(Male, 30’s) It’s clear to me where the parts of this dream came from but it’s still pretty interesting how they all were re-assembled into a nightmare. I work in a high school and we’re all packing up our rooms for summer.
In the nightmare, I’m in an old brick building and there are dozens of people around, kids, teachers, it’s supposed to be a school but it’s a weird old building. It’s not obvious where any room leads or how to get anywhere. There’s a flurry of activity everywhere, people packing things, saying goodbye, getting yearbooks signed. And every where there are these life sized rubber rats. They must have been some kind of mascot or something. There are at least a couple in every room, one teacher’s desks, on the floor. Like a joke that got out of hand. And the weirdest part is that almost ALL of these rubber rats were sealed up in locking storage bags.
I wandered from room to room trying to be of some help and I ended up in a basement. It had a very strong basement feel because the wall were stone, like cobblestone and the mortar was crumbling away. It wasn’t dark or particularly scary on its own. But once I got down there, I realized that there were two teachers there having a very serious, very private discussion about a student. I felt like I should leave them alone but I found I couldn’t. I physically could not fit up the staircase – it didn’t seem like any human could fit up the stairs but I got down there somehow. And again there were dozens of bagged rats, casually tossed in the corners of the cellar. There was another way out, something like a window, perhaps an old unused coal chute. It looked like I could get out of it, like I could fit through the window but it was just a little bit higher than I could reach easily. There was sunshine from outside in the window. What stopped me was I was irrationally afraid that there might be more of these silly rubber rats in whatever space I crawled into. I started to look up into the window to investigate it a bit and that’s when I woke up.