Joelle's teeth-dentist dream of Gately (p. 724)
his head haloed with a strap and a polished metal disk attached to the strap just above his eyes, a tiny mirror of stainless steel, clean as the instruments’ tray; and the dream’s yielding and trustful quality of calm is undercut only by the view of her face in the halo’s mirror, the disk like a third eye in Gately’s broad clean forehead: because she can see her face, convexly distorted and ravaged by years of cocaine and not caring, her face all bug-eyes and sunken cheeks, lampblack-smudges beneath the pop-eyes
Context
The dream's optical hinge, before the teeth arrive: the mirror-disk "like a third eye" shows the veiled woman the one thing her waking arrangements are built never to show her — her own face, convex and ravaged, the U.H.I.D. veil replaced in sleep by an instrument that only reflects. In a dream about being helped, the first horror is simply being seen.