a loneliness filed under a genre — "A Rusk-level dream, Inc. A standard…"

The proof of the dream's own thesis happens in the telling of it: Hal reaches for the loneliness — "unlike anything" — and Pemulis immediately sorts it into a category, "a standard nobody-understands-me dream," dismissing the report of unbearable non-reception by not receiving it. The account of being heard as a showtune is itself heard as a stock dream-type, so the conversation reenacts the nightmare in miniature, the one person Hal is confiding the loneliness to filing it under a genre and moving on to derivatives.