After writing yesterday about no longer remembering my dreams, this morning I remembered a chunk of the one I was having when the alarm went off.

I know there was more before the part I remember, but it was fading. In the dream, I was living in my parents’ house, in which I grew up; I was my current age, with my current life, but in the dream appeared to have been living there for some time. My parents were away on a trip, and I was supposed to mow the yard. I had a robotic lawn mower–I think such things exist, but the one in my dream reminded me somewhat of the robotic vacuum cleaner I saw in the Skymall catalog on my flight to Tucson. It was round and looked sort of like a metal trashcan lid. It was supposed to move in an ever-widening spiral.

I came outside to check on its progress, and discovered that it had done about half the yard just fine, then had gone apparently haywire. It had veered off in a straight line toward the woods, cutting a swath through several rose bushes in the process. I went looking for it, but couldn’t find it in the woods. While searching, though, I found an abandoned rusty bicycle from my youth; oddly, though it didn’t seem at all odd in the dream, of course, the spokes were picking up transmissions, and were giving me snatches of my dad’s conversation to my mom, though I can’t recall now what they were discussing.

Then I was back in Tucson, at the desert museum. There was an exhibit of creatures that live in the desert foothills, but when I stepped outside and looked at the foothills, they were simultaneously real and an abstract two-dimensional painting of the hills (in glorious shades of purple), with moving but still two-dimensional abstract representations of the various flora and fauna, like living indigenous artwork.

Roger was there with me, and we wandered through the exhibit to a picnic area. There was a bbq underway, though there was no one else present. The grill, rather than being fueled by charcoal or gas, was peanut-butter powered. Similarly, it was clear that someone had tried to fashion plates and paper sacks out of peanut butter as well, but when they discovered that didn’t work (there were vaguely plate- and sack-shaped lumps of peanut butter around the tables), they had cast them out of peanut brittle instead.

And that’s when the alarm woke me.