ORONO — My recurrent nightmare is a simple devastation: I return to my childhood home to find strangers living there.

The bad dream took shape in daylight this week, a pair of Kris Sader paintings in the Museum of Art at the University of Maine stopping me short.

The two small acrylic works, framed together, show the same row of houses. The top strip, titled “Anybody Home,” is the “real,” with shadows, light and appealing shades of green. Below are the haunting “Ghost Houses,” red on red, windows dark holes like eyes and open mouths.

The conflict is classic material, in art and in dreams: safety and familiarity vs. strangeness and fear.

Sader is one of the bright points in the student exhibition opening today at the Carnegie Hall museum. A one-man judge and jury, Museum Director Wally Mason whittled the show down from 256 submissions to 86 pieces. They come from all class levels, degree and nondegree students, art majors and dabblers.

Their quality is uneven, but the best are well worth seeing. The worst will lead the viewer to wonder about what wasn’t accepted. In fact, students have organized an unofficial sister show of “rejects,” according to posters in the museum stairwell.

Art students have available numerous roads to failure. Some subjects seem ill-chosen — furniture, flowers, mobsters shooting guns. Other works are lively with technical skill but lack individual vision.

When students get it right, it only takes a few well-drafted lines. Something as simple as J. Hunter Jones’ black-and-white lithograph, “Apple,” gives a crisp, delicate visual pleasure. Sean Miskel demonstrates a decided style and confidence in his large charcoal drawings. Catherine Atkinson Greenwood shares her unique, engaging perspective.

One edge young artists have is their closeness to the unfettered perception of childhood. Several students look back and pay successful tribute to innocence.

In her linoleum block print “See Becca Go to School,” Nancy Megquier Braley imitates the spare look of an old-fashioned primer, with formal text and a sharp blue-and-white image of a schoolgirl in braids and bobby socks.

Intriguing imagery builds suspense in “Come Back Tomorrow,” where a little girl in a pink dress stands on a stormy beach. Behind her, a man wearing a tie covers his ears. Even more curious is painter Patricia Vadas’ decision to divide her canvas and cover one-third with a narrow, vertical abstraction.

If you enter the museum from the basement and bypass the front lobby, be sure to step into the hall to see “The Country.” Jeffrey Jacques’ hardy collage uses a wooden door as a canvas and pays tribute to life on the farm. His materials include a shovel, nails, staples, twine and burlap.

Another impressive piece that uses found objects is Jeff Ma’s chair built of rusted railroad spikes. Its squat, skeletal form is spare and elegant, a cross between an ancient torture device and an insect.

Some of the best student works are sculpture. Susan Page’s wood construction, “Winsome Quest,” overlaps pale and dark, rough and glossy shards. The alabaster curve of “First Glance” by Josh Jacobson suggests a skull that has drifted for years back and forth across a beach.

Scattered gems upstairs include the floating heads and blue backdrop of a collage by Leslie Herger, and a moody, untitled monotype by Eva Victoria O’Reilly that translates like bright stained glass obscured by a dirty curtain.