  We study free string propagation in families of plane wave geometries
developing strong scale-invariant singularities in certain limits. We relate
the singular limit of the evolution for all excited string modes to that of the
center-of-mass motion (the latter existing for discrete values of the overall
plane wave profile normalization). Requiring that the entire excitation energy
of the string should be finite turns out to be quite restrictive and
essentially excludes consistent propagation across the singularity, unless
dimensionful scales are introduced at the singular locus (in an otherwise
scale-invariant space-time).
