Mall of my Dreams

As salaam alaikum,

For the last several years, for some reason, there have been a few set locations that are included in my dreams repeatedly, as if there is a dream world that exists in another realm that I become part of when I got to sleep. It is within this world that my subconscious really takes over and I find myself dreaming about things that I didn't even know I was thinking about.

The most infamous set for me has been this one mall that I've dreamed about for the last several years, maybe since I've been in medical school. It's an indoor mall that's connected to a strip mall, and I think it's a amalgamation of Arborland mall from my childhood and Arborland mall now (it converted from an indoor mall to a strip mall, the only original store remaining being Toys R Us, but even that's been renovated), along with some other malls I've been to. Anyway, the mall is always the same, every time I go to it in dreams. And I have a favorite store that I go to. It's this oddly shaped women's clothing store, with a few clothes up front in the main entrance, a narrow corridor that leads to another section that I usually don't get to in my dreams, but that's there.

The mall also has a food court that I've been to several times in dreams as well, sometimes getting to eat there, and a department store, at least. There are a lot of other stores, but I never go to those.

This mall is infamous in my dreams not only because I've dreamed about it a lot, but because of this series of dreams I had over a couple of months. Dreams rarely terrify me, but this one really did. For some reason, I had joined this organization of misfits that robbed establishments and then destroyed them so no one would know that they had just robbed them. I don't know how I became involved with this...gang. I'd never seen a movie like this or anything, so I had no idea where this dream came from.

Anyway, I was involved in one of their heists, and I was apparently the leader. I've forgotten by now what we stole, but we put the merchandise into shopping carts and casually walked out of the mall. One in my party had apparently planted bombs, and so we were trying to get out before they detonated. So I was only a small distance from the store, and I don't know how I got out with shoplifted merchandise with no one noticing, and shortly thereafter, the bomb detonated. I then blended in with the crowd not to spark suspicion, and then I took the merchandise back to the headquarters.

Later on in the dream, I was terrified. What had I just done? My first concern was...would we be caught? Would the security cameras show us planting the bomb, stealing from the store? Well, the damage to the store was so great, apparently, that the security cameras and the whole system was destroyed, so we were safe in that respect.

Then, there was remorse. What had I done, and for what? Had anyone been killed? I started to see footage on the news and it was horrible. The bomb went off in the toy section of the store, and so many children were injured, and I saw footage of small crying children and babies with their mothers, some missing limbs, in chaos in the mall. I was in disbelief. I realized what an atrocity I had committed, and I realized that now, whereas I had previously had a clean slate in life, I'd have to repent probably for the rest of my life and who knew if God would ever forgive me. And what if I were caught? Like, what about medical school? I couldn't be a doctor if I went to prison for this! So, even though I felt that I'd have to confess to fully repent, I couldn't because that would mean my career. And what if someone figured something out? It was a very sticky situation.

A while later, I returned to the mall of my dreams in a separate dream. Two separate occasions, I went to the mall after the bombing. In one of them, I surveyed the department store, which was back open but with certain sections still closed for repair. Apparently, the bomb also took out that women's clothing store that I often frequented, or at least the front part of it, so for the first time, I shopped in the back of it. I was so guilty when I went back to the mall to see it suffered so much damage, and I was a little bit afraid that someone would see me and suspect me, so I spent little time in the mall.

I probably dreamed about that mall once or twice more while parts of it were still closed for repairs, but it's all fixed now, and I'm not sure if the bombing even still exists.

Take that to a dream interpreter...I have no idea what it all means. I may have been influenced by the mall destruction scene of the Blues Brothers, which I hadn't seen in at least a year or more.

Anyway, the mall of my dreams appeared again last night. I almost forgot about it, but I was packing my bag to come to study at the medical school campus and I felt like I had dreamed about M. I'd hoped not...I haven't been thinking about him at all lately, so why is he still creeping into my dreams? No idea.

But he was in my dream, in the mall of my dreams. We ran into each other in the women's clothing store...or I felt like we came in together. I was just there because he was there, and M was shopping for his wife. He told the person in the store who was trying to help him that he was shopping for his husband. I shook my head, telling him that he needed to get used to calling his wife his wife and not his husband. He nervously nodded, that's true.

I then picked up a pair of size 19 pants (apparently, things were in juniors sizes on this rack). It was a big pair of brown pants with an unattractive cut that were apparently tall. I commented something about the pants, and then I either woke up or moved on in the dream.

This is a recurrent theme...M accidentally calling his wife his husband. It happened in a dream a couple of weeks ago. I must have had the dream because I've been thinking about a lot of my friends who have gotten married in the last couple of years, and I feel so behind. Seriously, two of my friends have had their second children already, and I'm here, being an overgrown child in medical school, for some reason having dreams about an old college crush and his wife. Because they're never unaccompanied...I guess my subconscious finds it more halal that way, as I said before, but I could really do without.

So the mall of my dreams persists. I wonder how long I'll go shopping in this mall, and how many other sets and landscapes will recur in my dream world. We'll see...

Wasalaam.