why so much plaid? and why are my dreams always so long and detailed?

I had a between-snooze-function dream this morning that had several threads.

The first thread involved trying to juggle the care of two dogs (to anyone who's talked to me lately, that won't come as a surprise since it's a real-life issue). We were living in a very spartan mid-century concrete house with a fenced yard that seemed divided into several parts, most of which I hadn't been in. We were discussing how to sufficiently exercise the dogs when I remembered that my husband had bought a really nice black vintage-style bike that was parked in the communal parking area, and I suggested that we ride bikes with the dogs so they could run and get more exercise. There was a back-and-forth on whether he had actually bought a bike and then forgotten about it, and whether, if so, the black bike in the parking lot was the one he had bought and not someone else's.

Then, inside the house, my sister and husband were doing an experiment on the effectiveness of Google. They chose as their subject a guy we know who has gone by several different names in his life, and they were comparing the results coming up for each name. One of the results was a video montage of his life, of the sort that people show at graduations and funerals. I only really remember two snippets of it. In the first he was about 12, at a Bar Mitzvah type occasion, wearing a red-and-green plaid jacket and matching plaid bowtie and looking very young and happy. In the other snippet he was adult, very hirsute (bushy hair and beard), and holding forth on some controversial subject in front of a group of people. In this one he was also wearing a loud plaid jacket and an unmatching also-loud plaid scarf. I had the impression that this bit of video was not something that should be readily available and that he might get himself into some sort of Homeland-Security-related trouble over it, not least because the bushy beard made him look like a candidate for profiling.

As we were looking at this video the surroundings changed and we were suddenly in a Target-like clothing store (still at a desk looking at the computer). The store also housed the office where I work, with people's desks mixed in here and there with the merchandise. My coworkers were walking back and forth purposefully, getting engineering-related things done, and my boss had a little office off to the side, the sort that you would imagine the manager of a small store having.

In the dream (and above all in real life), it was time for me to get ready to go to work, but I was reluctant to do the preparatory rituals and I wanted to watch the video of the plaid-clad friend with earphones so I could actually hear what he was going on about. So I went into my boss's office and told him I'd like to take a couple of hours of sick time and come to work later, if that was okay. He readily agreed, and I puttered around the store for a while, most notably running laps back and forth between the racks with the feeling that I was getting some really good exercise [on later reflection I realized that people were giving me really annoyed looks].

Around this time (still in the store) I met a girl with a really interesting sweater she had knitted. It was big and cozy, with a fair-isle pattern over most of it. The sleeves were kind of big and gathered on the shoulders and partway down the front, and she had very cleverly incorporated pockets into the side seams so she could stow away her hands. I really liked the idea and wanted to make a similar one for myself. I also suddenly had a vision of a completely different type of sweater, very much like this one. On thinking about it, the stitch pattern that was in this sweater wouldn't even be possible, but it was very pretty.