I was sitting at my desk in my classroom where I taught High School English and was just getting ready to stand up and teach the lesson of the day and the students were sitting at their desks in rows and getting ready to listen when two tall dark figures like men in maybe black leather armor with helmets so you couldn’t see their faces but probably looked mean like aliens in every movie and they had guns and were menacing us so I knew they were aliens and I half stood up because they were pointing their guns in my direction and I all of a sudden remembered the panic button under my desk that I had forgotten about years ago when they put it in because of school integration and some people thought there would be riots but there weren’t and the button used to be red and maybe still was but I hadn’t noticed it for years. And it probably had a wire that went under the desk and down the desk leg into the floor and over to the offices where it would go off, and I had no idea if it still worked or if it ever did but I pushed it anyway just in case.

And the Menace Men looked like they meant business and gestured their guns at me very unfriendly and said something like, “We’re coming to get you,” or “We’re taking you with us,” and I sized up the situation and I knew the jig was up and I knew it was because I had the biggest brain in the galaxy and they needed me to fix some machine that was nefarious so they could take over everybody, and I stood up the rest of the way.

And then our School Security People came to the doorway out of the hallway, so I guess the panic button worked, and one was the janitor just there to help out, and the other one was our School Security Guard who had a gun because all over the country they were trying to get all the School Security Guards to have guns because students kept bringing guns to school that they shouldn’t have and shot everybody they could, which is why one of the girls in my class was under her desk and grabbing her phone which you weren’t supposed to bring to school but she’d hidden it in her purse because you know how girls are with their purses and she was whispering something that sounded like “911” and our School Security Guard sized up the situation and went for his gun to unsnap the holster and the two big alien Menace Men turned at the same time and shot him.

So I grabbed the chair by my desk where students would come up to conference about their papers and discuss grades and I swung it at the nearest Menace Man and my students stopped being immobile and jumped on the other one even though he was bigger but there were so many of them and they brought him down and some came to help me bring the other one down for extra credit. And one of my students got the alien’s gun and shot him and there was black blood coming out so we knew for sure he was an alien so the student shot him some more and shot the other one on my side that I had hit with the chair and there was more black blood almost all over so we ran to the window and looked out the blinds. And there were more alien men standing all around the school holding guns and menacing us and waiting for someone to give the word and tell them what to do so we ran back and grabbed the guns of the aliens lying on the floor in the doorway and grabbed the gun of our Security Guard after unsnapping his holster and we ran to the back door at the end of the hallway because we knew that’s where they would be coming in, and they were, two more, and we shot them and grabbed their guns and went to the door and closed it and barred it as best we could and ran to the window to look through the blinds where we saw police cars driving up from 911 and looking surprised because nobody had told them and they jumped out and sized up the situation and grabbed their guns and there was a lot of shooting on both sides and we heard a helicopter and looked up and there was the big flat bottom of a space ship hovering down closer and menacing us and it was getting darker
and I decided this was a dream like a nightmare and I didn’t like the way it was going and I decided I’d better wake up.

And I did.

And there was my Daughter rushed in and trying to calm me down because she sized up the situation and I had probably yelled out in my sleep something like “No! No!”

And she said, “We better not watch those movies just before going to bed.”
And I agreed with her.