to have some sort of off-shoot far, far away, a place I only go with my father. This one doesn't go underground or have rest areas, but it's still pretty big, maybe a bit larger than an actual hypermarket. For some reason, everytime I dream with this store and my dad I'm always a small kid. He goes to buy whatever he needs and I eventually separate from him to look at my favourite sections.

• Said favourite sections are toys, books and seasonal products. I often find unusual ponies, like black unicorns, but I never get to buy them because I wake up before I do.
• Once they hosted a tabletop game party at the entrance of the building (just before entering the actual shop, probably where the self service cash registers are). I joined in and played this Warriorcats-esque game for four players where each one played as a different animal: a wolf, a big cat, a swan and a snake. I forgot the objective of the game.
• This store also has (had?) an unreasonably large frozen meat section.
• And a fish section where they were selling orca meat. Like, just a big ol' slice of killer whale with black/white skin fins and everything. Along with it there was a disclaimer. I couldn't quite read it (you can't read in dreams), but it claimed that there has been an overpopulation of orcas and that's why it's fine to cull them and sell their meat.

Long, winding streets full of stalls. I'm always looking for interesting toys and trinkets here. There's a brick and mortar corner shop where an old lady sells old stuff. There are other permanent thrift stores like this, but this is the most memorable one.

This dream is simply about a bakery existing in a distorted reflection of my home town. What is strange is that there is an actual bakery that exists, but it's actually on the opposite side of the dream one.

The Cornerstore is a small store that changes layout and products depending of the time of the day. It had sweet buns earlier, and meats and pastries later.

A few streets further, there is a newsstand, and another one on the other side of town, crossing a bridge. I like to go these places, looking for magazines.

• A path full of fallen flowers, with the trees they came from above us. I went on a walk with my bf on this one
• A wooden bridge crossing a huge lake that is just a bit below the water, enough to get your feet wet and see lily pads and small fish swimming around. Birds are flying above the sky too.
• The "Sea of Wheat": An endless field of wheat that slowly curves down as you walk through it, as if you went down between two hills. It had no paths, but you didn't have to step on the wheat to advance, and the wind made it sway in a way that it got out of your way. It was a cloudy morning, with the sun shining through the clouds.

This town in dreams is a place I often go as a holiday or as a field trip. It's sort of placed near the sea, but I never got to actually see the sea there. There's a neighbourhood area where wealthy people live in cozy-looking houses with gardens overgrown with vines (but in a lovely way). The people living here, although wealthy, are very nice and friendly and generous.

Further on, after some pretty empty streets, there's a funfair that has a lot of screens and bright lights. I feel it's a very "metallic" funfair that focuses more in rides similar to those "4D simulator" cabins, at least aesthetic-wise.

There is also a subway station you can just slide in. As in, instead of your usual stairs, there's a huge slide you're encouraged to sit down and slide into as if it was a playground. I actually want to use this idea for Tooneiros: slides for the buildings, slides as in slopes in cities and open terrain, and yes, slides even in the subway! And when it rains, they could become water slides! Again, maybe not very practical in real life, but fun for fictional and dream worlds.

There was a huge hole in the desert that could lead you straight to Hell. Apparently something like this exists in real life? As in, a bigass hole in the desert nobody knows where it leads? Anyway, mine also had two graveyards on each side. Well, calling them "graveyards" is a stretch. It was actually two fields of rocks with the engraved names of those who went to hell. One side was for people, and the other, for animals.

This is a plain ol' parking lot I dreamt about more than once. Sometimes, small events like markets are hosted there or around it. There's greenery surrounding it, and you can catch a good sunset from there. Or did I grab that one from real life?

This one is quite special, for it is not quite a dream, but more of a dream-like, yet real memory.

However, I must tell you beforehand that this story features some disturbing thoughts about being underwater, so please, if those topics upset you, proceed carefully.

When I was very young, I had this fun outing with part of my family to spend a day canoeing at a dam.

Back then, I knew what a dam waas because of school and cartoons, but I couldn't picture that place as a dam because it didn't have a huge concrete wall holding in all the water. I never got to see that part, and nobody even told me that was supposed to be a dam. For all I knew, that was just a very big lake! And due to the places I've frequented in my early life, I was used to the idea of a lake so big you couldn't see the other side of on the horizon.

When we were on our little rowboat/canoe, they told us to make sure we didn't drop other objects into the water, for this time, we couldn't just swim to the depths and retrieve it, because it was so deep you could never touch the bottom. This wasn't just the deepest end of the pool anymore. It was real, real, real deep.

I became aware of the watery abyss under us. I realized that I could never touch the bottom no matter how strong, how resilient, how much could I hold my breath underwater, because I was just a person, and the magnitude of this surpassed my human condition. I started to envision it almost like an endless pit filled with water. I imagined objects being dropped there, sinking for infinity, getting lost forever. And then people. People who could drown and whose bodies could never be rescued, because that "lake" was just. That. Deep.

This is probably the first time I was fully aware of the concept of mortality. The concept of real danger. The concept that if something goes wrong, things could not be okay afterwards.

I remember few things about this outing. Other than what I just wrote above, I recall having a delicious ice cream sandwich with chocolate biscuits and, when going back home, seeing some clouds intersecting the mountains in the sunset, looking like there was a lake between the mountains, as impossible as that might sound.

Ice cream sandwiches with chocolate biscuits always remind me of this memory.