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Where curiosity fluffs the pillow and cheeky humor hogs the covers. Adventures in Dreamland blends surreal sleep stories with soothing audio — guiding you into beautifully strange places only dreams can reach. Each tale calms your mind while priming your subconscious for peace, love, and purpose.
🌙 Find up to 8 hours of relaxing ambient tracks after the story — and explore all of our series on YouTube 💤 @SleepDreamland:
✨ DreamScapes
🏡 Dream Grounding
🧠 Dream Priming
🐜 Dream Wonders
📚 Dream Studies
🎭 Dream Spoofs
"The Trending Desert" is a story in our Dream Priming playlist, where we plant positive seeds for personal transformation wrapped inside surreal stories. Tonight's seed is about the exhausting, expensive, and oddly universal project of trying to fit in — and the quiet relief of remembering that the most magnetic thing about you has always been the part you've been trying hardest to hide.
— One — The Shuttle Bus —
You wake up on a bus.
Specifically, a shuttle bus. The kind of shuttle that takes people from long-term parking to a festival gate. It is dusty. The seats are a cracked leatherette in a color that was probably once beige. The woman across from you is wearing a light-up cowboy hat, a crocheted top, fringe boots, and an expression that suggests she is mildly regretting every choice that led her here. She is taking a selfie. She has been taking the same selfie for, you suspect, approximately the last three hours.
You look out the window.
Sand.
More sand. Sand going in every direction. Not ocean-sand — the dry, serious kind. A desert. Not a picturesque postcard desert either. This one has — you squint — what appears to be a giant inflatable flamingo slowly deflating in the middle distance. And past the flamingo, what might be the ruins of a fast-fashion billboard. And past the billboard, more sand.
The bus pulls up to a wooden sign. The sign is faded in that very specific way of things that have lived in desert sun for longer than anybody meant them to. It reads:
WELCOME TO THE TRENDING DESERT.
Underneath, in smaller, slightly more ominous lettering:
MANY HAVE ENTERED. FEW HAVE LEFT LOOKING LIKE THEMSELVES.
And below that, almost an afterthought:
FREE WATER AT THE EXIT. PLEASE DRINK IT.
You stare at the sign. You glance back at the cowboy-hat woman. She is adjusting her fringe. She has not looked up.
The bus doors hiss open. A voice — automated, cheerful, and clearly worn out by its own cheerfulness — announces: "THIS IS YOUR STOP. HAVE A FUN TIME. PLEASE REMEMBER YOUR ACTUAL FACE."
"Okay," you murmur, standing. "Either I've accidentally taken a package tour to my own self-esteem issues, or my subconscious has a TripAdvisor account."
You step off the bus.
The heat hits you immediately — dry, golden, the kind that makes your skin prickle. The air smells of dust, coconut sunscreen, and, faintly, disappointment. The shuttle pulls away behind you. You look back and watch it trundle off across the dunes, headed, presumably, to pick up the next round of hopeful shoppers.
Before you, in every direction, stretches the desert.
And in the middle distance — walking toward you, unhurried, hat pulled low — is a figure.
Short. Broad-shouldered. Weathered. Walking at the pace of a woman who has never once been rushed about anything important.
She gets closer.
She lifts a hand.
"Hey there, newbie," she calls out. "Welcome to hell. Come on, let me walk you through it."
— Two — Hattie —
Her name is Hattie. You know this because her name is stitched in red thread on the breast pocket of her faded khaki ranger shirt, which is tucked into canvas work pants, which are tucked into a pair of boots so old they might qualify for historical preservation.
She is maybe sixty. Maybe seventy. Maybe anywhere between forty and ninety, honestly — she has the kind of face that stopped worrying about age so long ago that age, in return, has stopped worrying back. Her skin is the color of very good whiskey and has every line a person could reasonably want. Her eyes are a startling pale gray. Her hair is tucked up under a wide-brimmed leather hat that has seen things.
She does not extend a hand to shake. She just nods at you, comfortable.
"Hattie," she says. "I'm your guide. I walk people out of this desert. It's what I do. I'm good at it. You're in good hands."
"You — guide people out?" you ask.
"Been doing it thirty-odd years now." She shrugs. "Somebody has to. You'd be amazed how many people come through here and never find the exit. They just wander around buying stuff. Very sad, very lucrative, not my circus."
She gestures for you to walk with her. You fall into step.
Hattie walks like a woman who knows the terrain. She does not rush. She does not explain as she goes. She just moves, and trusts you to keep up.
"I used to live here, you know," she says, after a moment. "In the desert. Years ago. I was deep in. I had the outfits. I had the timeline. I had a whole plan for what I was supposed to look like by thirty, and then a new plan for what I was supposed to look like by forty, and then I got tired. Real tired. That's usually what happens. Your body does you a favor and makes you tired, eventually. You stop being able to keep up. You sit down on a dune one day and you realize you've been walking in a circle your whole life."
