Dreams

Friends-locked for strangeness.Early this morning, I got up to put on my new knee braces that I'm testing out because my knees were bothering me a bit and I wondered if I'd sleep better with them on.Then I went back to sleep and had odd dreams. First, I dreamed that Stephan was going on a trip somewhere without me, in his car, but for some reason I'd ridden with him down to the end of our street to see him off. He let me out and I was walking back up the street to our house. I realized I was naked, which of course, happens in dreams, but I was less concerned with this than whether I had left the house unlocked, since I wasn't carrying anything either. I was sort of slumping half-crouched down the sidewalk, embarrassed to be naked, when I realized that this was a dream and it didn't matter, so I just stood up and walked normally.At some point I dreamed that I was in church, but things were a bit odd, and the music director was leaving because he'd taken a job somewhere else. I was very surprised and dismayed by this. He was going to some town in Indiana I wasn't familiar with, but for some reason I had misheard or dreamed that he was going to Albuquerque, so we kept joking about that.Then, I was on a hike with three other women I didn't know. I don't recall if any of the others had some peculiar device, but I did. To help me walk, I was holding two handles much like the handles on a plow. Each handle curved down to meet the ground in a very small wheel. The wheels had cages around them, each containing a large flying insect, which was buzzing and helping propel me forward. I was concerned with keeping up with the others, and afraid of making a bad impression by being a slowpoke or that they'd think I was a wimp because I needed this contraption to help me walk.At some point we were walking up the small sidewalk on the back side of my house. My feral cat Shasta went by. I crashed somehow and broke my walking contraption. One of the bugs escaped, the other looked dead. When I bent over to look at it more closely, I saw it had Shasta's face. Perhaps these bugs took the face of the last creature they passed. I apologized to my companions and warned them that they "would see other strange things around here." I found a length of Christmas ribbon and thought for a moment I might use this to repair my contraption, but felt that my companions were annoyed that I was slowing them down. I just carried the broken device and we set off again.We continued along the side of my house, when a knock came from the inside of the back door. I was puzzled, because I knew Stephan had left for a trip. Had he come back early? I opened the door and it was my Mom, who had come for a surprise visit. Boy, was I surprised because she's an obsessive planner, like me, and would never do something that spontaneous. I wondered what was wrong, and was impressed that she'd actually made it on her own, as she hasn't done a long drive in years and gets a little confused driving in unfamiliar places.Then my alarm went off. I've got an alarm clock that I can set to make "natural" sounds instead of beeps or radio. It's set to something like "babbling brook" which sort of approximates the sound of water. At any rate, it's less obnoxious than a beep.But because I was pretty deep in sleep when the alarm woke me, I was clumsy reaching for the snooze button. I don't know what I hit, but I started getting a radio station in German with that squeaky radio sound in the background. I hit every button on the clock, even turned on the lamp to look at all of them, but even turning the switch to "off" didn't get rid of the German chatter. So I turned the volume all the way down and got up.And no, the part about the German radio was not part of the dream. Not unless I'm still dreaming now and only think I'm sitting here typing this.ETA: I blame time_shark because I read his cool and inventive Twitter story here just before going to bed!