Strange and Disturbing Dream

[rara23]

This is the dream I had last night. I'm at a big, very crowded, club-type party with my best friend K. The party is an event that's going through town, not one of the local clubs. It's in a western-style building with an L-shaped staircase (I haven't seen this building in real life, but the city I live in has a big event called the Stampede every summer that features a rodeo and this year is the 100th anniversary). Most of the party is on the main level, I don't go upstairs. A dark-haired man catches my eye through a crowd. Later, that same man has me pinned to the floor and is attacking me violently. I'm terrified and confused, as I don't understand the reason for the attack but I know it's me specifically he's after. Later, I'm walking up a large, broad, off-white marble staircase with K, leading to a patio-type area on the front of a building. It reminds me of something I've seen in movies, there's definitely nothing like it in the city where I live. On the patio area there are tables, also off-white marble. We are going to an art class, and I am looking forward to it. There is modeling clay on the tables, but we have cameras and are going off to take photos. I have my ex-boyfriend's camera (that I used to borrow when he got a better one and was teaching me photography). He is there and sees me with the camera, but we don't interact. Later, I go back to where the party was with K to look for clues, possibly as to a reason for the attack. I'm feeling traumatised. I'm terrified and upset and wondering if I will ever feel normal again after being attacked. I recall wondering if it's anything like what my friend felt after being sexually assaulted. At some point as we look around the club, I am descending the L-shaped staircase after finding nothing upstairs. We go into a small room to look around. The room is well-lit with natural light and is all painted off-white. There is a table in the middle. The room is familiar somehow. As we're looking through the room, the teacher from our art class walks by. We don't think anything of it until we go to leave the room and find that the door is locked from the outside. It's an old door, painted off-white like the rest of the room. The top half of the door contains a large, undivided window. A boy about our age who has been in the room the whole time but only comes to my attention now breaks the window and suggests we climb out through it. Only the lower half of the window breaks. K looks at him like he's stupid, reaches through the broken window and unlocks the door. I woke up about 40 minutes before my alarm was supposed to go off, shaking violently. I could've rolled over and gone back to sleep, but I didn't want to return to the dream so I tried to think of something else first. All through the dream I was terrified and felt like I was in danger. Extreme paranoia throughout. I'm currently working in a very easy but fairly likeable job, trying to save money to go to school this fall in music. I'll be 19 this weekend. I had some disagreements with my dad over what school I'm going to (the one I'm going to is out of town and not my dream school, he thinks I should wait to leave home until I'm accepted into my dream school), but I know I'm making the right decision. My best friend K also attends this school, but she's a year ahead of me as she did not take time off to work. She was sexually assaulted by a guy she met in a club just after her 18th birthday and it's taken more than a year for her case to get to court. The court date is next month and I know she's struggling with having to go back over all the details to prepare for her testimony. The ex-boyfriend whose camera I'm using has been extremely frustrating lately. A few months back, he slept with my best friend (after he and I had broken up and I was sort of seeing someone else) and they both kept it from me for a long time. She eventually told me the truth and was extremely apologetic, but it took him weeks to apologize. When I found out, it wasn't the sex that bothered me, just the fact that they had kept it from me for so long while I had been in the middle of their fights (and the fact that I felt like he had taken advantage of her lack of self-confidence). The three of us were once very close, but have been growing apart since he and I broke up last November. It would be wonderful if some light could be shed on this dream, because it's very rare for me to have dreams like it that genuinely terrify me and I can't get it out of my head. Thanks!