Hal's teeth-to-shale dream; the unhelmed WYYY
Hal Incandenza had this horrible new recurring dream where he was losing his teeth, where his teeth had become like shale and splintered when he tried to chew, and fragmented and melted into grit in his mouth; in the dream he was going around squeezing a ball and spitting fragments and grit, getting more and more hungry and scared. Everything in there loosened by a great oral rot that the nightmare’s Teddy Schacht wouldn’t even look at, saying he was late for his next appointment, everyone Hal saw seeing Hal’s crumbling teeth and looking at their watch and making vague excuses, a general atmosphere of the splintering teeth being a symptom of something way more dire and distasteful that no one wanted to confront him about. He was pricing dentures when he woke.
Context
Very late October, an hour before dawn drills, Mario's bed empty. The first full statement of the teeth dream (second movement at scene 155, Joelle mirror at 146): Hal's secret rot as an open secret — everyone sees the crumbling, checks their watch, and won't name what it's a symptom of, down to a dream-Schacht too booked to look. Worth noticing the seam it sits on: the book cuts straight from 092's undersea dream to this one across the VERY LATE OCTOBER dateline — Carlisle reads the splice as composed, dream handing off to dream between the Ennet and E.T.A. worlds, and for once we're inclined to let him have it (the reading stays his).