The face-in-the-floor nightmare
the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares’ very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake: it’s just been… overlooked; and then that horrific interval between realizing what you’ve overlooked and turning your head to look back at what’s been right there all along, the whole time…. […] The dream is that you awaken from a deep sleep, wake up suddenly damp and panicked and are overwhelmed with the sudden feeling that there is a distillation of total evil in this dark strange subdorm room with you, that evil’s essence and center is right here, in this room, right now. And is for you alone. None of the other little boys in the room are awake; the bunk above yours sags dead, motionless; no one moves; no one else in the room feels the presence of something radically evil; none thrash or sit damply up; no one else cries out: whatever it is is not evil for them.
Context
The dreamer — almost certainly Hal, almost twelve, first night in a subdorm — and the book's first full haunting: an evil presence in the room, felt before located, and for you alone, unshareable, which welds the ghost material to the solipsism material from the start. The thesis clause — the horror was with you all along, even awake, just overlooked — is the epistemology every later E.T.A. haunting runs on, from Stice's bed to the brooms on the wall. (Carlisle keeps the dreamer's identity deliberately open, which if anything strengthens the room-haunting read.)