Hal's tennis-court dream (Maps and Territory)
We sort of play. But it’s all hypothetical, somehow. Even the ‘we’ is theory: I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game.
Context
The dream's last lines. Once the map has swallowed the court, the match itself goes abstract — play becomes "hypothetical," the opponent becomes "theory," and all that's left concrete is apparatus. The same map-replaces-world endpoint the anhedonia essay states clinically at p. 693, here felt from inside a dream Hal medicates himself to escape.