the hillside of stupors and the bad D.T.-dream — "the cart’s now shoeless unconscious owner…"
the cart’s now shoeless unconscious owner just waving at the air in front of his face in sleep as if at a bad D.T.-dream of lost shoe and worldly goods
Context
The street bottom laid out as landscape: three dozen wind-bronzed men in stupors "of various origin," curled around bottles and pipes and burnt-out Sterno cans, and among them the shoeless sleeper batting at the air in a "bad D.T.-dream" of the very goods being stolen out from under him. The withdrawal-nightmare and the theft happen in the same instant, the bottom too far down to wake for.