It was several years in the future, Sara and I were making another baby, and I wore glasses. Maybe we had other children, or maybe I was counting myself as a child. We were taking turns doing night shifts with the kid(s). I had switched to contact lenses recently and was still getting used to them and sometimes switched back to my glasses, occasionally getting my kids' or Sara's hair stuck in them.

And I had a side project. You would think that I wouldn't have time for a side project, but I was able to get away with it because it involved time travel. I had inherited the time machine from Doc Brown. It was the only one that existed, as far as I knew, which was good because, while I was careful not to do anything that would mess with the timeline, others might not be. So I was a bit secretive about these activities. Sara asked me one day "how much time do you spend doing this stuff?", and I thought about it a second and said "I spend days at a time in parallel universes. I might be a year older relative to you than I would be otherwise."

"Parallel universes" wasn't exactly what it was. Sometimes I went to isolated bubble universes, just to give myself time to relax or work on projects without having to spend the time in everyone else's world. Other times I time-travelled within our universe, but since I was careful not to change anything, the effect was indistinguishable from if those were actually different universes, either branched off from my 'home' one or completely separate from it and just happening to contain people and places that I recognized. At least that was true until one day I messed up and arrived a couple of days earlier than I had left.

This situation was complicated by the fact that I had brought two cats and one 8-year-old Marilla with me, and one of the first things that happened was that Marilla met her 2-days-younger self at the computer desk at the bottom of my parents' stairs. Obviously the older one had been in on the whole Dad-has-a-time-machine thing, but now, having interacted with the younger one, we risked creating some kind of paradox, which I did not want to deal with. So the three of us went and hid in a back corner of the basement to discuss the situation and figure out how to make sure that (A) things would work out so as to avoid a paradox, and (B) the knowledge that I had a time machine didn't leave the group, because this was confusing enough with just us doing it. Don't need Biff going around messing things up, or even good-intentioned people zooming around and tying incomprehensible knots in the metaverse like a bunch of programmers haphazardly merging and rebasing each others' Git histories.

A bunch of complicated scheming followed. There was a montage of the cats training to fight by fighting each other near a cliff while I tried to keep them from actually getting hurt, either by clawing each other too hard or by falling off the cliff.

One of the things that had to happen was that I had to go to a post office which was also a military base and, like, get a key, or plant some fake information there, or something. The task should be less impossible than such a task would normally be owing to our prescience of the comings and goings of the people who worked there. But it would require doing some things almost perfectly, and I was nervous about it, and the dream ended before the mission was complete.

As I receded from the post office act I was thinking of the music from Crystalis that plays in the cave to the northwest of Leaf. It seemed appropriate to the situation.