There was only such a little space between the time the sleepers fell asleep and the time they began to dream in earnest, and it was only that space that began to the lovers. Once the dream began, the time for their pleasure was over. It was time to go to work.

She rolls over in bed, kicking the leaf-blanket off of her legs. She punches the tiny pillow in frustration and gets herself settled back down in the midst of unmended pots and pans, though she knows it won’t do any good. As soon as she starts to drift off, it comes again… the words, the horrible, hated words. The staccato beat of those five words drives itself into her head, shocking her back to consciousness.

Every time. The same five words. They come at her from all over the world, from parents reading to children and children reading to themselves, from stage performances and from thousands of DVD players. From a global audience, the words come and they awaken her every time, all the time… and the clapping, the clapping comes with them like a hideous heartbeat boring into her brain.

“I do believe in fairies, I do believe in fairies, I do believe in fairies.”

The pixie can’t sleep. We won’t let her.

It has slept for a long time. Now for the first time in ages it awakens in pain, pain such as it has never known. The air is hot and thick, strangely invigorating but unfamiliar. The beetles which live on the forest’s trees, thinning them at a reasonable level and then dying in the winter, have not been dying, and so the trees are in agony. The forest is not the trees, but the trees are of the forest and it feels their pain. It acts. Taking in a deep breath of the newly vitalizing atmosphere, the forest acts. It adjusts its trees, changing their sap to be thicker and more abundant, better suited to repelling the insects.

It’s a start, but a slow one.

I can do better, the forest thinks, taking in another mammoth breath.

It reaches out and it awakens some of its children. There are spiders in the forest, and insects that hunt, and birds with long, clever beaks. They can be adjusted, too. Made cleverer, made hungrier, made more numerous. The forest is alive with activity now, fully awake and alert It reaches out within itself. The wolf packs that once roamed it are all but gone. The great bears are dwindling in number and lazy. Long paths have been cut through the forest’s body, and in some cases covered over with rocky earth and barriers of metal. Its boundaries have retreated inward upon themselves.

The forest exerts itself like it is giving a great shrug. Roots extend towards roadways, seeds find their way into cracks. The effects of this are not immediately apparent. The plant parts of the forest are not as quick as the animal parts, even with the refreshing effects of the altered air.

The forest touches the bears and the wolves, along with the bats and the owls and the blackbirds and the raptors and the raccoons and the badgers in their dens. It reaches out to all of them, along with the deer and the rabbits and the squirrels and the mice. All the hunters, all the scavengers, all the foragers. They are all awake now, attent and waiting for the forest to act.

I can do better than this, the forest thinks again, and it adjusts them all. They remember when they were larger, when they were wilder and fiercer, stronger and smarter. They remember when the forest they were a part of was a thing of greatness and they themselves become greater.

There are men in the forest. It didn’t notice them at first, because there have always been men in the forest, though they stopped being part of the forest long before they adjusted to their present shapes. Its attention is on them now that the initial shock of pain that jolted it to consciousness has subsided. Some of the men are felling trees, not with stone and fire or even with iron but with strange metal implements that shriek and spin. Trees are being dragged off by great mindless metal beasts that belch out precious carbon and toxic-flavored fumes. Elsewhere, the forest’s insects are being killed by poison, the forest’s birds are being frightened back into their accustomed timidity by the roar of men’s strange devices, and the forest’s beasts are being hunted with things it can’t even begin to describe.

Shocked, the forest reaches out… and receives yet another shock. Across the world, its brethren have all been similarly penned in, reduced, or even destroyed. Their cousins, as well. The wetlands: drained and built over, or starved, or poisoned. The undulating prairies: fenced in, ripped apart, made to bear tamer seeds from other places. Rivers channeled and dammed, and everywhere men have laid their rocky paths and spun webs of metal carrying lighting and water, built their odd angular lodges, and constructed their roaring engines.

We can do better, the forest says, and it starts to wake the others up.

“Well… I’ve got this new thing,” the pusher said. “Don’t know if it would be in your line, though. It’s a little different.”

“What, is that supposed to make me want it more?”

“No,” the pusher said. “It’s honestly just not to everyone’s taste. If I recommended it to everybody, I’d have a lot of unhappy customers.”

“What is it?”

“It’s called ’sleep’,” the pusher said. “Synthetic neurochemicals that activate some kind of vestigial brain function that no one’s used in a couple hundred years.”

“‘Sleep’? Like a computer?”

“Yeah, basically,” the pusher said. “It puts you into power saving mode and runs a screen saver inside your brain… sort of like hallucinations, sort of like memories. It’s hard to describe. But not everybody has them all of the time.”

“What happens if you don’t?” the kid asked. “You just… sort of stand there until you come down?”

“No, you wanna make sure you’re sitting down or preferably reclining somewhere before you take it,” the pusher said. “Because your whole body goes kind of limp, you see. You’ll end up on the floor if you try to take it standing up.”

“So this stuff makes you lie down on the floor, unable to do anything? And sometimes gives you some kind of visions? Doesn’t it get really boring if you don’t have them?”

“Not really,” the pusher said. “Your consciousness is sort of… shut off. You’re not aware of anything that happens outside your head or the passage of time, at all, when you ’sleep’.”

“That’s some lame trip,” the kid said. “Why would anybody want that?”

“To get out of their lives for a while maybe? I don’t know,” the pusher said. “Some people who take it regularly say they feel more relaxed, sharper during the rest of the day, but I don’t know that you’d that notice that after one trip.”

“How long does it last?”

“About eight hours, give or take,” the pusher said.

“Shit, I can’t do that,” the kid said. “I’ve got stuff to do.”

“Like I said, it’s not for everyone.”