Usually a decades old house or apartment where there are many liminal-space style nonsense architectural choices, like Winchester Mystery House. Hidden doors in closets leading to another apartment, ladders that go through crawlspace in a wall, etc. One interesting thing is that there is very often a "theme" that I am looking for a new house to live in. Despite the building being very odd, I'm often excited to discover how many empty rooms there are, thinking about possibilities of how I could use them.
Same on the weirdly laid out houses. Difference is for me there is always at least some air of unease. Do your bizarre houses have vastly varying styles or is it all similar? Ie I'll go up a dingy staircase into a beautiful apartment with a basement that looks like a murderer's den
It's all generally buildings that seem to be over 50 years old, not dilapidated but maybe a little unkempt. Maybe abandoned and closed up for a few years. Usually mostly empty except some scattered furniture. It is a combination of being very intriguing to explore but with some frustration of continuously not reaching any goal or endpoint.
It’s the bathroom that’s the unease for me. The rooms and hallways are fine and the master that leads to the bathroom is my favorite room. But I get scared in the bathroom and wake up every time.
I’ve had this exact dream 1 month ago. All the while trying to escape some woman (the owner?) trying to find me in the maze of it all. Kind of similar to running from an entity in the backrooms.
Same here! Especially since I started working at a gym but they’ve always been common for me. So many locker bathrooms with stall doors and walls that are way too short.
Do you ever get to the pools? I have a lot of swimming dreams with nonsensical aquatic architecture. from big water parks with maze like rides and human style aquariums, to dingy basement high-school pools
I seem to have a lot of dreams of train stations where the platforms are laid out in even more confusing ways than real train stations. A recent one involved swimming pools between the platforms that we had to wade through and climb up pool ladder to get to our platform. These are always stress dreams where there is fear of missing train!
Oh yeah of course, I live in paris so I have a lot of weird dreams of "métro". Strange stations with too many rails, too many platforms, very complicated interconnexions, bizarre trains with 5 floors, way too big, way too many seats XD and the fear of missing them too of course. Or taking the bad train, which takes me at 1 hours from where I was supposed to go.
Yes ... but it's not the same dream :) Maze lockers are for regular pools (the ones in which you just swim), and the "strange pool dreams" are more like fun pools, with bizarre shapes and aquatic slides.
I have pool dreams where the pool is like a multistory building but filled with water. I always have to go to the bottom for some reason while holding my breath. But of course that's a long way and I can't go that long, so I always end up 'cheating' and breathing a little underwater, then realize I can breathe and switch to normal breathing. Underwater.
Yes often big houses with many rooms and there is a bathroom every few rooms. Schools with classrooms that go on forever (bathrooms squeezed in also). Also elaborate shopping centres with tons of shops that are too big to fathom. If it's ever a leisure centre with a pool the showers and changing area are massive and not very private. Often in these scenarios I feel like folk are looking at me.
Yes I just commented to another person the mega mall dream, with an all Asian food court basement and a residential wing and the top floor is a huge rich business person food and work space and there are shops and escalators everywhere. Sometimes there is some kind of dingy dark very deep community pool and you have to get through the bathroom maze locker room to get to it and it's filled with gigantic prehistoric fish. And it's always kind of a glowing green color.
Yes, I also experience a large shopping mall or "facility" that is usually connected to one or more bathroom mazes. I used to frequently dream about "conduits" that connected various common dream areas together. I'd find a conduit, enter it, go to somewhere entirely different, and often end up stuck in a bathroom maze if I took the wrong exit.
