I dream in 2.35:1

I had a dream last night that was totally crazy. I will tell you the details of the dream in the order that I remember them occurring in the dream.

For starters, I lived in a hidden apartment in the back of an elevator shaft. I lived there with my parents and younger brother (note: they were not my real parents, and I do not have a younger brother). It was sort of like a hidey-hole, with a few smaller rooms and a really low ceiling. The building that the apartment was in was some sort of retail store on the ground floor, with apartments on the upper floors. There was a girl on one of the upper floors that my younger brother had a crush on. We would see her near the elevator and I would rib him about it. And then we would wait for the elevator to go by and then climb down into the shaft and open the doors to your apartment. It was bizarre.

Anyway, at one point in the dream I went out of the apartment and out into the store and got geared up to go out and be a police officer, because apparently I was a police officer, and the police headquarters was a part of this store. I put on all of this bulky stuff that made me twice as tall and muscly as I really was in the dream, so that I sort of looked like a really awkward-moving body builder. And then I went out in search of drug dealers and such to bust up.

At this point, the dreaming me realized that the dream-world me was in some weird variation of the plot of The Terminator. Don't ask me what made me realize this, because obviously what I've just described has nothing to do with The Terminator at all, but I just knew that's what was going to happen: I was going to go out and encounter this unstoppable killing machine that looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger. And that is exactly what happened. I was out busting up drug dealers and such in my mecha-esque gear when I encountered a Terminator. Well, I didn't encounter it, but I knew it was there and that it was coming for me. I spent the next 20 minutes or so running and trying to find a hiding place from this thing. The number of dreams that I have in which I am running and hiding from scary things is inordinately high (I once had a dream that The Joker was chasing me through Gotham for one reason or another - the last thing I remember about that dream is hiding in the corner of a friend's apartment while The Joker slaughters people looking for me. It was traumatic). Does anyone know if this is some sort of a common dream scenario?

Anyway. At one point I ditched the weird techie gear I was wearing and, somehow eluding the Terminator, I took off back to the police headquarters/big box store. Somehow on the way back there I managed to interview witnesses who had seen the Terminator and identified what it was wearing and what it looked like (it was wearing cowboy boots and jeans, among other things that I don't remember exactly). I went to the dispatch and asked her to patch me through to my partner and fellow lawpeople so that I could let them know to be on the lookout for the Terminator, and meanwhile as I'm there I'm still hiding from this thing because who knows if it's coming for me. Then, as I'm hiding, these crime boss-looking guys come in in their fancy suits and well-kept hair and what-not, and they drop a bundle of money on the desk in front of the dispatch (who is now apparently my boss) and tell her that this is a payoff of $600,000 so that they can do whatever they want. My boss starts to protest this when the Terminator arrives. He shoots the crime bosses and I take off running again, leaving my boss to who knows what terrible fate.

I run home. The apartment I live in is basically a hole in the wall behind an elevator. Who would think to look there? Certainly not the Terminator, I think, or at least I hope. So I get to the apartment and I seal up the entrance (which is basically a set of sliding elevator doors that meet in the middle) and I sit there next to it and I'm shaking. My family is there and they're freaking out and I don't remember if I tell them anything or not but the whole thing is very tense. And then something starts pounding on the door. The Terminator manages to bust a fist through the door. And that's when I woke up.

Seriously. What the hell? I haven't watched or even really thought about a Terminator movie since Salvation came out last Summer, and this dream bore more of a resemblance to the original Terminator movie than that one. It was like some weird cross between The Terminator and RoboCop. My favorite part was definitely the apartment in the back of the elevator shaft, though. That was pretty weird.

So what does it mean? Maybe I just watch too many movies.