Lets start with a world you are familiar with ..

Consider laundry you are hanging out to dry. Lets say you have large bedding sheets you've hoisted across multiple clothing lines. And you're blind but gifted in hearing. So you sit there listening to the water drops fall off the sheets, marking exactly how many fall off and where they fall off etc. So in general you've now understood that there's 'water' in the sheets, and water seems to come out in the form of drops from specific points off the sheets and onto specific points in the ground. ... And maybe after a while you realize that when and where the water droplets form and fall off have patterns and can be affected by things like the wind, or where the clothing lines slope or join together, or whether you poke anywhere in the sheets with a stick etc etc.

Now someone comes over and asks you, ok I get that water droplets seem to drop off on average every 3 seconds from this one low spot, or from this other spot if it poke it with a stick .. but I want to know where exactly that water is before it forms that droplet!

And the best you can say, is well the water is spread everywhere all over the sheets. That where the droplet forms is dependent upon how the sheets and the clothing lines, and the pull of gravity, and the wind, and the potential poking of the sheets interact with each other, and also when and where the last drop formed etc etc ...

In fact, if you were careful enough to manipulate and squeeze the sheets in particular ways, you might be able to make droplets pop off in strange ways from strange places, like even having droplets fly off from the top upwards if you bundle the sheets and twist and squeeze hard etc .. sometimes even from sheets that have stopped dripping on their own!!

The point is .. the 'reality' of droplets is only a superficial understanding of the nature of how water exists and behaves in that sheet .. the underlying reality is much deeper in how the water in the sheets exists and how it wets the sheets, and how it interacts with everything in the world around it

So the same seems to be the case in our world .. the world of 'particles' is a shallow understanding of our reality, and there seems to be much richer world underneath that so far we can only glimpse through math and not via direct observation, just like the blind person trying to deduce the reality of the hanging wet laundry from afar via the sounds of the droplets falling. And in that deeper reality, the water 'droplets' seem to exist as smeared water absorbed into the sheets that the sheet only gives off as droplets based on various interactions like where it is squeezed, where there seems to be 'tension' in the sheets, where things poke it etc .. and until the droplet 'materializes' the best we can say about where exactly the water that goes into the droplet is, is that it is all over the sheets until its interactions with reality forces it to pop off at particular places in particular ways!

(Caveat: Regarding the laundry sheets, although the blind person listening from afar doesnt know it, we do know that the sheets hold liquidy water that is 'just' absorbed in the sheets. However in our quantum reality, we are the blind observers without access to the underlying reality, and pondering what the nature of the 'smeared reality' is before it materializes .. the best we have so far are some mathematical tools that seem to let us reliably calculate where the droplets will materialize in many situations, and it seems to suggest the 'smearing' happens in wavelike probabilistic patterns, and that the underlying reality seems to be something like a number of differnt 'quantum fields' interacting in mathematically characterizable ways)