That night, Dema dreamed of the forest. In the dream, it was not as if she were in the forest, it was as if she was the forest, aware of it as all the creatures in it were aware. But there was another level of awareness in her dream, an awareness of the forest as a whole that had not been part of her original experience in the forest. It was as if she was herself being the forest in some sense. And not being Dema.

She was brought out of the dream by a faint fluttering noise in her room. Waking, she realized that there was a bat flitting around above her bed. Not just any bat. One of her bats. She felt a kind of hollowness within her body, and knew that the bat had formed out of her own body mass. It carried part of her awareness with it, so she knew what it was experiencing. Its bat-dream told it to fly off and hunt, but there was no way out of the room. 

Dema went into her own bat-dream, and encompassed the dream that was the little bat so that it became part of her body again. Her bat-dream too included the urge to fly off and hunt. She was sorely tempted to go up on the roof and assume her human-size bat form, but she was not about to hunt bugs again. Instead she went down to the kitchen and fixed herself a cup of coffee and a bagel.

The episode puzzled her, and alarmed her a bit too. She would have liked to talk to Sedna about it, but her grandmother was asleep and she didn't want to disturb her. Or upset her unduly. So she went back up to bed. On the way she stopped in the bathroom and stepped onto the scales. Her weight seemed to be about normal. 

But maybe some of that body mass was somehow foreign, belonging more to the forest dream than to her. Perhaps the insects she had eaten while being her flock of bats was not an adequate replacement for the parts of her body that had been eaten by the other bats when she was still the beetle swarm. She didn't know where this idea came from. It didn't really make sense to her. But there were things about the forest dream she didn't understand. She tried to put it out of her mind and go back to sleep.