to awake to the reality
- idiom
:
despertar a la realidad
- After months of denial, she finally awoke to the reality that she needed help with her addiction.
Examples
-
He awoke to the reality of the financial crisis when he saw the empty store shelves.
-
That night, even those residents who had blinkered themselves against Alzheimer's awoke to the reality of what Alzheimer's was and how it tore down men like Muley Duggan to the point of utter despair.
Fiction book (1994) -
The team's poor performance in the last game made the coach awake to the reality that changes were necessary.
Synonyms
∞
1.1
To suddenly understand something you did not know before
705
1.4
To be fully aware that something is true or happening
55
5.0
To understand something important and change for the better
31
3.0
To find out what really happened
30
4.1
Accept the truth about a difficult situation
16
3.7
Accept real facts even when they are painful
16
7.1
To learn the true facts after not knowing them
7
7.0
To understand someone tricked you and become more careful
3
7.3
Realize an unpleasant truth and stop ignoring it
Antonyms
How Aware
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase's meaning is directly compositional: 'awake' (become conscious/aware) combined with the prepositional direction 'to' plus 'reality' (the actual situation) yields 'become aware of the reality.' This pattern (become aware of X) is common and cross-linguistically transparent, so a B1 learner who knows the constituent words can readily infer the meaning.
Etymology
Awake to the reality uses the simple image of waking up: someone opens their eyes and suddenly sees the reality after being 'asleep' to it before. So, to be awake to the reality means 'to become aware of the truth or the real situation'.