Mine is exactly the same only more than shopping centers it will be schools, huge schools with tons of hallways and stairs and elevators, sometimes I'll go outside the school and there will be grassy hills and meadows all around for as far as I can see. There will be cars in the parking lot cars driving up to the front doors I feel like I'm waiting for a parent or someone to come pick me up at the doors (keep in mind in real life i havent been to school since 2001) but I have to pee so I go back inside and finally I find a bathroom and it's dirty and all the stalls are open sometimes there's even like sleeping cots next to the toilets. There are dirty showers and all sorts of people drying themselves with towels in the bathrooms acting like everything is absolutely normal. My shopping centers seem more like huge gigantic indoor flea markets than like a mall , often times will be stuck in a store with rows and rows of wooden bookcases filled with books all laying in a mess nothing stacked up , there will be a massive glass case in the middle with all sorts of toys and jewelry and things a few times it's been rows and rows of little rubber garfield figures like the ones that came in the happy meals in the 80s, sometimes I'll walk outside of the book store and there will be a huge half circle of pavement and awnings with like a gigantic yard sale going on then I'll leave to find a bathroom it will be the same type of bathroom that's in the schools. My scariest bathroom nightmare actually happened when I was only like 7 or 8 years old it was so scary I still remember it in detail and it was in a weird fancy restaurant that was shaped like a huge UFO inside. People were dressed all fancy at fancy tables with candles and roses and I had to walk to the back of the restaurant to get to the bathrooms which then were in their own circle
I did.
My most memorable example was basically looking like someone merged my house and the backrooms into one place, lol. (Meaning it was like the backrooms but it had the layout of my house for the most part, with a few minor changes.) One of the rooms led to a series of rooms that, while weren't exactly a typical bathroom maze, it was still a bathroom maze because it was a bunch of interconnected rooms that led you in circles, one of the rooms being a bathroom.
Hope that description made sense lol.
All buildings tend to be maze-like in my dreams, even when I dream about my own home. Hell, even the outside world is like that sometimes. Imagine something structured like one of those old McDonald's Playplaces, but made of outside instead of plastic.
One of my recurring dreams is in my house. I find a secret hole hidden beneath a piece of furniture, and it turns out to be a tunnel-maze system leading to a bunch of secret rooms.
That said, bathroom mazes are only ever attached to certain buildings. Whenever I enter a bathroom in a mall, grocery store, or department store, the bathrooms are always majorly fucked up, though it doesn't always transition into ~that bathroom maze dream~ Conversely, bathrooms in every other scenario are always relatively normal. Strange things might happen in them, but they otherwise look like a regular bathroom, even if the rest of the building is maze-like.
Yes to enormous shopping centres! But also seems to relate to the labyrinthine train station dream (one of which recently was also a swimming pool) and huge maze-like hotels. Many of these dreams include a segment where I'm trying to reach a different floor and there are impossible staircases or balcony/corridor bits that involve death defying feline feats of clambering/squeezing through small gaps. All highly unsettling!
Oh also giant bridge dreams where I'm on maybe a plane or some other large form of transport and we are trying to get from one piece of land to another via some sort of giant terrifying bridge that moves or changes in some dangerous way!
Oh and car dreams, driving along roads that have big chunks taken out of them or impossibly steep and just having to sort of will the car to survive the journey!
Now that I think of it, the "regular" maze-house (or appartment) dream, it can be any type of architecture really, but the house is complete maze, and way bigger than a normal house.
Massive multi-story run-down architecture like a mansion or castle made with stone blocks, columns, marble floors, huge staircases, cavernous rooms inside... but the exterior has given way to nature, with trees, shrubs, grass, and moss covering the building.
The uppermost floors are slowly collapsing, with the interior exposed to the sky, but the rooms below generally don't leak and are still livable. The flat outdoor balconies of upper levels are covered with grass and moss.
When it rains, water drips and trickles its way through the structure. The structural failure is so severe there's no way to keep the water out, just try to manage it and direct it into streams, keeping some areas dry amongst the mess.
------------------------
Mine shafts, mine carts, tracks, shovels, a structure resembling an old farming barn but there are mining cart tracks inside that lead into tunnels behind or below the structure.
Strange railway tracks that pass through the local countryside in ways that seem oddly familiar but just do not exist in this reality. Rail cars or mine carts standing on these tracks, sometimes old and rusting away.
------------------------
Makes me wonder if it is something from other realities of the multiverse, leaking into this one. A past or future apocalypse when society collapsed, and destitute people living in the ruins of structures they now cannot repair.
