the crumbling teeth: a symptom no one will name
his teeth had become like shale and splintered when he tried to chew, and fragmented and melted into grit in his mouth
Context
The secret habit surfacing as a recurring nightmare of oral decay. Hal's teeth turning to shale and grit as he chews is the body dramatizing what the waking mind won't admit — the rot of the hidden marijuana dependence — and the dream's real horror is social: everyone sees the disintegration, checks their watch, makes vague excuses, and declines to say the obvious, "a symptom of something way more dire" left unnamed. The theme's insight is that the addict's secret is often an open one, visible to all and confronted by none, and that Hal, waking to price dentures, can only address the symptom while the dire thing underneath stays unspoken — a private preview of the collusion that will let his habit run unchecked. Hal retells the identical dream to Mario the same night his cold quit begins (155, pp. 769-770) — the same iconography of two hidden prodigies handed their corrosion back as ruined teeth, the dream-dental system Joelle's freebase nightmare runs on too (146). (The WYYY/Madame Psychosis sabbatical and the seeing-but-not-saying mechanics are communication-solipsism's / dreams'; routed.)