Excersise and Dreams

I don't know if it was that last session at the gym without my gloves or if it's the rainy weather, but my hands have been achey the last few days.  Oh well, at least I can type.   (Hand to brow)  Despite the pain, I managed to get to the gym Tuesday:  120 calories on the rowing machine in about 15 minutes (I think).  Someone was on the elipitical machine I like, so I went downstairs and did 3X12x60lbs on the pec-fly, 3X13X70lbs on the lat-pulldown, 3X13 Roman chair curl-ups, 3X12X35lbs barbell curl-ups, followed by 2X8X35lb barbell reverse-pull-ups.

---

Alice-in-Wonderland type dreams Tuesday night:  

In one scene -- which I man have dreamed last -- I was a magical Alice... or at least I was a long haired blonde girl in a blue dress with a white apron.  A bunch of us, including Albus Dumbeldore, stood in a dark hall, or arch-lined cloister.  The vast (dance?) floor was a black and white checkerboard stretching in all directions.  A horde of red dragons circled under the hidden ceiling, coming closer and closer to the floor.  

I stepped away from the crowd and into the middle of the checkerboard and said, "I wish to become a checker."  I shrank to a red queen and then further into a small hocky-puck sized disk.  For some reason the dragons couldn't touch me when I was in this inanimate form, they circled lower, but their power was checked and they could do no more damage.

Dumbledore picked up an art deco statuette of Tinker-Bell (or a similar pixie), and said, "Pixie, retrieve our friend."  The statuette glowed firefly green, became a living pixie, who then flitted over (with tinkling bells and lots of "la-la-la's") to where I was still a small checker.  She picked me up and brought me back, where I was somehow restored to my proper Alice-in-Wonderland form (either by the Pixie or else by Dumbledore).  I have a sense that everyone found the la-la-la's cloying.

Scene Two:  I was a kind of Slappy the Squirell character, and along with a bird and possibly the Pixie, we were keeping barely one-step-ahead of a suburban mom--posibily a nicer version of Lois Cranston from "Malcom in the Middle"  There was something about a loft in the house, hiding a birdhouse (with the help of the Mom's kids).  I remember the day was bright with green lawns and blue, cloudless skies.  I think I lived in a telephone pole when I wasn't invading the Mom's house.

Scene Three:  Mark and the Child and I were camping.  The segment started out in a cold field on a dark, cold morning.  We decamped with a bunch of other folks and left in a white truck or VW Van (the configuration changed during the dream).  By the end of the dream, we were looking for a small object that had fallen between the car seats and into the bed of the vehicle.  (I have a sense of the car seats being simultaneously up for passengers and down to accommodate camping supplies.)  The ?toy? ?pen? ?thing? had fallen into the chassis -- which was suddenly the empty bed of a VW Van turned into a pickup, and was threatening to fall through wheel holes and onto the highway.

Scene Four:  After a road drip (possibly the one in scene three), we wound up at an abandoned or closed theme park, sort of like The Enchanted Forest.   A bunch of us got onto a train ride, with regular sized passenger cars.  As we pulled away I saw four Victorian business men peering through a large picture window in a house at us.  There was a sense that they knew we were on site and would chase after us.

The train went something like sixty feet and stopped at a victorian spa.  I was thinking that we should keep going, but everyone wanted to take a hot soak or sauna, so we got out.  There was lots of marble and tiled floors... and I suppose it looked like Bath might have, with lots of Georgian curlicues in the carved portals, and extra pillars, and decorative excess.

Our sizes became much more plastic, and we became smaller or larger as hallways shrank or expanded.  I remember looking through a keyhole at a bath interior, and shrinking through it to get to the hot waters on the other side.  At another point I wanted to get out quickly -- possibly the Victorian businessmen had caught up with us -- and I pressed my face against a tiled, circular opening about the size of a quarter while I waited for my body to shrink so that the hole would become a tunnel I could get through.