He dreams he’s with a very sad kid and they’re in a graveyard digging some dead guy’s head up and it’s really important, like Continental-Emergency important, and Gately’s the best digger but he’s wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry, and he’s eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so he can’t really dig, while it gets later and later and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy’s head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy’s head up before it’s too late, but the kid moves his mouth
...more
People spend a lot of time parsing this out - is it a hallucination? a premonition? both at once? A wraith-implanted fantasy or directive? But it's one of the more well-known Hamlet allusions, seemingly with Gately cast as Hamlet himself (since he's the one saying "I knew him") which is, again, weird and confusing. But we could connect this back to Hal's essay about the hero of inaction pretty convincingly.