She kicks at a small piece of what appears to be a shattered ring light, half-buried in the sand. It skitters off.
"Anyway. Once I got out, I figured I might as well stay nearby and help other folks find the door. I know where it is. They don't. It's really not more complicated than that."
You walk beside her for a moment in silence.
"Can I ask you something?" you say.
"Shoot."
"Why am I here? I didn't — I don't think I, like, signed up for this trip."
Hattie laughs. It's a good laugh. Low and worn-in.
"Honey," she says. "Nobody signs up for this trip. You just — wake up here. One day you look around and go, 'huh, when did I start comparing my face to a stranger's on the internet every morning?' Or, 'huh, when did my outfit cost more than my rent?' Or, 'huh, when did I start feeling vaguely behind on some race nobody ever told me I entered?' And that's when you realize — oh. I'm in the desert. I've been in the desert. Maybe I've been in the desert for a while."
She glances sideways at you.
"You figured it out tonight. That's good. Some people don't figure it out until they're buying their fourth round of filler."
She tips her hat back and surveys the horizon.
"Come on. I'll give you the tour."
— Three — The Graveyards of Trends —
Hattie leads you over a low dune, and you come upon the first graveyard.
It is exactly that — a graveyard. Except instead of tombstones, there are half-buried objects sticking up out of the sand, each one marking where a trend came to rest. Hattie walks through it with the casual authority of a docent who has given this tour ten thousand times.
"Flower crowns," she says, pointing at a pile of wilted plastic blooms. "Roughly 2013 to 2018. People wore these to festivals, to weddings, to brunch. Felt very important. Felt very 'me.' Very ancient-forest-priestess. Went out of fashion roughly the same week everybody realized they made you look like a birthday party clown."
She moves on. Points at another dune, this one made entirely of discarded vape pens.
"Vapes. Oh, these really had a moment. Everybody was doing it. Then the coughing started. Then the lawsuits started. Now they're out here. Try not to step on one."
Another dune.
"Fidget spinners. Don't ask."
Another, smaller one — half-buried mason jars, tangled strings of fairy lights, a dented gingham apron.
"Cottagecore, 2020 to 2022. Beloved briefly. Everybody was going to move to a farm and bake bread and hand-churn butter. Nobody actually moved to a farm. A few people bought aprons. The aprons ended up here."
You stop. You pick up a mason jar. You turn it over in your hands. Dream logic has preserved it perfectly — inside, there is still a little faded string of fairy lights, coiled up like a sleeping firefly.
"I remember this," you say, quietly.
Hattie nods.
"Course you do, honey. You tried on all of it. Everybody tries on all of it. That's the thing nobody tells you — none of these trends were really about the clothes or the filters or the hobbies. They were all about the same thing. You know what that was?"
You look at her.
"Feeling less alone," she says. "That's all any trend has ever been. A whole generation of people trying to feel less alone by doing the same thing at the same time. It's sweet, if you think about it. It's just a very expensive, very exhausting way to go about it."
She picks up a flower crown, turns it in her hand, and sets it back down.
"Every girl who wore one of these was trying to say the same thing as the girl in the next photo over. We're the same. I'm like you. We're not alone. It worked for about five minutes. Then it went out of fashion. Then everybody had to buy a new thing to say the same thing. And the desert," she sweeps her hand across the horizon, "got bigger."
You look out at the dunes. They are enormous. Endless.
"How many trends are buried here?" you ask.
Hattie grins, a little grimly.
"All of them, honey. Every single one there has ever been. And a few that haven't happened yet. They're pre-shipped."
— Four — The Coachella Ruins —
You crest another dune and stop walking.
Below you, stretched across a long shallow valley, is what can only be described as a civilization that failed.
It is a vast, collapsed festival ground. The main stage is a skeleton — just the metal rigging left, with tattered banners hanging off it like the ribcage of something that sang itself to death. A huge inflatable rainbow arch lies deflated on its side in the sand, slowly being eaten by the wind. Food trucks sit half-buried, their colorful paint flaking off. A ferris wheel leans dramatically to one side, like a drunk uncle at a wedding. Strings of broken bistro lights stretch between tent poles, swinging gently even though there is no wind.
And there are people here. Not many. A few. They are dressed in fringe, in glitter, in cropped cowboy hats with small LED lights that are mostly burnt out. They are taking selfies in front of the ruins. They appear not to notice that the ruins are ruins. They have perfected their angles. They are posting, presumably, even though it is impossible to tell what service they are posting to.
