In "Haunted in the Bush," Frenchie meditates on his own ability to dream, contemplating the existential threat that dreamlessness presents. He does so through the use of a simile:

I thought about the sickness and the insanity that crept like bedbugs through families while they slept. What would I have done to save my parents or Mitch, given the chance? Would I have been able to trap a child, to do what, cut them into pieces? To boil them alive? I shuddered. I didn’t want to know what they did. And I didn’t really want to know if I’d be capable of doing it.

Frenchie compares the dreamlessness and insanity creeping up on non-Native people to bedbugs—critters that, though apparently small and inconsequential, can perpetuate sickness and disease. One might not think that dreamlessness could have such a drastic psychological impact. Like bedbugs, dreamlessness was underestimated.

Curiously, in the above passage Frenchie demonstrates a radical form of empathy for his oppressors. Many other people in Frenchie's circumstances would refuse to empathize with those who hunt them and orchestrate their genocide. Frenchie would have every right to do the same. Instead, he wonders what he would do to save his own life, to protect his family. He wonders if, deprived of dreams and a future, he would make the same choice.