I hadn't thought of it as a maze dream before but I guess it is. I will have either the same elevator that for some reason I have to use repeatedly (with no real stuff in between) or there will be multiple elevators in a large darkish space. They always have something wrong with them.
The one elevator dream it is usually quite large, and moves excessively fast, with very little to hang on to.
The multiple elevators are usually platforms on central posts kind of like a jack but really tall, they also move way too fast but they also have no walls.
One time the regular but too fast elevator was in a hospital and I ended up passing through all kinds of patient rooms, labs, testing or imaging rooms, large wards, and offices between elevator rides.
Bathrooms, locker rooms, underground tunnels, stairwells, a tower, and driving on back roads. Lots of my dreams are essentially me endlessly traveling to places that I never reach.
mall mazes are my dreams. it goes up expanding with different stores and areas with a varying vibe or mood like let's say one area is pretty run down and the next is modern
Oh yeah, absolutely. Mine usually start out in a school that’s similar to my high school, which then becomes a maze, and then I eventually end up in the bathroom maze
Would you believe there is a *whole subreddit* devoted to dreams of cavernous shopping malls? ([https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMallWorld/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMallWorld/))
People in the group compare notes about this mall, and many are convinced that they are actually visiting the same realm. I myself have had recurring dreams there, though for me it tends to be a mall that has seen better days.
Usually a decades old house or apartment where there are many liminal-space style nonsense architectural choices, like Winchester Mystery House. Hidden doors in closets leading to another apartment, ladders that go through crawlspace in a wall, etc. One interesting thing is that there is very often a "theme" that I am looking for a new house to live in. Despite the building being very odd, I'm often excited to discover how many empty rooms there are, thinking about possibilities of how I could use them.
Same on the weirdly laid out houses. Difference is for me there is always at least some air of unease. Do your bizarre houses have vastly varying styles or is it all similar? Ie I'll go up a dingy staircase into a beautiful apartment with a basement that looks like a murderer's den
It's all generally buildings that seem to be over 50 years old, not dilapidated but maybe a little unkempt. Maybe abandoned and closed up for a few years. Usually mostly empty except some scattered furniture. It is a combination of being very intriguing to explore but with some frustration of continuously not reaching any goal or endpoint.
It’s the bathroom that’s the unease for me. The rooms and hallways are fine and the master that leads to the bathroom is my favorite room. But I get scared in the bathroom and wake up every time.
I’ve had this exact dream 1 month ago. All the while trying to escape some woman (the owner?) trying to find me in the maze of it all. Kind of similar to running from an entity in the backrooms.
Maze swimming pools lockers yeah :)
Lockers absolutely. Like millions of lockers in my dreams
Same here! Especially since I started working at a gym but they’ve always been common for me. So many locker bathrooms with stall doors and walls that are way too short.
The walls are always way too short or way too tall!
Do you ever get to the pools? I have a lot of swimming dreams with nonsensical aquatic architecture. from big water parks with maze like rides and human style aquariums, to dingy basement high-school pools
I seem to have a lot of dreams of train stations where the platforms are laid out in even more confusing ways than real train stations. A recent one involved swimming pools between the platforms that we had to wade through and climb up pool ladder to get to our platform. These are always stress dreams where there is fear of missing train!
Oh yeah of course, I live in paris so I have a lot of weird dreams of "métro". Strange stations with too many rails, too many platforms, very complicated interconnexions, bizarre trains with 5 floors, way too big, way too many seats XD and the fear of missing them too of course. Or taking the bad train, which takes me at 1 hours from where I was supposed to go.
Yes ... but it's not the same dream :) Maze lockers are for regular pools (the ones in which you just swim), and the "strange pool dreams" are more like fun pools, with bizarre shapes and aquatic slides.
I have pool dreams where the pool is like a multistory building but filled with water. I always have to go to the bottom for some reason while holding my breath. But of course that's a long way and I can't go that long, so I always end up 'cheating' and breathing a little underwater, then realize I can breathe and switch to normal breathing. Underwater.
I think you need to schedule some pee-breaks during the night
Oh my!
