Do you have strong experiences of places in dreams? Geography or cities you return to again over time?

There’s a dream geography I return to often, and it feels like a place to assess options from. It’s an asian market, attached to a greater city, with multiple entrances and exits. It features indoor asian groceries, with a large range of foods, and outdoor stalls, with specialised foods - vegetables in one, barbecued meats in another, brooms in another.

Although I sometimes have time to wander and explore, to catch my breath in the shops, it’s usually the scene of a chase of some sort. Rushing past the sauce jars, skidding past the bbq pork stand; one time a small train with pursuers onboard followed me through the indoor shops.

It reminds me of carpark dreams - often appearing when you’ve lost your car, or the carpark is huge, or it’s partly underground, or do you ever have those car-stacker carpark dreams? (!)

Malls, shopping centres, artificial reality, false narrative of choices - limited choices - rushing, consumerism, the culture around us… I often have a feeling, and sometimes appear in the context of, being a teenager in these dreams. School friends appear, or I feel like I have to catch a bus cause I can’t drive, or I’m at the mercy of being told to hurry up and choose.

Do you ever claim your car (agency) from the carpark attendees (authority) in dreams? I often find my dreams stop when I identify my car, not when I get in and drive off.

Do you ever have a moment out of time, a shift in perspective, while you’re trapped in a shopping centre maze, or part of a chase? I occasionally find a moment of peace, buying an iced tea and sitting down with my sister, but without realising the illusion of the shopping centre.

It reminds me of a videogame called Echo, which is set on a planet which is a fractal palace run by a supercomputer. In this game, you navigate the almost endless repeating spaces - which are beautiful - while avoiding or aggressing clones of yourself (illusions), and every 30 seconds the system reboots: the room goes dark for a while, the clones lose their memory, your memory persists, the lights come back on.

Are you living in a fractal palace run by a superprogram, or are you able to reset out of it?

I think these hyperchoice, chase dreams give us a chance to practise seeing another way, and changing the scene. If you were to stand still and say, “I’m actually in a sunlit meadow right now” your dream could change instantly.

But it’s also okay to learn the dream pattern well enough to break it when you’re ready.

Next time you’re in the shopping centre, market, chase, carpark dream, you might realise you’ve been there before, and you know where the exit door to another world is.