One woman is sitting on a half-collapsed lounge chair, adjusting her fringe, taking a selfie, adjusting her fringe, taking another selfie. She has been doing this, you suspect, for a long time. She has a small pyramid of empty kombucha cans beside her and the look of a person who forgot what she was supposed to be doing here approximately four years ago.
"Coachella," Hattie says. "Or, well — not just Coachella. Coachella is the capital, but this whole thing is the empire. Fyre Festival's down there somewhere. Burning Man tried to secede and didn't really succeed. The Met Gala keeps a small embassy. There's a whole district of wellness retreats further south, but we don't go there, the vibes are bad."
She nods at the selfie woman on the lounge chair.
"She came here for the 2017 season, I think. Might've been 2018. She's been taking that photo ever since. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knows the festival ended. She knows the music stopped. She knows the girls she came with went home. But she can't quite remember how to leave. So she just keeps taking the picture. Waiting to look right. The funny thing is, she always looked right. She just didn't know it when it counted."
You stand there for a moment, taking it in.
A small brass sign has been driven into the sand at the edge of the ruins. It reads:
EST. 1999. PEAK ATTENDANCE: THE WHOLE INTERNET. FINAL GUEST: SHE IS STILL HERE. PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB.
"What is this place really?" you ask, softly.
Hattie considers.
"This," she says, "is where a generation tried to become the main character of a story that, it turns out, didn't have main characters. Just a lot of extras in very good outfits, all trying to out-extra each other. The joke of it," she adds, "is that the people who actually felt like main characters that decade were usually the ones not in the photos. They were watching the sunset, actually. They were in bed by ten. They were wearing sweatpants and laughing at something funny their friend said."
She tips her hat back.
"The desert does not give up that information easily, though. It's bad for business."
— Five — The Mirage of the Modern Face —
Hattie leads you on. The Coachella ruins fade behind you, and the desert opens up again into a long flat stretch of nothing.
Then, in the distance — shimmering, blue, impossibly lush — an oasis.
You stop. You shade your eyes. You can see palm trees. You can see what look like small white buildings with clean signage. You can see women walking between them in clean white robes, smiling, carrying little green juices.
"Oh," you say. "Oh, thank god. Water."
Hattie laughs, not unkindly.
"Nope," she says. "That's a mirage, honey. Prettiest one in the whole desert. I lost three years to it myself."
She keeps walking. You follow, reluctantly.
As you get closer, the shimmer flickers. The palm trees are plastic. The clean white buildings are a row of identical beauty clinics — all the same, all unmarked except for very small gold lettering: *consultation by appointment*. The women in white robes are not walking, exactly. They are gliding, in the way that figures in mirages glide, just slightly off the ground. And their faces —
You squint.
Their faces are all starting to look the same.
It's subtle at first. Then it isn't. The same puffed lips. The same tight jawline. The same slightly lifted brow. The same flattened expression — not sad, not happy, just smooth. As you walk past, one woman turns to look at you and her face is, in a way you cannot quite articulate, somebody else's face entirely. It is a face that was assembled from a mood board. It is a face that does not belong to the body it's on.
Another woman walks past. Same face.
Another. Same face.
"How long does this mirage go on?" you ask, quietly.
"Oh, for miles," Hattie says. "For miles and miles. It gets bigger every year. Used to be a single tent out here. Now it's a whole district."
She watches you take it in.
"Here's the part nobody tells you," she says. "And I'm going to tell you because I like you. The men — the ones most of these women think they're doing this for — do not actually want this. I have asked. I have receipts. It's not even a subtle thing. You stop ten men in the street and ask them what they find beautiful and not one of them will describe this face. Not one. They describe the girl they had a crush on in high school. They describe their wife when they met her. They describe their mama."
She tips her hat back.
"So who is this for? Mostly, it's for other women. Women comparing themselves to women comparing themselves. A whole chain of comparison going in a circle, eating its own tail, with a billing department at every stop. It's not a conspiracy, honey. It's just a very old human thing in a very new outfit. We've always done this. Ancient Egyptians plucked their eyelashes out. Victorians nearly fainted themselves to death in corsets. Every era has this district. Ours just happens to have a skincare line."
You look at the women gliding past. You cannot tell which ones are on their way in and which ones are on their way back out.
Hattie doesn't judge it. She just observes.
"Some of them will find the exit," she says softly. "Some of them won't. That's just how the desert works."
— Six — The Suggestion Box Tent —
You walk on. The mirage fades behind you.
After a while, Hattie stops at a small dusty tent set up in the middle of nowhere. It is army-green, faded, sun-bleached. A hand-painted sign above the flap reads:
WHAT MEN ACTUALLY LIKE.
And underneath, in smaller letters:
SUGGESTIONS SUBMITTED DIRECTLY. UPDATED CONTINUOUSLY. PLEASE REVIEW.
