Today I woke up with theme from "Jurassic Park" movies in my head. No idea why, but it made me reminisce a bit.
When I was a kid I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I had lots of books about them (with picture, obviously), went to some of the museum in Moscow, that had appropriate expositions (like Paleontologi Museum or Darwin's Museum), had lots of stickers and even hand-made POGs, that I did from LEGO card-board and stickers with dinosaurs. Surprisingly, I do not remember whether the obsession came from watching the 1st "Jurassic Park" movie or if I watched that after I got the obsession, but, yeah, I watched the 1st and 2nd movies a lot, since I had them on VHS (makes me feel old knowing what that is).
BTW, speaking of LEGO: I once created a huge... Truck, I guess, that was inspired by the trucks from the 2nd movie. LEGO has (or at least had) those frames specifically for cars, so I used those, extended them to make make them wider (I think about 4 figurines wide, plus walls) and, essentially, built almost like houses on them. They were high enough for LEGO figurines to be able to stand inside, they had computers, tables, chairs and whatnot. The colors were all over the place, since I had to use whatever blocks I had, but it did not stop it from being a mammoth made of several segments and at least 30cm in total length.
I also had a tabletop game called "Охота на динозавров в затерянном мире", which roughly translates into "Dinosaurs' Hunting in Lost World". No idea if there was an international release, but some kind soul has scanned the original and uploaded it here(it's safe, just an archive with .tiff files). It was like light monopoly with dinosaurs' hunting, and it was the game for me, whenever someone visited.
Surprisingly, dinosaurs were also a source of a nightmare which I saw when I was about 4, maybe 5, and pieces of which I still remember, because it was the first dream, in which I died.
There was a forest, almost like an Amazonian one: lots of greenery, which was very vivid, and lots of humidity and flying insects. I think I was searching for some lab in there, when a pack of velociraptors decided to snack on me. I ran through the forest, and there was like a hole, a crater perhaps, where a huge, but vastly derelict and rusted dome was. Under that dome there were some buildings, I am assuming the lab in question.
I ran towards the dome along some serpentine-like path, still being chased by raptors. How they have not caught up with me is a mystery, but... It was a dream, so let's roll with it. At some point I got into a place near the dome's edge, which turned out to be a blind-end, since there were buildings to the left and the right. There were some gaps, but I think they were too narrow.
This was an opportunity for the raptors to finally catch up with me. I certainly was not Chris Pratt (did not even know of him at the time), so had no way of calming them down. Thus one of them walked up to me and sliced my belly open. Surprisingly I did not feel the cut itself (which can happen when you are dealing with something very sharp, but obviously claws can't be that sharp), but I did feel the weight of my guts falling out and blood flowing down my pants. I keeled over, and then there was a hit at the back of my head, probably the raptor tapping its claw at the back of my skull.
And then I woke up.
To this day this one of the most vivid dreams I ever had. Yes, portions of the dream are hazy or even completely forgotten now (it was quite a bit longer, than described above), but what I felt during my in-dream death - those are clear as day.
A very interesting way of familiarization with death, if I do say so myself. Although, it's possible, that by that time I already experienced clinical death. I believe both events were very close to each other on the timeline, but you know how childhood memories work: it gets easily jumbled up. Besides, my clinical death is a story for another time. Maybe.
