An old apartment, nudity, and Stephen Colbert

My boyfriend D and I have moved back to my old apartment, or at least to an apartment in my old building. [My old building was a poorly maintained, pre-war walkup; we currently live in a beautiful 2007-built high rise.] A realtor lady is asking me about any defects in the apartment, I think maybe to get a record of the condition of the apartment before I take possession. I mention the big hump in the living room floor. [My old apartment actually did have a huge hump in the living room floor.] I tell the lady, I used to always say "Jimmy Hoffa is under that hump," or, "we could ride half-pipe in there."

It is midnight. D and I are in the bedroom. We are in the bed, maybe watching TV. Our apartment is on the fourth floor out of five [actually, I lived on the third floor out of four], and there is an opening in the bedroom ceiling that looks out on the stairs to the fifth floor. We see a naked guy, presumably a fifth-floor tenant, ascending the stairs. There is a white metal ladder from our bedroom up to the fifth floor hallway. D jumps up and starts climbing the ladder, I guess out of curiosity about the naked guy. As the guy ascends I get a view of his underside, but I don't notice any genitals. He seems to have just smooth skin there. Also, I notice he doesn't seem to have much or any hair on his body.

D seems to have transformed into Stephen Colbert. He decides to go out into the hallway naked as well. He goes out of the apartment (naked) and returns a few minutes later. Apparently some people with children were also in the hall at the time, leading to a horrible misunderstanding. They think D/Colbert is some kind of pervert. D/Colbert is sitting on the bed (which is now against the outside wall of the bedroom, instead of in the middle where it was when we first saw the naked guy). I hear the angry people from the hall coming, so I sit on the bed in front of D/Colbert to block their view of him. The people come to the doorway of our bedroom, but not finding D/Colbert, they leave. I turn around to talk to D/Colbert, but he is not behind me! I look and see he is on another bed against the opposite wall. This second bed seems to be sort of like a bunk bed; there is structure above the bed where D/Colbert is, so he is sort of ecnlosed. There are blankets hanging down around the bed like drapes. The configuration reminds me of a dorm room where the resident has made like a little tent or fortress to define his space.

*****

I don't recall having any dreams set in the old apartment while I actually lived there-- which I always thought was odd, because I had been living there so long-- but I've had several set there (or a version of there) since moving.

I had two conversations involving hair yesterday. At work, my friend and colleague K and I discussed the relative hairiness of different ethnicities in general, and of ourselves and our partners in particular. Then yesterday evening on my way home from work, I stopped at a shop near my home and purchased a necklace and earrings. While ringing up my purchase, the shop owner told me about a time she had met the designer, and mentioned that he had no hair at all on his head. I asked if he had that disease where you have no hair at all anywhere, and she said no, she just meant he shaves off all his hair and eyebrows. I think these mentions of hirsuteness vs smoothness contributed to the stranger's smooth appearance, maybe even to the extent that his genital area was completely smooth-- not just hair free, but completely free of any disruption to its surface.

However, when I first reflected on this dream after waking, the first thing that came to mind was the very weird thing I saw once on Ugly Americans. The guy in my dream didn't look like that cartoon at all; he looked fairly normal (except for his lack of body hair and genitals!). This weird naked guy appeared once for literally one second on Ugly Americans. His appearance was totally out of the blue, not connected to anything else in the episode, and has had me wondering what the hell he was doing there ever since.

In this dream, D and I move into the apartment in which I used to live alone. Like the cluttered room dream, I think this dream includes an element of my irritation with some of the trade-offs of cohabiting. I lived alone for ten years and controlled everything in my space. Now that I have to share quarters, I feel that my space is invaded, that I no longer have the control over it that I had living alone. The second bed with its blanket curtains reminds me of a college dorm, a place where, though a room is shared, it is clearly and explicitly demarcated into individually allotted areas. Perhaps the passage through the ceiling in my dream shows that I know I need to "open" my space to D.

There is still a lot unaccounted for in this dream, so I am not labeling it as "interpreted."