"Huh," Hattie says. "Haven't been here in a while. Barely anybody stops at this tent. It's a shame. It's got the good information."
She holds the flap open for you.
Inside: a small wooden box on a folding table. Next to it, a thick stack of small paper slips. You pick a few up at random and read.
"She laughs real."
"Her actual face."
"Confidence, mostly."
"When she's just herself and not performing."
"The way she is when she doesn't know I'm looking."
"Doesn't matter what she's wearing. Matters that she's in it."
"Kindness. Real kindness. I can always tell."
"That she finds things funny. I like funny."
You dig through more of them. There are hundreds. Thousands, maybe. Not a single one mentions a cosmetic procedure. Not a single one mentions a lip shape. Not a single one mentions a waist-to-hip ratio. Not a single one is, in fact, about anything you can buy.
You hold one of the slips up.
"This is all of them?" you ask. "This is the actual data?"
Hattie shrugs. "That's the data, honey. I don't make the data. I just keep the tent standing. Not many people come in here. Most of them go straight to the mirage. The mirage has better marketing."
You stand there for a moment, holding the slip that says *the way she is when she doesn't know I'm looking.*
You think, briefly, of every time in your life you have known somebody was looking, and adjusted.
Hattie watches you. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to.
— Seven — The Oasis of the Weird —
"Come on," Hattie says. "One more stop, and then I'll walk you to the exit."
She leads you over one last ridge.
And there — tucked into a small green valley, surrounded by actual palm trees that are actually palm trees — is an oasis. A real one this time. No shimmer. No gold lettering. Just water, and trees, and a small collection of people going about their odd little lives.
You walk in.
There is an old woman teaching pigeons chess. The pigeons appear to be winning. She seems pleased about this. There is a man knitting a sweater in a size that suggests it is being made for a streetlamp, which, upon reflection, it is. There are two friends arguing passionately about whether a tomato is a fruit. There is a woman wearing what appears to be an entirely mismatched outfit, down to the earrings, with the peace of a person who did not even briefly consider whether the earrings matched.
Nobody is taking pictures.
Nobody is performing.
Everybody is very clearly, very unapologetically, themselves.
"Who are they?" you ask.
"Oh, the weirdos." Hattie smiles. "That's what I call them. They've all been through the desert. Every single one. Some of them spent a long time in it. The chess-pigeon lady had the whole 1980s wardrobe, I heard. The streetlamp-sweater guy was briefly a very successful finance person. They just got tired of the costumes earlier than most. Came here. Stayed."
The old woman looks up from her chessboard and waves at you. Not a big wave. A small, content one. The wave of a person who is not worried about how the wave looks on camera.
You wave back.
"The weird thing about weird," Hattie says, watching them, "is that it's what was under the costume the whole time. Everybody has it. Some people find it. Some people don't. The ones who do tend to end up somewhere like this. Nothing fancy. Just — themselves. Peacefully."
You watch the pigeons make what appears to be a checkmate.
"I want this," you say, quietly.
Hattie nods. "Yeah, honey. That's why I brought you."
— Eight — The Exit —
Hattie walks you to the edge of the oasis.
There is a simple wooden door standing in the sand, not attached to anything. A small sign beside it reads:
EXIT. FREE WATER. PLEASE DRINK IT.
A rough ceramic bowl of cool water sits on a small stone. You pick it up. You drink.
It's the best water you've ever had.
Hattie tips her hat.
"That's it," she says. "That's the tour. You take the door. You go home. You won't remember most of this in the morning, but you'll remember the feeling. That's usually enough."
"What about the others?" you ask. "The woman on the lounge chair. The women at the mirage. Will they — "
Hattie shrugs, gentle.
"Some of them will find the door. Some of them won't. I can't walk anybody out who doesn't come find me. That's how it's always been. I keep the tent open. I keep the water fresh. People show up when they show up."
She looks at you.
"You showed up, honey. That's the only part that was ever up to you."
You hand her the empty bowl.
You reach for the door.
And you are back in your own bed.
The desert is gone. Hattie is gone. The pigeons are, presumably, still winning at chess somewhere. The woman on the lounge chair is still adjusting her fringe, and she may or may not find her way out, and that — it occurs to you — is not your job to fix.
Your job, tonight, is simply to remember.
That the trends were never the point.
That the mirage was always a mirage.
That the men, and the people who love you, and the universe itself — have been trying to tell you for a long time that your actual face, your actual laugh, the way you are when you don't know anyone's looking — is the oasis. It was the oasis the whole time.
You got tired of the costume. That is a good thing to get tired of. Many people never do. You did. That's the whole story.
Sleep now, weirdo.
The pigeons are rooting for you.
Good night.
Sweet dreams.