Thousands of Redditors dream of ‘MallWorld’

“I always dream of the same mall.” 

So begins a recent post on the popular subreddit r/The MallWorld. The subreddit was first created in 2021, and currently has 10,000 monthly visitors detailing their recurring dreams of eerie, often empty spaces. The description reads: “Have you been to one of these common dream locations?”

The post continued: “It has a very vintage feel to it. It always has warm amber lighting and wooden guardrails. It has 3 main floors, and one secret lower floor. The lower floor is usually kept pristine, a time capsule of the ’90s. The stores are closed, but the merchandise remains. It smells like my kindergarten class did.”

If this dream sounds familiar, you are not alone. The post is among thousands on Reddit and TikTok from people who say they also dream of the same space, collectively referred to as “The Mall World.”

But this is no ordinary shopping mall. While not always identical, many say their mall worlds share similarities. There are endless stairwells, forbidden floors, and looping elevators. Some have dreamed of the same food court, others of an arcade. Sometimes the dreamscape is not even a mall at all, but a water park or an airport. People have tried to draw maps of Mall World. “I finally don’t feel alone,” one person wrote on Reddit. “I feel so much relief in not being the only one.”

The dreamscape has recently seen a resurgence in interest. One TikTok user said she discovered TheMallWorld subreddit after searching for answers about a recurring dream she was having. 

She explained: “Finding TheMallWorld has literally changed my life, because there are 20 thousand people having the same exact dreams as mine.” The video was posted earlier this year and currently has over 400,000 views. 

So why is everyone having the same dream? There are a number of theories circulating on the internet. 

One suggests it is related to Carl Jung’s theory of collective unconsciousness—the idea that all humans share a deep, inherited layer of the unconscious mind that shapes how we think and dream. Others have linked the idea to “astral travel,” where the physical body is left behind to go explore other planes of consciousness. Another conspiracy theory links these shared dreams to the gifted and talented program in the 1980s and 1990s.

Or perhaps the real reason is less intriguing. Most of us have been to a mall at least once in our lives, and our brains tend to feed off existing mental maps and memories to construct our dreamscapes. As Dylan Selterman, an associate teaching professor at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, told The New York Times: “Sometimes, people dream about weird stuff.” 

Liminal spaces have been a source of online fascination for years. A simpler explanation may be that the online discourse is unconsciously influencing people’s dreams. If you’ve not visited Mall World and are feeling left out, just reading about Mall World might be enough to trigger a visit.