We will present a framework for describing the asymptotic behavior of high-level exceedances for stationary time series and random fields whose finite-dimensional distributions are regularly varying and whose exceedances occur in clusters. The main tools are the theory of point processes and the notion of the so-called tail process. The latter allows one to fully describe the asymptotic distribution of the extremal clusters using the language of standard Palm theory. We will illustrate the general theory on a couple of time series and random field models.