Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
- Dreamwalk Park at Orem's University Place Mall offers an immersive, otherworldly experience.
- The park features interactive rooms with fantastical creatures, hidden clues, and unique effects.
- Co-founders emphasize creativity, aiming for a believable escape and lasting visitor engagement.
OREM — Normally when you go to the University Place Mall, you're looking for clothes or shoes. But the co-founders of Dreamwalk Park want to transport you to another world.
Dreamwalk Park is described as an "indoor, micro theme park" with the intent to help patrons escape this world and discover another one. The park is a series of rooms, hallways and destinations that are filled with fantastical creatures, plants and mysteries to explore.
"We just want to transport people," cofounder and chief creative officer Ben McPherson said. "Ultimately, we want them to feel like 'I actually didn't feel like a mortal for a minute. I went to a different place.' We want them to be almost addicted to that vibe."
After arriving at the park, patrons are brought into a sci-fi-esque spaceport and greeted by a robot who helps them begin their voyage. Participants are given decoder wands (UV flashlights) and a portal pass (a microchipped card) they can use to find clues on the walls and unearth hidden creatures.
Travelers traverse across an erupting volcano, a galactic grotto and ancient alien ruins. The journey continues through a grove of glowing mushrooms, gemstone caves and other extraterrestrial rooms before ending in a steampunk cosmic marketplace that looks straight out of "Star Wars" — and even includes a secret robotic speakeasy.
The rooms are filled with ethereal music, supernatural lightning, large animatronics and artistic effects. The portal pass allows people to turn on lights, wake up ancient spirits, view holographic images, play games and even talk with a lab-grown fish.
There are Easter eggs, secret messages, hidden prizes and concealed clues to discover in the more than half-mile path that winds around 50,000 square feet. Shows of music, light and other visual effects occur every 10 minutes in certain areas to add to the experience.
"You can get lost in a 20-by-20 foot section of a tide pool for hours. So that's what we wanted to do — we don't have the size, but we have the ingenuity and the creativity to just fill every nook and cranny with something," McPherson said. "It's kind of endless on how much you can explore."
From stones that glow as you pass your hands over them to robots that play music and creatures that seem to breathe and move, the founders emphasized attention to detail to set their interactive and immersive experience apart.
"Obviously, we're not as big as like Disneyland, but we want there to be this micro detail that makes it feel bigger," McPherson said.
Cofounder and CEO John Pope said he wanted the park to have "a certain level of perfection." Employees, including "portal park rangers," will be throughout the park as actors to help people feel like they are in another world, and not in the mall next to RC Willey.
"There's a magic that certain parks have where you actually feel like you've left your real life," Pope said. "There's so few places, anywhere, that you can actually have that believable fictional escape where your imagination is convinced about where you're at ,and we feel like this is one of those."
"When you're in here, you kind of forget what's around you," he added.
In most amusement parks, lights, speakers and other standard objects from everyday life are visible and can take people out of the experience, but the founders wanted to hide those as much as possible. So light comes from gelatinous glowing masses or lantern mushrooms, and the music seems to seep out of walls with no speakers in sight.
"Being able to be fully immersed and have your imagination be completely convinced by what's around you, that's on another level, and that's what we wanna keep bringing for people," Pope said.
The park will open on Dec. 12 and has been in the works for more than three years. Pope and McPherson met through their background in film but ultimately ended up creating the magical world of Dreamwalk Park with the hope of providing a unique entertainment experience here in Utah.
The founders even created an entire alien language that travelers can decode along their trek. Some people could even have "one-off" experiences that nobody else ever discovers, McPherson said.
"We kind of like that. There's something noncorporate about it. This is a passion project, and we want the community to kind of feel how deep this rabbit hole goes," Pope said.
Depending how much one decides to explore, people could spend hours in the other-worldly park, but McPherson said most people could expect to spend around 2 hours on their Dreamwalk expedition. He hopes people take the time to slow down, take it in, and enjoy the storytelling through exploration.
"Everybody wants adventure. Everybody wants to escape. Everybody wants to see what's around the bend of the trail.O ur job is to provide more bends in the trail," Pope said.
All of the effects are customizable, the founders said, so the experience can be switched up and changed for different seasons or events to keep the park interesting for people to return.
"It's unending how we can expand and extrapolate in that way," McPherson said.
Dreamwalk Park will also be selling merchandise and "high-quality collectibles," such as trading cards, made in house by the artists of the park. Pope said they won't be just standard gift shop items, but will be unique artifacts that inspire connection to the artists.
