A very late night.

Please take a moment to look at the timestamp on this post.

There, you've looked right? No, your eyes are not deceiving you. It is 2 AM here in Arizona.

It has been a long time since my interactions with children have lead to serious nightmares. However, I find that nightmares where my students are involved are usually the most terror filled, though action-wise, they are very tame.

Take the last one I had. It was when I was living with my sister in Telluride. I worked at a summer camp with K-2nd graders. One of the kids (we'll call him T) was the main character in this dream. In Telluride they have gondolas that take us from the town of Telluride up to the town of Mountain Village. Rockies (the center I worked at) would sometimes take the kids on field trips up there. The Gondolas were free, but sometimes we had more kids then we had teachers. Each Gondola held eight people. With 20 kids and 3 teachers, we needed four Gondolas. When this happened we would pick the three most responsible 2nd graders and place them in the third gondola. That way when they reached the top they'd be reunited with the teachers already there.

In this dream however, T managed to get separated from the group and put in the gondola going back down the mountain. That was it. But I lost hours of sleep.

Tonights horror? Lockdown drills. A thousand questions spin in my head. It's scheduled for 3:00. My class is usually moving between class and specials at 3:00. Do I keep them? Do we rush into the classroom of the nearest teacher? Do I stay with them at specials? What do I do? What if this was a real lockdown? What would the procedure be then?

I know it is useless to worry about this at this time of night, but my nightmare played out with each possibility happening and the consequences playing out. None of them were wonderful. Most were psychologically scary.

My place in this Adventure in Learning? Scared, and very, very tired.