Recurring Dream... with a Twist

About a month ago, I had a dream that I was living in a small rental apartment (kind of like the one I have now but with some differences). In the kitchen of this space, next to the water heater, was a door that I apparently hadn't asked about or even noticed when I first moved into the apartment. But months after I had moved in, the door suddenly made itself known to me, and after that, I just had to go through it. When I did, I found a basement which connected to the main house that the apartment was in. In going through the door, I immediately found myself in a room with carpet and dank walls, like someone had been sitting in there for years smoking. Through another door, the rest of the basement was what you'd expect: concrete floors and walls with years and years of stored-up junk and memories lining the walls, stuffed into overhead compartments constructed of plywood.

This was the basement in the dream from a month ago. I remember leaving the basement space, going back into my apartment, and closing the cream-colored door and locking it.

In last night's dream, the cream-colored door was ajar, and there was a sizable gap between the bottom of the door and the floor which wasn't there the month before. Through this gap between door and floor, two tiny kittens had crawled. When I opened the door to throw the kitties back into the basement, instead of entering into the dank room from the previous month, instead there was a set of stairs that went even further down into a sub-basement space. I tried to put the kitties back on the stairs and close the door between me and them, but the latch that holds the door to the frame was busted. I eventually wedged a mattress pad under the door to both prevent the kitties from re-entering and the door from hanging open.

I could still hear the kitties meowing from the other side of the door. :(