“Welcome to our dream world,” reads a large yellow sign at the entrance of 29Rooms: Expand Your Reality. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

The pop-up gallery space fashioned by Refinery29 opened today at the D.C. Armory, but it isn’t so much a dream as it is a thought-provoking fun house, a series of spaces meant to be crawled into, climbed up and carefully considered. Oh, and of course photographed.

“We wanted this year to think about experiences that would be disarming for people,” says Olivia Fagon, a D.C. native and the creative director of experiential at Refinery29.

Though this is the fifth iteration of 29Rooms, which began in New York in 2015 and changes concepts each year; this is its first appearance in D.C. The show runs through Oct. 27 (visitors access the space by buying timed tickets) and includes a few local names on its list of collaborators.

Among them is Jamea Richmond-Edwards, a Silver Spring mixed-media artist who created the D.C. version of “The Traveling Billboard,” a wall-sized fabric panel re-fashioned for each tour site. In it, a woman palms her hair with one hand while the other gestures to the side, seemingly summoning onlookers to a land just beyond view.

Richmond-Edwards, a Howard University alum whose portraits blend collage and drawing, says she often portrays African American women in a “regal” light.

“We really pride ourselves on how we present ourselves to the world,” she tells DCist. “That is a way for us to control our own narrative, because … when others portray us with our history, it’s like, ‘OK, your history begins with slavery, and you come from nothing.’”

Just across the way sits “Dream Doorways,” a collaboration with Billboard-charting musician and onetime Alexandria resident Kali Uchis. Fagon says Uchis set out to provide visitors a “walk through her own dreams”—and apparently her dreams are pretty trippy. In easily the most Instagrammable exhibit at the show, viewers can snap shots defying gravity in a brightly colored office space, digging their feet into a sandy beach (real sand!) or peering into a reflective Hitchcock-esque room filled with artificial blue birds.

A new addition this year is The Art Park, a set of interactive works designed by artists from five of the touring cities. Included is a set of stairs by D.C.-based illustrator and animator Trap Bob on which “Follow Your Dreams” is painted.

Other rooms to pop into include “Teen Bedroom”—featuring a twin bed lined with Elmo-like fur and a functional Nintendo 64 loaded with Mario Kart—and “A Conversation With Your Inner Child,” where visitors are invited to address younger versions of themselves and tack the sentiments to the wall. Also set aside some time for “You Are Magic,” a dimly lit pair of cave-like rooms where one can rest and absorb an audio recording of affirmations. (“I am wise.” “I am serenity.” “I am the architect of my life.”)

One of the more provocative spaces in 29Rooms is “A Long Line of Queendom,” created in collaboration with Unbothered, a sub-brand of Refinery 29 serving as a digital hub for black millennial women. Its centerpiece is an oversized velvet-like do-rag, on which is printed the first names of groundbreaking African-American women.

“It’s a space that’s meant to be commemorative; it’s meant to be celebratory,” Fagon says. “This is a really great example of when you create a space and it’s a clear message. Every single surface of it is inscribed with something powerful, and it’s meant to be photographed.”

But, perhaps ironically, one of the most powerful rooms in the show is the most aesthetically spare. In “29 Questions”—a room Fagon says was quickly dreamed up when another piece fell through—visitors are paired with strangers at small round tables and given a deck of verbal prompts such as “How would you like to be remembered?” or “What is your go-to karaoke song?”

Michael Cass, who serves as the room’s moderator and has witnessed lengthy lines of waiting patrons at prior showings, says the questions offer visitors a way to “open up.”

“[It’s] a lasting connection you wouldn’t have through social media.”

29Rooms:Expand Your Reality runs Oct. 18-27 at The D.C. Armory. Tickets start at $29. Stroller parking and a mothers’ room are provided.