This dream starts off relatively straightforwardly but I don't clearly remember or understand what happens later. I'm not sure I did even in the dream. First, my parents and I are in the car driving to the city. Along the way I get hungry and see into the windows of one of the buildings we're passing that it looks like some sort of cafe. We have plenty of time before we need to be where we're going so I ask if we can stop. My father obliges and asks which place it was I wanted to go inside and I point to the strip mall it was in. I could've sworn the first time we drove past that the cafe was on the corner, but now that space is vacant. We find the cafe in the middle of the building and decide I must've just not been paying much attention before. My mother and I decide to go in while my father waits in the car.
We walk into the cafe and are greeted by a cheery woman at a counter selling teapots and prepackaged goodies, things you could give as a gift is my impression. From the outside this space looked small, modern, and brightly lit. Now that we are inside the lighting and colors are more subdued and earthy, and it's much larger than we thought. My mother buys prepackaged coffee flavored macaroons which come in a tin with a coffee bean design, and a container of candied nuts which I never actually see or taste.
After making our purchase we ask if we can look around. We turn left into a room with a buffet counter of foods I can't quite identify but desperately want to eat. There are many small tables, all of them full despite very few cars in the parking lot. There isn't much public transportation where I live and walking/biking isn't common so this is a bit odd. We go up the stairs at the end of this room and the geometry of the space doesn't seem to align with the architecture of the building. For one thing, how can there be windows on two walls of the room if we're in the middle of the strip mall? Upstairs looks even older and posher than down with glossy dark wooden banisters and wainscotting and a celadon green wallpaper that looks like a William Morris design. It's just as full up here but the people seem.... indistinct somehow. People almost always are in my dreams but usually I don't realize that I never saw someone's face clearly, for example, until I wake up. This was notable to me within the dream, their sort of blurriness. We come back down a set of stairs to the right of the front desk, which I could've sworn didn't have anything to the right of it when we first came in.
At the front desk my mother picks up our snack and starts walking back out to the car and I ask if I could possibly get a glass of water for the road. An attractive blonde boy smiles brightly at me and pours it. Once I leave the cafe the water is no longer in my hand, but I'm also no longer hungry or thirsty. At the car mom says "Did you get your water? What about the cute boy's number?" which made me just as pissed off as when she makes this sort of comment in real life. I know she always means well but as someone in their mid twenties who that sort of thing never happens to I never take it well so I parry back with, "no, did you?" As I watch the blonde boy cross the parking lot in the opposite direction.
Our destination is a hotel in the city. My brother meets us there, it's some holiday or another I believe and we're going to see a play the next day. I can't sleep and for some reason the logical solution to this in the dream is to walk across the street to the place where the play is being rehearsed and see if they need help with anything. Oddly enough the cast and crew are there at 4am and welcome the extra set of hands. I help unload some platforms from a truck and into the theater and do some small last minute costume fixes a button here, a safety pin there.
At precisely 5:51am we go underground. I'm not sure why we go underground or how we get there or what the space we're in is supposed to be but at 5:51 that's where we are. By "underground" I don't mean a cave or a subway station this is a sprawling underground building/community. In different rooms different things are happening but most of them seem to be cavernous gyms and auditoriums filled with young people (I was one of the oldest people there, I doubt anyone was over 25).
I don't remember the next part very clearly. It seemed kind of like a normal school or community center at first (apart from being underground) people were playing various sports, eating breakfast at long tables, or gathering in small groups at the edges of the rooms, but I felt a strange animosity from everyone. When I walked past people would stop what they were doing, fall silent, and stare at me. There's a really disjointed hazy quality to this part of the dream in my mind and it seemed rather non-linear as it was happening as well. I learn somehow that I'm not allowed to leave. At some point the others shift from just staring to blocking my path, pushing me into walls, hitting balls towards me, etc. I'm not sure if that was before or after I find a couple of the people from the theater crew and sort of ally with them. I go into a gym with a bright blue floor and there are five gallon drums and sort of low blockades of things set up at intervals around the room. A group of stereotypical "popular girls" in matching camouflage sweat suits are there and they start fighting me and one of the theater crew people. I think they were guarding the door to leave because the door behind them had a bit of light coming in around the edges. Right as I was about to kick one of them off me and open the door an alarm sounded. The alarm was some sort of reset and we set the blockades back up and went back to our starting positions to fight again. I thought this was unfair since I had been about to escape but the reset wasn't just a rule I wasn't supposed to break, it was a rule it was impossible to break. Then the alarm went off again and I realized it was my real alarm to wake up, so I did.