ON MALL DREAMS

Somewhere in the mind, or mind of minds, is a grand snarl of escalators, rectangular caves, and an inescapable dim glow, perhaps accompanied by faint, barely intelligible music. Everywhere malls exist, people dream of mallscapes, which, strangely, are remembered as if they are one singular mall, or “Mall World.” Three hypotheses stand out among the explanations for this phenomenon:

1. That there is some stable form to the collective unconscious as described by Carl Jung and other esoteric psychologists, and a homogenous structure of childhood memories and nostalgia has formed the architectural underpinnings of a shared archetypal Mall. While simple and non-falsifiable at its foundations, this explanation for mall dreams found its way into the New York Times, and has since become the most commonly repeated hypothesis. This labyrinth reflects some challenge to the soul yet to be overcome, unique to each individual dreamer, yet universal in the spirit of its expression.
2. That there is some evolutionary function of mall dreams resultant from a Silurian past in which mankind's ancestors spent millennia underground. While chimpanzees now hold the scientific name Homo troglodytes, this Linnaean branch instead once referred to scattered accounts from Greek historians of strange, human-like beings adapted to chthonic life, who were perhaps far more widespread within some forgotten civilization. Narrative paleontologists at the University Beneath St. Paul have argued that, much like the primeval nature of dreams about sex or losing teeth, the strategies surrounding quickly navigating cavernous structures and unfamiliar interior spaces were a just-as-common source of anxiety for our subterranean progenitors. These mall dreams are atavistic echoes of a time before the caves we wandered were artificial, and we had not yet made peace with the heavens.
3. That the shopping mall itself is a type of emergent organism which relates to us as an anemone does a clownfish; as we wander through the passages of its many mouths, we clean it of food and goods on which it would otherwise choke, and nourish it with the capital that allows its doors to remain open. This exchange exists as a throughline between Istanbul's Grand Bazaar and Minnesota's Mall of America, as well as every form of covered market maintained via similar symbiosis before and after. In this model, such dreams are induced by the mall's aesthetics intentionally; the consumer is conditioned to associate the safety of sleep with the structure's trance-inducing atmosphere.

This is not an exhaustive list of possibilities, nor are any among them mutually exclusive. If taken in net, they perhaps speak of a shared call within mankind to return to Hades' domain of riches and the dead. We extend the underworld willingly in defiance of the sky, yet on some level, we know we may be forced to flee into its depths once more. We gather all our treasures together into one place, to witness or distribute, seeking strange comfort in that which devours us.