Page 156 - Nuts to You - The Nutcracker Retold

disorientation, recognition, consternation that it was all a dream, then relaxation as we let it go.
Or so we hope.
Sometimes this goes on all night – making you wish you’d never eaten that cold pizza and cookie-dough ice cream as a bedtime snack. And after the third or fourth time waking up in a cold sweat – you’re likely to hurl the empty ice cream carton across the room and swear off the cookie dough and promise to switch to the lite plain vanilla AND to quit the late-night sneaking of snacks from the kitchen.
Or so your mother hopes.
Then there’s the other kind of dream. The worst of the worst of the worst. If you’ve ever had one – you know what I mean. The “other” is the dream that won’t let you wake up, or shall I say, wake fully. It’s the type of dream where you dream you wake up and a dark figure is at the foot of your bed and he’s reaching out to drag you from the bed and – and the worst part is that you know this is a dream, so you tell yourself to wake up! He’s reaching out to grab your foot and drag you away!
“Wake up!” you yell to yourself – but you don’t wake up! Then you realize you can’t move – you’re frozen in bed. You know you’re dreaming, you can’t move and HE’S coming at you all the time. You struggle to just move your foot away from his hand and you can’t do it! THEN you realize – you can’t wake up, and the worst thing that could happen has happened. You can feel the clammy, scaly hand pulling on your foot – you try to scream out – but you can’t. You try to wake – and you can’t. And he begins to pull you off your bed. Then the true horror hits you –
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