I watched
Jurassic Park III last night. I am assuming that's why I had the sort of
dream that I did. The dream doesn't have anything to do with the
plot of the movie, though... no
spoilers here.
I don't remember many of the surrounding details, like where I was in the beginning and the other parts of my dream. I do remember the adrenaline-rushing parts, or most of them.
My friend Breana was with me, although she wasn't the same person as my real-life friend by that name. We were in some sort of old wooden shed, much more like the old sheds on my father's farm than any of the Jurassic Park compounds. We were being chased by an unnaturally bright green alligator-dragon-thing. It had a sort of snapping alligator head with the requisite sharp teeth, and beside that one fist... a very strange fist. The fingers were tipped with short claws, and the thumb was coiled against the clenched fingers. The fist was small, but dripping with an acidic poison. At one point in the dream, Breana and I were standing on green crusty sand across a little moat from the wooden shed, dodging poison flung at us.
Then at some point the thing was distracted, and we dived into the moat. We made it to a wooden platform, then dived underwater into a corridor. Swimming was very, very easy... one stroke would propel us a long way. We were turning down blind corridors, and at one point I remember having to wait underwater with my eyes open, waiting for the creature to swim past. Unfortunately, I was respirationally incontinent and my bubbles alerted the thing to my presence. It was distracted by something or Breana, or both, and I waited underwater for longer than I should have been able to before we made another escape.
The whole thing was a lot more exciting than it sounds... it was as exciting as the movie, any of the three movies, although I had no more of a sense of danger than I had had while watching the movies. At some point the dodge-and-flee tactics brought us out of the wooden shed maze and across some dirt into a sort of town. The monster took on human form (which looked a bit like those creatures shown in the previews of The Ghosts of Mars, which was incidentally not previewed before JPIII) and when we climbed under this wooden roof covering metal tanks (the kind that hold liquid or gas) on a metal framework (which incidentally, is something we have here at the farm) he could not reach us. It was the same sort of situation with the Headless Horseman and the church in Sleepy Hollow, but there was no real reason why this certain spot was safe in my dream.
The monster-man tried to get some big buff peasant man to use the monster-man's sword to knock us out from underneath the roof, but the peasant took the sword and gave it to us, and we killed the monster-man with it. I think Breana actually did that part.
Later, we were somewhere talking about our adventures, and the experience turned into having been a video game. We repeated it, although this time in a sort of fast forward, without worries because we knew what was going to happen.
This was not a nightmare. Nowhere in it did I experience the sheer terror that I felt so often as a child when the room was too dark. The fear I felt was a sort of adrenaline-rush, the kind I know from video games and movies and books. Still, I watched the original Jurassic Park in the theatre, and my family owns that and The Lost World on video, which I have seen repeatedly. Jurassic Park III is a whole new experience... one effective enough to invade even my dreams.