Orin phones Hal about Himself's suicide
O., it got worse and worse. I dropped weight. I couldn’t sleep. This was when the nightmares started. I kept dreaming of a face in the floor.
Context
The origin of the founding image, dated to the source. Hal, on the phone with Orin in YDAU, is narrating the grief-therapy ordeal that followed his finding Himself's body in the microwave: weeks of failing to "deliver the goods" to an implacable grief-pro, and here — spring YTSDB, mid-therapy — the face-in-the-floor nightmare of pp. 61–63 gets its start-date. The foreshadow-dream system's taproot: the nightmare Hal is still having in the book's present began as undelivered grief.