There’s nothing like a 2:30 a.m. wake up to foster some group bonding. Scene: I was asleep. Had been for about 2 hours. My dream was getting crazy though, because suddenly there was a HUGE ‘crack!’, to which I chose to ignore, in my dream. But then I heard voices. My roommate was asking me if I had heard that lightning strike. Girls in my mod were saying to go outside. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the high-pitched screech of a fire alarm. As we stood outside in the cold in our various forms of sleepwear (which end up only being warm when you’re snuggled up in bed,) we speculated about what happened. Nothing was on fire. I wasn’t even sure there was a fire alarm going off–we found out later that the alarms weren’t working in the 7 stack of the mods. But we were told to walk to our fire-escape area in front of the mods. Still cold. Still listening to stories… apparently the lightening strike was huge and loud. I only heard it from the distance of REM sleep. It had screwed up the fire alarm system in the mods when it hit; though we couldn’t figure out where it hit. The firemen finally showed up. We realized that had there really been a fire, only half of Warkentin Court made it out alive. And as Scott, our RD, announced that he was going to let us go back to bed, my modmate, in her alert, quick-witted state of being, proving that operant conditioning works even for a well-studied senior in college, shouted “Is there going to be cake?” (referring to the cake we had been given after a fire drill at the beginning of the year.) Though I’m jealous of the guys above us who slept through that 45 minutes of groggy cold, and I feel a bit more lethargic today due to the disruption in sleep, I am thankful for the gaggle of entertaining folks to mumble and stumble around together at 3 in the morning.