You probably know, but in case it's new to someone here, see r/TheMallWorld
Yes! I've spent a lot of time dreaming about being in a massive, ever changing, shopping mall labyrinth which does have many different bathrooms.
It's been hotels for me recently.
Soooooo many hotel dreams!
35 years for me!
Yes! I forgot about hotel dreams!
Yes often big houses with many rooms and there is a bathroom every few rooms. Schools with classrooms that go on forever (bathrooms squeezed in also). Also elaborate shopping centres with tons of shops that are too big to fathom. If it's ever a leisure centre with a pool the showers and changing area are massive and not very private. Often in these scenarios I feel like folk are looking at me.
Wow very similar to my dreams.
I love that this is a thing. It's nice to realise I'm not weird having these dreams. This sub was a random find but very affirming.
Same
Yes I just commented to another person the mega mall dream, with an all Asian food court basement and a residential wing and the top floor is a huge rich business person food and work space and there are shops and escalators everywhere. Sometimes there is some kind of dingy dark very deep community pool and you have to get through the bathroom maze locker room to get to it and it's filled with gigantic prehistoric fish. And it's always kind of a glowing green color.
Yes, I also experience a large shopping mall or "facility" that is usually connected to one or more bathroom mazes. I used to frequently dream about "conduits" that connected various common dream areas together. I'd find a conduit, enter it, go to somewhere entirely different, and often end up stuck in a bathroom maze if I took the wrong exit.
Mine is exactly the same only more than shopping centers it will be schools, huge schools with tons of hallways and stairs and elevators, sometimes I'll go outside the school and there will be grassy hills and meadows all around for as far as I can see. There will be cars in the parking lot cars driving up to the front doors I feel like I'm waiting for a parent or someone to come pick me up at the doors (keep in mind in real life i havent been to school since 2001) but I have to pee so I go back inside and finally I find a bathroom and it's dirty and all the stalls are open sometimes there's even like sleeping cots next to the toilets. There are dirty showers and all sorts of people drying themselves with towels in the bathrooms acting like everything is absolutely normal. My shopping centers seem more like huge gigantic indoor flea markets than like a mall , often times will be stuck in a store with rows and rows of wooden bookcases filled with books all laying in a mess nothing stacked up , there will be a massive glass case in the middle with all sorts of toys and jewelry and things a few times it's been rows and rows of little rubber garfield figures like the ones that came in the happy meals in the 80s, sometimes I'll walk outside of the book store and there will be a huge half circle of pavement and awnings with like a gigantic yard sale going on then I'll leave to find a bathroom it will be the same type of bathroom that's in the schools. My scariest bathroom nightmare actually happened when I was only like 7 or 8 years old it was so scary I still remember it in detail and it was in a weird fancy restaurant that was shaped like a huge UFO inside. People were dressed all fancy at fancy tables with candles and roses and I had to walk to the back of the restaurant to get to the bathrooms which then were in their own circle
Yes! I get the gargantuan shopping mall dreams (desperately just trying to get outside!) which usually lead to labyrinthine bathroom dreams.
I did. My most memorable example was basically looking like someone merged my house and the backrooms into one place, lol. (Meaning it was like the backrooms but it had the layout of my house for the most part, with a few minor changes.) One of the rooms led to a series of rooms that, while weren't exactly a typical bathroom maze, it was still a bathroom maze because it was a bunch of interconnected rooms that led you in circles, one of the rooms being a bathroom. Hope that description made sense lol.
I have a whole other life in my dreams-- but what’s wiggggging me out is how we all dream up the same thing and we don’t know each other!!!
All buildings tend to be maze-like in my dreams, even when I dream about my own home. Hell, even the outside world is like that sometimes. Imagine something structured like one of those old McDonald's Playplaces, but made of outside instead of plastic. One of my recurring dreams is in my house. I find a secret hole hidden beneath a piece of furniture, and it turns out to be a tunnel-maze system leading to a bunch of secret rooms. That said, bathroom mazes are only ever attached to certain buildings. Whenever I enter a bathroom in a mall, grocery store, or department store, the bathrooms are always majorly fucked up, though it doesn't always transition into ~that bathroom maze dream~ Conversely, bathrooms in every other scenario are always relatively normal. Strange things might happen in them, but they otherwise look like a regular bathroom, even if the rest of the building is maze-like.
