Flooding Stairwell

Date: 7/17/2022

I was at work (for context, I work at a summer camp), but the environment was different. Me and the other counselors had around 30 kids in some sort of large room with a lot of wooden crates, pipes lining the walls, and other storage and equipment. The room was unfamiliar, and this was not the normal school I worked at, and all the other employees and the campers were unfamiliar. I checked outside the room and went into the hallway, the room everyone was packed in was backstage for a school auditorium. Outside it was night and it was raining hard. We began to lead all the kids outside through the rain into another building. We entered into a square room with a staircase bordering the wall ascending several stories. The walls were tan and had a worn brick facade. The stairs were metal and equally worn. We began to pack the kids into the stairwell and up stairs. Far above, water had begun to drip through the roof. I was at the end of the line making sure there were no strays or any kids lagging behind. Despite the chatter, they were well behaved and moved quickly and efficiently, very unlike their real life counterparts. Towards the top of the stairs, the metal catwalk evened out and created a square around the perimeter of the room before a last stairwell in the middle of the room leading to the exit door. Because of the way the catwalk wrapped around the room, it was awkward to step towards the final stairs, especially as the catwalk began to fall apart due to further rain damage as the leaks got worse (either that or the dream logic got wonky, I think it was a bit of both). As the catwalk fell apart, I had to help some of the remaining kids step across a gap between the catwalk sections. Looking down, I saw that water had begun to leak into the stairwell and flood the building. That being said, falling at this point still would surely result in death. As I helped about three kids step across. We tried to help them over to the middle stairs, but the center catwalk leading towards it had begun to break. Some of the other counselors tried to help the kids step across carefully but the catwalk was wobbling dangerously and finally shattered as a kid stepped across, stranding me and two other kids on a now isolated catwalk as the stairs themself broke afterwards. I was surprisingly calm, and had never really felt like there was any immediate danger throughout the entire experience. Looking around, I felt it would actually be a cool place to explore, and made a mental note to tell one of my friends Aislinn about it later. At this point, the water had risen to our level. It was at a 45 degree angle angling up towards the opposite wall. Above us was the final catwalk where a red-haired counselor (who is not someone I actually work with) leaned over and called for me to throw up the remaining kids. I tossed one of the kids up as the water reached our feet. I picked up the last kid to throw but the water was rising fast, and had reached our stomachs and therefore I couldn’t get any momentum to toss them up. Luckily, the water helped us more than anything, and it raised us up the final catwalk where me and the other counselor helped the last kid climb (or swim) over the railing. The three of us went through the door where we found ourselves outside at a playground (dream logic, I guess). It was still raining and night out, and all the kids ran towards the playground equipment. Before me I saw two Batman motorcycles and got excited, but was incredibly disappointed to find they were just old Batman-themed playground equipment. The dream ended as all the counselors went about our business as usual to watch the kids as they played as if nothing that had just occurred or was currently occurring was anything out of the ordinary.