Page 155 - Nuts to You - The Nutcracker Retold

Cold Showers and Rude Awakenings
Fortunately, it’s the scariest part of nightmares that wake you up the moment before the culmination of what you fear might happen – happens. We wake up before we hit the ground, after we’ve fallen off the cliff, before the train hits us as it’s roaring down the tracks, and before the monster reaches out and grabs us as we run for our lives. We wake up – with a start and in a cold sweat, to be sure – but we wake up, look around wildly, and see we’re safe in bed – and in danger, only of being strangled by the sheets that we’ve tossed about in our dreams. We then either high-tail it out of our rooms in search of human companionship, or we lie on our backs, breathing hard until we calm down. Then we uneasily laugh at our fears, switch on the light just in case, then eventually fall back asleep with the light blazing on our eyelids and helping us to dream of sunlit beaches and apple orchards.
Or so we hope.
Sometimes, the nightmares come back – and we must start the process all over again. Wake up, wild moment of
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