Hal's tennis-court dream — "when Bridget Boone, in whose room…"
when Bridget Boone, in whose room a lot of the 16 and Unders used to congregate before lights-out, invited me to consider a couple of late-night bongs, as a kind of psychodysleptic Sominex, to help me sleep, perhaps, finally, all the way through a really unpleasant dream that had been recurring nightly and waking me up in medias for weeks and was beginning to grind me down and to cause some slight deterioration in performance and rank. Low-grade synthetic Bob or not, the bongs worked like a charm.
Context
Hal, first person, on how he came to marijuana at nearly sixteen: prescribed by a peer, as medicine against a dream. The etiology of the book's central habit runs straight through a recurring nightmare — self-medication of the inner life from the first bong on — and "worked like a charm" is the hook going in. Carlisle notes the catch: the dream "still recurs 'every now and then'" — the medication suppressed the symptom without curing it.