the gargantuan-court dream: the court whose lines bound and define play
The lines that bound and define play are on this court as complex and convolved as a sculpture of string. There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net.
Context
The court-lines-as-enabling-form idea, dreamed to nightmare scale. In Hal's recurring dream the court is gigantic and its "lines that bound and define play" have multiplied into "a sculpture of string," "systems inside systems," too complex to read. The lines are what make play possible — you can't hit without a boundary to hit inside — but here the enabling form has metastasized past all playability, so that Hal stands unable to figure out "where in all that mess of lines" to serve. The structure that lets the game exist becomes the thing that paralyzes the player. (The dream itself is dreams'/maps-territory's; landed here is only the lines-as-enabling-form angle, cross-ref, no duplicate blockquote.)