Gately dreams Mrs. Waite and Death — "This is how it works: didn’t…"
This is how it works: didn’t he know? In the dream everybody in the world seems to know this except Gately, like he’d missed that day in school when they covered it, and so Death’s having to sit here naked and angelic and explain it to him, very patiently, more or less like Remedial Reading at Beverly H.S.
Context
Carlisle reads the whole dream-pair as Entertainment leakage: Gately "dream-watches scenes in his head reminiscent of Infinite Jest," and the planted, everybody-already-knows quality of the dream-knowledge is his evidence the wraith is transmitting rather than Gately inventing — with the forward stake being whether Gately could resist the cartridge's "near-terminal pleasures" the way he's resisting Demerol (the temptation 169 stages as another dream). Our digest adopts the wraith-transmission implication; the resistance-equivalence is his.