I've just remembered that I dreamt an entire day out with my family and a visitor that we had from India!

We were at a collection of large white buildings spread out sparsely on a very green grassy hill, like a remote but large university campus, and we entered a building that was little more than a wide entrance carved into the hillside, with steps leading down to an underground lab that was having an open day. Inside it was white and tiled, a little like the aesthetic of Portal.

There was a demonstration of a vast chemical reaction along one wall - the kind of chemistry setup that you would expect to find in Tom and Jerry, a vast tangled array of weirdly-shaped glass tubes and bulbs that was about four feet high by ten feet wide. The demonstrator in a white lab coat on the left side of the arrangement was announcing that he was pouring sulphuric acid together with hydrochloric acid into the receptable, saying that "normally we wouldn't do this" but that it was good for the tours. Having done that, though, he couldn't get the reaction started despite a couple of fiery sparks in the first bulb along the network, and people began to drift away, muttering that the place's tours actually being a bit rubbish and never living up to what they were supposed to be.

The next thing that someone brought out was a collection of the creatures that they were creating in the lab, and put a bowl of them on the table - a collection of large insects and brightly coloured wriggling mollusc-things with what looked like unnatural bite marks in them. This disturbed me so much that I excused myself and then turned and ran back up to the surface again - I had been looking for an excuse to leave for some time anyway but this genuinely scared me off.

I went with my brother to the arcade nearby, which was massive and took up a large amount of a building in which a family pub was also situated. Down a few corridors at the back, there were a collection of DDR machines, a mixture of real titles and ones I'd never seen before - Dancing Stage Fusion, DDR Extreme Aqua, and another Dancing Stage F- title that was meant to be the sequel to Fusion... not all of them had dance pads in front of them, and some were butted up against other machines so that there wasn't even any room for them (but a different machine in Japanese was set up so that you had to wave your hands about to "dance" instead of using your feet).

One of them had no dance pad but a foot-tall, four-foot-square glass cabinet in front of it at waist height in which two original Playstation controllers were sitting. In this dream universe, the Playstation Move was a little remote control that you held in your hand, and could make the real controllers get up and walk on their handle-stalks, and you could play miniature DDR with them. Mine was nearly out of batteries so we had to manoeuvre it over to the charging station (where it lay down and blinked a light at you) before I could get it to groggily take part.

There was also some dreadfully buggy Bomberman action-adventure Zelda game thing, but it was near unplayable. By now the entire party had come together again and for some reason we didn't have any shoes, so I was asked to go and get them from the car. I asked them all what size of shoes they were, and they all laughed replying that it didn't matter because their shoes were all in the car anyway. This offended me greatly and I stomped off out the fire exit at the back, then spent ages looking for the car in a field of sheep before remembering that I was already driving it.

My mother called me to apologize by playing a song down the phone at me - I can't remember if it was a real one, whether I'd just made it up, or any possible relevance to the dream at all. We arranged to meet back up again in the front garden of our hotel, which was only accessible by the back door on the side of the building - a short U-shaped corridor took me around and back outside again to a walled garden with an observatory-style domed glass roof.

After that I went back to the underground lab, where warning lights were flashing and they were announcing urgently that all visitors had to leave because they were closing soon. Despite the obvious bad situation, I slipped in past the security checks to use the toilet - a vast orchard of square metallic urinals, where the surfaces were treated with a chemical so that when they were... utilized, the liquid turned bright opaque colours of blue and yellow on its way to the drain. A six-year-old beside me was watching me intently and making me very uncomfortable.

Then I turned around and used the sink, which was in a mad setup much like the rest of the building - I waved my hands in front of it, a spigot squirted water directly into my face and I woke up at 5am.

My parents are visiting in a couple of weeks - I hope that the real days out go better than that.