Ok, some background story: I had this dream maybe about a year or two ago. Most dreams that I have not been able to interpret I just forget about, but this one keeps popping back into my mind, as if there is something in it that needs resolved, or something in it that I need to understand.

I've posted this about before, but I was not able to get very much help.

The dream:

I was walking up a set of concrete stairs in an old broken apartment building. All the doors were off their hinges, everyone just lived kind of communally. It was filthy and smelly, dark and cold and there weren't many people. I felt really really sick, like the sympathy nausea you feel when you're with someone who is sick.

There were children running about as if they were happy - probably knew nothing better than the squalor they were enduring - but they looked sick. Pale, skinny, covered in sores and scars. Their mother looked even sicker than they did, but she carried on with a smile on her face and worry on her eyebrows washing the clothes by hand in cold, plain water. I almost got the feeling she knew they were doomed to die like this, but wanted to stay strong for her children.

There was so much pain, sadness and agony - yet so much love. I'll never be able to forget it.

When I left the building the nausea lifted. It was snowing, the landscape was covered in snow. The city could be seen in the background but it seemed eerily quiet - no traffic noise, not even any movement. Just tall, quiet, grey buildings listening to the near-silent snowfall.

I could hear a man whistling and singing. It was an old man with a big grey beard. He was with his dog and he was singing about the "good old days". Again, I could sense so much love, it was unlike anything I'd been able to comprehend before.

What I have derived from it so far:

Not a lot. I have had this dream nagging away at me for so long and nothing really to show for it - the reason why I tried to give up interpreting it. I simply didn't think there was anything to interpret. But dreams typically do not keep bugging me time after time, not in the dream state but a waking state. I haven't had it re-occur as a dream, but the emotions and atmosphere and the characters keep coming back to me while awake.

The man with the dog does most of all, I don't know why. I don't know any old men and I don't particularly like dogs.

I tend to get anxious and get sympathy symptoms when someone else near me is feeling uneasy or unwell, it would explain why I felt the way I did in the dream but not why I haven't been able to get it off my mind or why I had this dream.

I am particularly afraid of severe sickness and disease, especially in filthy conditions. I remember feeling guilty for wanting to get out of that building, as if I wanted to avoid these people despite the fact they had done me no wrong. The amount of love I felt from them made me feel even more guilty.

The setting almost seems like a sort of post-apocalyptic setting. I have had lots of post-apocalypse type dreams that I have felt very much connected to, but have never really bought into the idea that such a thing will ever happen in reality. Nations will rise and fall, but I think humanity as a whole still has some ways to go yet.

So, for anyone who is willing, can someone help me with interpretation?