I am working on a local branch where the remote version of the branch has been merged after a pull request was approved. The remote version of the branch was subsequently deleted after merging. So the branch only exists locally for me.

However, I can’t get out of the branch now because when I try to git checkout main I get the error error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout: with a list of files that I don’t care about.

All variants of the solution

git add *
git stash
git pull

have failed on git pull with the error message

Your configuration specifies to merge with the ref 'refs/heads/mybranchname'
from the remote, but no such ref was fetched.

because the remote version no longer exists. I don’t want to do git clean because there are some untracked files that I care about in my local directory. Help! How do I get unstuck?