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She never stops hoping for a rescue.
Even when they turn off all the lights in her cell so she can't even find the bucket in the corner to piss in, even when the lights are kept on at top brightness for days so she can't sleep because of the relentless pressure on her eyes, even when she feels their fists or their electrodes or their knives, she keeps believing in freedom. Some people in the cells, they don't believe anymore, maybe because they've never had it, but she remembers, and so she believes.
They inject her with trackerjacker venom, and she sees terrible things. Her mother, choking on her own vomit during a party. Children with axes in their brains or spears in their sides coming after her with bloodied weapons. It's in the aftermath of one of these injections that she realizes exactly how terrible the Games are, how frightening they must be to the children who are also hunted down and killed. She's sure that the torturers didn't mean for her to have this realization, and she clings to it, the only real thing from the drugs.
When Haymitch (and rescue) arrives, she thinks it's another dream.