In which the after-effects of her forest dream 
send Dema back to the North Woods.

He had been asleep for a thousand years. In his sleep, he dreamed, and his dream was the life of the forest. 

It had long been a peaceful dream, but recently the dream had been disturbed. He was not much aware of how long he had slept, or when the disturbance had begun. In his dream there was no time, because for him there was no past, no future, only an ever-changing now that, for all the endless cycles of change, was yet changeless. 

Season followed season, and year followed year, and each one was like the last, was to him a repetition of the last, variations on an eternal theme. His only purpose was to preserve the essence of that theme, so that he could dream on undisturbed. 

For many cycles his dream had been serene. There had been men who were part of the dream, part of the forest, part of the cycle of death and renewal that was the life of the forest. But lately other men had come, men of a different dream, men who refused to become part of the forest dream. Instead they had upset the dream, taken the oldest trees, cut them down and taken them away, and with them their essence, the essence of the forest, was taken from him as well.

Then these men were gone, and he was left with a dream that had profoundly changed, because many of those trees had been part of the dream from the beginning, had taught him the dream, and dreamed it with him. But the dream was a dream of change and renewal, and so it was that some of the essence of the trees remained, and seedlings sprouted. He sheltered them, and protected them, so that although their tender shoots fed the rabbit and deer and other animals of the forest, the seedlings grew and became new trees, and the forest dream remained.  

Dema Culver was at home, telling her family about the forest dream.

"It's a little scary when I think about it now," she said, "But at the time it was just peaceful, because I was so deep in the dream. My body kept shifting into the form of one forest creature after another, wherever the dream happened to wander. I didn't need to focus on them, to get familiar with them first, because the forest dream itself was already deeply familiar with all of them.

"I was a tree for the longest time, with roots and leaves and everything. That might be the scariest part, because there is really no sense of time in the forest dream, and I could easily still be there. But somehow the dream had led me to a place right at the edge of a marijuana plot. When men came to harvest it, I knew it, and my Lamia nature awoke and wanted to deal with them.

"But I couldn't shift fast enough. I was too mixed up in the forest dream, with all its variety, to come out of it and just be myself, or the Lamia. When I tried, my snake dream came back, but so did my bat dream and my fish dream, and I ended up stuck with such odd parts of each that I could barely move."

"Is that when you went all gooey again?" her sister Kore asked.

"Yeah. I stopped trying to go anywhere, and instead I was just trying to get rid of these dreams I didn't want. Bad idea. My body lost all sense of form and was melting into the ground."

"And that's how you found the beetles." 

"Sort of. There was a nest of them under me, and when I realized I needed something in the forest dream to shift my goo into, theirs was the first dream I found."

"So you turned into beetles. How many? Hundreds?" 

"More like thousands. Turns out that when there are too many beetles in an area, they fly off in a swarm to find a new home. And I was way too many beetles for that little colony!"

"So you flew all the way home as a swarm of beetles?" her mother Naga's eyebrows climbed an inch or two up her forehead.

"That was the plan. But then I started getting eaten by a flock of bats."

This time it was her grandmother Sedna's eyebrows that shot up, but she didn't say anything.

"That might have been the end of me. The beetles weren't worried. It isn't in them to worry. The bats never eat all of them, so the ones that were left would have gone to ground and started a new colony somewhere if I'd let them. With maybe enough of me left to make my right leg or something.

"I don't know what would have happened if I didn't already have a bat familiar. But I did, so I sort of automatically shifted from the swarm of beetles into a flock of bats. I flew off with the bats that had been eating me, and together we ate a bunch of other bugs.

"I even roosted with the bats in their cave the next day, but that night I flew my flock on home. And here I am."

"And now you have a whole forest full of creatures you can shift into. Including flocks of bats and swarms of beetles! Cool!" said Kore.

"I don't know how easy it would be, and I'm not about to try it. But I do still have a link to the forest dream. I used it to get the goods on the bad guys."

Sedna looked pensive, and Dema asked, "What is it, Grandma?"

"I'm recalling stories of shamans that walked off into the forest and didn't come back. I suspect they went deep into the forest dream the way you did, and never came out of it."

"But Dema did," said Kore, "Dema always comes out of it."

"Not without help," said Naga. "If it hadn't been for her connection with Juan, she'd still be in that cave in Mexico."

"And this time there was no connection," added Sedna. "I only knew you were gone, and I couldn't tell where."

Dema became wistful. "The forest dream is a good dream," she said quietly, almost with reverence. "It's a little scary to think about, but I might have been happy there."

She went quiet, and sat with her hands crossed on her lap, a faraway look in her eyes. No one spoke, until suddenly Kore said, "What's that!" 

 A beetle had appeared on Dema's forearm.

Dema looked at it dreamily, and said, "Oh, it's one of my beetles." It disappeared back into her arm. "I guess I drifted into the forest dream for a moment there," she said.

Naga said, "Well don't drift too far. I really don't want a swarm of beetles for a daughter."

Everyone laughed, perhaps a little uneasily.