Dream: The Creepy Dorm Room

Dream 20040727, 5:15 AM:

I’m with Richard (my brother) at a college dorm room; we’re moving in there, preparing for school. There are three beds, and he and I talk about which one each of us wants, and how to arrange the room. It’s laid out very square, with the beds all along one row and desks along the row opposite, and we consider changing it up to make it more livable. I lie on one of the beds, and see that there are bolts sticking out of the top of the head and foot boards, where they could be bunked with the other beds; I point this out to Richard. The room has a kind of creepy feel to it that I can’t put my finger on. Richard asks me to get him his bear, a stuffed teddy bear which is sitting on the desk. He tells me that something on the desk frightens him. I go and look, and picking up the bear, I find several feathers, long gray flight feathers, like from a turtle dove or mockingbird. I ask if they’re his, and he tells me that they were there already. He had left them there, thinking they would make good pillow feathers. I tell him that we have to get rid of them, that they are related to whatever makes the room feel creepy. As I’m talking to him, I’m cutting up a piece of yellow tissue paper, making some kind of template for a science class; I don’t know what the template is for, but it seems like I’m making a scale model of a room.

Another guy shows up. He announces that he’s to be our new roommate. He is loud and annoying in a very geeky way, and he starts walking around and telling us how the room ought to be arranged. I don’t like him. He has wavy mid-brown hair – not long hair, just full. The doorway into the room reminds me somewhat of the entry to the sculpture area at Brookhaven college, and there are huge stacks of firewood there. I remark that we won’t need to worry about running out of firewood any time soon; there are several chords, although some of it isn’t cut up. A woman walks by, and I think for a moment she’s Sandra I., someone who goes to church with my Mom, but it isn’t her, and she walks on. The television is on, and is showing an advertisement for a movie, “The Sandman Cometh,” and the screen image is of a pair of hands digging up from beneath reddish sand. It seems hokey, but curioulsy disturbing.