Troeltsch sick in bed — "It’s one of those unpleasant opioid…"
It’s one of those unpleasant opioid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily in and out of this half-sleep where your mind’s still working and you can ask yourself whether you’re asleep even as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete.
Context
Troeltsch, seventeen and felled by a sudden rhinovirus, thrashing in a moist half-sleep under the ATHSCME fans' border roar — the theme's borderline hypnagogic case, carried because the text renders the state as dreaming ("even as you dream"). The dream/wake epistemology stated here — you can ask whether you're asleep inside the dream — is the question the wraith-night (162) and the buses-realization (177) will escalate.