The most disturbing dream I’ve ever had.

I was recently trying to convey this to a friend of mine and though I’d post it here, just in case anyone wants to have a go at interpreting it, or perhaps just wants to wallow in how staggeringly morbid it is.
I recently had a dream/nightmare, actually several if you want to be technical about it, as it was a “continuing storyline” that spread out over 2 or 3 nights. It wasn’t the same dream or variation on a theme over and over, it was an ongoing thing, as if I had this other life that was going on while I sleep. I don’t remember seeing anything in the paper, on TV or in any other medium with anything even remotely approximating this story, nothing that I can think of that would influence this train of throught into running a nightly timetable through my head.
Basically, in this dream, I’m living in the house where I grew up, as an adult. My wife doesn’t feature anywhere in the dream at all – it’s like she’s just not even there in that world. And I have a baby daughter. (Where this baby came from, I have no idea, because there’s no wife or girlfriend at all in the entire story.) Put simply, I turn my back for ten seconds to climb up on a ladder and change the light bulb in my basement (something I never actually did while I was living there). And I come back down, and she’s gone. Frantic searching ensues. I can’t find a trace of her. I call, shout, scream, because at this point, even upsetting the kid enough to get her to cry will lead me to her. There’s not an open door, there’s no one else in the house, and I can’t figure out where she’s gone.
That’s pretty much night one. The second night basically involves friends (but no one I recognize as family, or who is playing any kind of familial role) coming over to commisserate, the police searching everywhere in and around the house, asking me questions, and a few people questioning my fitness to be raising this kid on my own. (On that score, I don’t disagree – I know zip about taking care of an infant.)
On the third night’s dream, she turns up dead. Behind an appliance somewhere – somewhere where I’ve already looked, again and again and again, trying to find her, and somewhere where I can’t even picture how she got back there. She got stuck, couldn’t move and apparently couldn’t make a sound. She was in the basement the whole time, and I was right there looking for her, and I couldn’t help her in time.
I woke up from that, I almost think my subconscious forced me to wake up at that point, and I felt like I had been gut-punched until my insides were hollowed out. I felt like I really had lost that child. The rest of that waking day was completely lost to me, because I was feeling this devastating emotional fallout from something that didn’t even really happen. I got upset about it again later, a whole different flavor of upset, because I really found myself wondering what the hell any of that meant, and why it was hitting me so hard when my eyelids were open.
For the record, I’ve never had a younger sibling, much less had one die; I’ve never had a nephew, niece, cousin or any other relative die at that age, nothing that would bring that kind of a thought to the surface, let alone in that much detail. I’ve never had any children of my own, and I’ve never even succeeded in conceiving one. I’ve never had a child to lose, or known anyone who had anything like this happen.
So why any of this would occur to my subconscious, much less in a way that I almost can’t get away from it, I have no idea. But it was really disturbing.