She woke from a horrible dream, sweaty and tangled in bedding.
She lay there breathing heavily. She looked at the clock. The alarm wouldn’t go off for over half-an-hour, so she could lay there, clawing it all back. It was vivid in her mind. It was all about falling, but never quite hitting the ground; and it was repetitive, very much so. She knew where she was in the dream. It was a picnic spot she would go to with the family before she moved out. It was a great, grassy area near the sea. Part of the grounds had been fenced off because the cliff edge was deemed to be unsafe. Somehow, she was there, passed the fencing, walking along the edge when it collapsed under her feet. She was falling down the cliff face. Falling, that is until she managed to wildly lash out and grab a flimsy tree root coming through the rock face.
She sighed heavily as she lay there having a clear picture of that moment in the dream. The feeling of relief. The terror she had felt slowly subsiding. The feeling of hope, of rescue, of climbing back up. Then, the first of the repeated events. The root began to come away from the crevice and she was losing her grip at the same time. It was that ghastly moment that would be repeated throughout the nightmare. Would the root come loose or would it slip through her fingers? Each time she actually lost her grip. Each time she began falling again. Each time she would grab hold of a root to stop her fall, but every time this happened, it was the same root! The very same root, over and over…
She was slowly coming out of it all. Gradually coming back to the real world and feeling a lot better. In fact, she must have dozed off for a while, because the alarm woke her. She lay there again, thinking about the dreadful night she’d had. This time she was able to let it all go a lot quicker. Her mind turned to the things that she had to do today; the bit of shopping that she must remember to do when she leaves work later. This was going through her mind as she pushed the covers away and swung her legs out. She sat on the edge of the bed massaging her face for a while. She was still shaking the nasty incident off when she became aware of something odd under her feet. She looked down and saw the root!
She began to scream.
