It wasn’t that the dream itself was so scary. When we wake up, we often find that our worst nightmares are really not so intensely frightening as we had thought when we were asleep. It was more that the dream was so vivid. It had felt so real. It was one of those dreams where you wake up wondering, wait a minute, what am doing here?

She gently fingers the plaid flannel of her bedsheets, still in that shocked state between dreaming and being awake. She is a little bit dizzy, her breathing a little bit jagged.

“Just a dream,” she whispers softly, for only her own ears to hear. “Just a dream.”

The luminous red letters on the digital clock she keeps by her bed read 1:07. I still have time to go back to sleep, she thinks drowsily, letting her eyes fall shut. But as soon as she drifts into dreamland, for the second time tonight, the nightmare returns.

Tossing, turning, the dream controls her body in a way she did not think was possible. A scream erupts from her throat, waking her; her eyelids flutter open.