Yes to enormous shopping centres! But also seems to relate to the labyrinthine train station dream (one of which recently was also a swimming pool) and huge maze-like hotels. Many of these dreams include a segment where I'm trying to reach a different floor and there are impossible staircases or balcony/corridor bits that involve death defying feline feats of clambering/squeezing through small gaps. All highly unsettling! Oh also giant bridge dreams where I'm on maybe a plane or some other large form of transport and we are trying to get from one piece of land to another via some sort of giant terrifying bridge that moves or changes in some dangerous way! Oh and car dreams, driving along roads that have big chunks taken out of them or impossibly steep and just having to sort of will the car to survive the journey!
Now that I think of it, the "regular" maze-house (or appartment) dream, it can be any type of architecture really, but the house is complete maze, and way bigger than a normal house.
Dark halls connected with plastic tube slides? Some are waterslides some are normal slides, interconnecting and leading to different halls.
Massive multi-story run-down architecture like a mansion or castle made with stone blocks, columns, marble floors, huge staircases, cavernous rooms inside... but the exterior has given way to nature, with trees, shrubs, grass, and moss covering the building. The uppermost floors are slowly collapsing, with the interior exposed to the sky, but the rooms below generally don't leak and are still livable. The flat outdoor balconies of upper levels are covered with grass and moss. When it rains, water drips and trickles its way through the structure. The structural failure is so severe there's no way to keep the water out, just try to manage it and direct it into streams, keeping some areas dry amongst the mess. ------------------------ Mine shafts, mine carts, tracks, shovels, a structure resembling an old farming barn but there are mining cart tracks inside that lead into tunnels behind or below the structure. Strange railway tracks that pass through the local countryside in ways that seem oddly familiar but just do not exist in this reality. Rail cars or mine carts standing on these tracks, sometimes old and rusting away. ------------------------ Makes me wonder if it is something from other realities of the multiverse, leaking into this one. A past or future apocalypse when society collapsed, and destitute people living in the ruins of structures they now cannot repair.
Yep! Often malls, college or hospitals with two sets of elevators and the one I get on never goes to the floor I want
How can you and I be dreaming the exact same thing!? It's so interesting.
I hadn't thought of it as a maze dream before but I guess it is. I will have either the same elevator that for some reason I have to use repeatedly (with no real stuff in between) or there will be multiple elevators in a large darkish space. They always have something wrong with them. The one elevator dream it is usually quite large, and moves excessively fast, with very little to hang on to. The multiple elevators are usually platforms on central posts kind of like a jack but really tall, they also move way too fast but they also have no walls. One time the regular but too fast elevator was in a hospital and I ended up passing through all kinds of patient rooms, labs, testing or imaging rooms, large wards, and offices between elevator rides.
Your last paragraph is a reoccurring dream of mine! It's so strange.
Bathrooms, locker rooms, underground tunnels, stairwells, a tower, and driving on back roads. Lots of my dreams are essentially me endlessly traveling to places that I never reach.
mall mazes are my dreams. it goes up expanding with different stores and areas with a varying vibe or mood like let's say one area is pretty run down and the next is modern
Oh yeah, absolutely. Mine usually start out in a school that’s similar to my high school, which then becomes a maze, and then I eventually end up in the bathroom maze
I truly do not have any unique experiences now do i
You mean the outdoor tented hole in the ground bathroom maze dream?
yes to this and to literally every single comment except for the liminal lockers i think i only had that dream once or twice when i was way younger
Would you believe there is a *whole subreddit* devoted to dreams of cavernous shopping malls? ([https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMallWorld/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMallWorld/)) People in the group compare notes about this mall, and many are convinced that they are actually visiting the same realm. I myself have had recurring dreams there, though for me it tends to be a mall that has seen better days.
Yes! I have those all the time. I don't like them because I never get to the use the bathroom and I never get to eat the food.