Dreams of Animals and Gods

Lots of long, disjointed dreams...

Mark and I were travelling along a highway which was raised over a rocky crag.  I can't remember if we were at the coast, or in the woods.  It was dark.  The highway was raised a little, with concrete barriers on either side.  It might have been raining or snowing.  I think there was a cabin involved somehow, and a fifty-ish man with short grey hair in plaid who was a caretaker (the goofy, crazy/eccentric rural bachelor in the fashion of strange Scooby-Doo characters who know something).

The dream turned into a fantasy animal quest of epic proportions, with about ten clans of various animals, each with its own agenda... it went on for some time, but all I can really recall

A travelling cat (who is reminding me of our cat, Smokey) and mouse had encountered a mesmerizing... ?rat? who lived in a big city apartment.  The rat had mesmerized them into reliving a particular instant, sort of like a memory loop, and had abandoned them in a city intersection.  The cat was reliving something scary, as it was all puffed out.  The mouse's memory loop wasn't so bad, but he had to continually talk his way out of a situation of some sort.  They were rescued by go-cart driving chipmunks.  The cat managed to fit behind his chipmunk rescuer by sitting behind him, and the mouse sat next to his rescuer.  The go-carts scurried down a street.

A band of wolves slunk across a shadow valley.  They saw the fires of humans gathering in a grove for a party and closed in to attack the revelers.  Insert cries of surprise, pain, and fear here, superimposed over an artsy water-color panning montage of red flames, shifting dark tree branches, sinuous dark wolf bodies, teeth, raised arms, and shocked faces.

A 30-something woman was categorically reciting entries on various deities.  I wish I could remember what she said, because there were at least ten, and I'd never heard of them before (although they sounded familiar and typical).  I want to say one of them was a blonde dancing god that was somehow associated with the Pleiades.   This is almost certainly what I get for reading about Sappho's poem about the setting Pleiades and then stumbling into a Pinterest board featuring various gods.

Working Out:  20 minutes on the elliptical for 210 calories.  10 minutes on the rowing machine for 105 calories. 3x12x50lbs on the pec fly.  3x12x80lbs on the lat pull-down.  3x13 hanging crunches.  3x12x12lbs inclined Arnold curls with dumbbells.  3x12x40lbs on a triceps pull down.  I managed to do one pathetic chin-up and a half of another one before I went back upstairs and used the assisted chin up machine to work my way up to about 12.  I guess if I want to do unassisted pull-ups like my hero, the 60-something guy who is really in Shape, I need to push myself some more.

Writing:  After chipping away at comments I got on a magical urban fantasy family Halloween story, I managed to get paper-and-pen re-writes into a Scrivener document.  It's gotten about 700 words longer, and I'll have to check to see if it's under 5000 words or not.