Page 222 - Nuts to You - The Nutcracker Retold

Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!
Ever been caught between waking up and dreaming, twixt clear and cloudy, not knowing if you are asleep or awake? It’s a muddy, morning mess of imagining. First you think you’re awake and “something awful” is going on. Then you realize you’re asleep and just dreaming. And then you try to wake yourself up fully, which only makes the “something awful” get more awful. And so you try harder to wake up, and the very fact that you can’t wake up creates a panic so big, so awful, that you almost believe the “something awful” in your dream is really, really real, and now you are in one big, awful mess!
Well, that’s the mess the Sweeties were in. When the piping stopped, the spell began to wane, and they were caught ‘tween the dream and the seen – and unable to fully distinguish which was which. Were they awake? Or were they dreaming?
If it hadn’t been for the snap of Mother Ginger’s hoops clamping down around the Mouse Queen, and the swoosh of the trap swinging up into the air, and the crash of both the Mouse Queen and the trap hitting the ground with a
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