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> 神々は何度も何度も何度も, 気が遠くなるほどサイコロを振りました.

Having hard time fully understanding this sentence. Especially this part
「気が遠くなるほど」, or how it affects 「気が遠くなる」. My translation would be something
along the lines of "Over and over and over again, the gods are astounded​ as
they role the dice."

I would really appreciate it, if someone could break the sentence down a
little bit and explain the grammar part, that I might have missed.
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question
grammar translation
What does 気が遠くなるほど mean?
For the usage of this ほど, see: [About ...ほど
constructions](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/52300/5010)

Jisho.org treats 気が遠くなる [as if it had two
meanings](https://jisho.org/search/%E6%B0%97%E3%81%8C%E9%81%A0%E3%81%8F%E3%81%AA%E3%82%8B),
but there is actually only one base meaning for this idiom, "to have the
feeling of faintness/blackout", "to almost faint", "to be half-unconscious",
etc. As you know, this can happen both when you are very sleepy/bored and when
you are very shocked. In this case, it's the former; Gods rolled a dice for
countless times to the point where it's difficult to keep consciousness or
sanity.

Compare the idiom with 気を失う which is "to be (completely) unconscious", "to
(fully) faint".
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> 気が遠くなるほどサイコロを振りました

The construction is explained in this answer: "[About ...ほど
constructions](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/52300/7810)" that it
literally means "they rolled the dice to the degree that you (almost) feel
faint".

Actually, 気が遠くなる is a very common metaphor in Japanese that depicts how
overwhelming the scale/number is (imagine that you count sheep over and over,
and you will soon fall unconscious). Here the referent is a number, so you can
just translate it like:

> They rolled the dice for countless times.

cf.

> 気が遠くなるほど長い時間 _a nearly-eternal time_  
>  気が遠くなるほど低い確率 _an incredibly low probability_  
>  気が遠くなる事業 _a gargantuan project_
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answer