Gately's M.D.-temptation dream (p. 890)
The dream’s vividness had been either fever or Disease, but either way it had fucking seriously rattled his cage.
Context
Gately's own morning-after diagnosis, and the theme's AA inflection: the dream wasn't neutral sleep-noise but a symptom — fever arguing or the Disease arguing, the Spider running the temptation it can't yet run on waking Gately. The line licenses reading the whole M.D. sequence as the addiction's rhetoric given a stage, which is how the scene's following pages treat the rising Demerol memories ("clamoring to be Entertained").