Rap Rat was a real product. In 1992, a company called Marblex released a VHS board game for children featuring a character called Rap Rat — a cartoon rat who rapped instructions for the game via cassette tape. The game was sold primarily in South Africa and some European markets.
The game itself was unremarkable: a board game with VHS and audio components, common in the early 90s. Children would watch the video, listen to the tape, and play the game. Standard.
What wasn't standard was what happened after.
Children who played Rap Rat reported, with documented consistency in households across South Africa, that they dreamed about the rat. Not anxious dreams or nightmares in the conventional sense. Something more specific: the rat, in the room, standing in the corner or at the foot of the bed, watching. Not threatening. Just present. Watching.
The dreams were dismissed as children's imagination attaching to a character they'd engaged with before sleep. This is common and usually accurate.
Except the descriptions were too consistent. The rat standing in the same position. The rat watching without moving. The rat, in some accounts, moving when the child looked away. The rat, in the most disturbing accounts, saying something — the same something, across children who had not spoken to each other about the dreams.
Several parents reported that after their children described these dreams, they themselves dreamed of the rat. The parents had not watched the video. Several had never seen the character.
The game was recalled. The stated reason was a choking hazard with one of the game pieces. This is likely true. Whether it was the only reason has been discussed in collecting communities.
The VHS tape, when digitized and analyzed, was found to contain approximately four minutes of footage following the end of the main content — after the point where the tape would have appeared blank to normal viewing. The footage is dark. Something moves in it. The audio track during this section contains, at a volume below standard playback threshold, a voice. The voice sounds like the character. What it says has been transcribed, though the transcription is disputed.
The surviving copies of Rap Rat are collector's items. People still buy them. People still play them.
Children still dream about the rat.