Dreaming In a Far Away Place

In a motel room near an ocean I dream in a rented bed, listen to the scrabbling claws of small crabs as they emerge from yet smaller holes in the sand. The little crabs are going to pick clean the carcass of a dead horse. The unfamiliar bed makes only morbidly obese sounds. It creaks like a leather saddle and I am afraid that the scuttling crabs will overhear. Why do only the saddest words invite us to hear more deeply? Why do rented beds transmit alien nightmares as if a stranger still slept here?