Repostin frm my tumblr, I remembered this dream very vividly so I felt I had to write it down lmao..
It was set somewhere at the peak of spring, I recall that it was super sunny outside. There was some sort of absolutely huge (and I mean like comic con-sized or something like that) market/flea market blend going on out in a park. It was kind of odd because large parts of it were fully open-air, but then there were parts where there was scaffolding or even partially-built walls or ceilings w/ windows in them here and there, disconnected from everything else. I also recall there was a HUGE wall made out of bookshelves in the middle, so you couldn’t see the other side from whichever side you were walking on. I’d somehow gotten involved in running a stand at the market, I don’t really remember why. Think it may have been connected to the company my dad works for IRL. They sell household tools, gardening equipment and stuff like that, but as far as I could remember I wasn’t carrying any of that at my stand.
What happened instead was that competitors would come in, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups, and attempt to ‘sway’ people by handing them free samples of stuff, a lot of people used chocolate, some used.. lawn gnomes??? for some reason. I basically ended up abandoning my stand for a long time and going around talking to people & handing them samples in order to convince them to come see me. At some point, a really ‘bad’ vibe was cast all over the entire market, people started getting nervous and fidgety, and a group of (I guess richer) salespeople appeared. They were dressed in what I can best describe as.. Renaissance fair-bondage-mummy-steampunk gear? Like their faces were obscured, they wore these huge goggles, brown straps of leather flapping off them everywhere, giant propeller jutting from tiny backpacks on their backs to keep them afloat. They flew in through one of the few random half-built window-ceiling parts and basically started to carpet bomb random people’s stands in order to weed out the competition. Felt like things suddenly became like a tower defense game or something. Eventually they just… stopped and joined in with everybody else and the calm vibe suddenly returned.
I’d had enough of the ‘going around and advertising my business’ thing & realized I should probably return to my actual stand and, y’know, SELL things.. Problem with that was that, once I actually reached it again (not before accidentally walking down the wrong aisle a few times), my stand was.. gone? Instead there was a trio of middle aged-looking guys in business suits stuffing my wares into a couple of huge burlap sacks. They were already pretty much done by the time I realized what was going on, and they ran off. I chased them out of the territory of the market, past some sort of open-air sitting area/cafe where some of my relatives were sitting. When they noticed what was going on they jumped into action, and managed to catch one of the three guys, the one carrying the largest sack. IIRC, somehow the sack ended up crushing his head. For some reason everybody avoided even TRYING to touch the two other ones, who fled into what looked like a large sideways shipping container next to a garbage bin full of disguises.
Turns out these ‘guys’ were actually a man and woman with a penchant for disguising themselves, stealing, and hoarding. Also they were apparently potentially dangerously insane. Don’t remember much about what happened next, but I think it was something like a picnic table-side discussion about what to do, trying to formulate a plan in order to invade their house.. I remember there was some part where people ended up talking about whether we should or shouldn’t feed the leftover raw chicken breast that was in the burlap sack to someone’s cat, though.
In the end, I’d gotten tired of everyone just ceaselessly talking, and I’d actually decided to sneak into the thieves’ house. Some girl reluctantly borrowed me a swiss army knife just to be safe. I remember the whole thing was soft and bendy like jell-o for some reason. I remember trying to peer in through the entrance of the container-house.. It was one of those ‘bigger on the inside’-type of deals, with two floors. There were really, REALLY old and fragile-looking stairs leading to both, stairs looked scrawny and resembled ladders more than any actual stairs. Top floor seemed to be made out of wood entirely, couldn’t see much other than a large carpet, a whole bunch of mannequins in the distance and a bunch of disguises scattered around. The bottom floor looked like a hallway ripped from a subway network, completely filled with TV screen-shaped lockers on one side. I could hear the two people in there shout-talking to each other from one floor to the other and decided to enter, wearing a disguise I nicked from the dumpster. For some reason I was drawn towards the bottom floor.. Hallway seemed to go on and on for quite a while, tiled walls on one side and tv screen lockers on the other, until I finally stumbled upon ‘The Man,’ who looked like a humanoid shape covered in blots of grey and static fuzz. At least that’s how I remember it..
Things got REALLY weird from here on. The Man yelled at me, something about how I’d never catch him anyway, I should get out, all that, and ran off into darkness at the end of the tunnel. There was a constant sound of pipes being struck with pipes in the background, everything felt REALLY unsettling and wrong. I decided to follow the guy for some dumb reason anyway, and ended up running into the darkness. Immediately I ended up in some sort of fucked up void. There were giant white spotlight-esque areas here and there, connected to each other by means of long, stretched-out transparent blue glass walkways, and at each spotlight the wall was filled with a projection of some sort of bizarre landscape scenery. I’m pretty sure I was being led through some sort of hallway-ish structure still, not just a purely featureless void.. Occasionally, instead of a single screen-filling image, there were several small ones structured in an order similar to the tv screen lockers from before, displaying random scenes of disaster and other odd things. For some reason I quite distinctly remember going all ‘Holy shit, this IS my aesthetic!” out loud at some point lmao
Eventually, after several more turns, I ended up outside somewhere. There was still one of those white spotlight shapes under my feet, but all around me there was nothing but sea. Still it was sunny. Eventually wooden walkways started to appear before me, turning into some sort of boardwalk structure.. Then I woke up, unfortunately