Now, you are not going to believe this, but when you got to the part about looking down and seeing the mismatched shoes or slippers or whatever they were...
That instantly brought back a segment in a long weird dream I had last night, about which pair of shoes I should be putting on for whatever I was doing. And I was looking down at them wondering if, say, the other pair might be less wide and clunky looking. And one pair wasn't a regular shoe, but something like a slip-on thing you'd use to protect shoes from the rain.