Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  Bruno first outlined his approach in a late sixteenth-century text entitled De Umbris Idearum (On the Shadows of Ideas). “Shadow is not darkness,” wrote Bruno, “but rather shadow is the tracing of trails in light, or the sign of light in darkness.” In the back of his book, Bruno drew a circle. “Move around this circle in your mind,” said Bruno. “Contemplate the entire contents of your mind and the links between the world below and the world above, the inner and the outer, and you will comprehend all things and know the meaning that binds the All in the One: the secret knowledge in the shadows.”5

  Bruno’s obscure magical memory systems faded into historical oblivion. In the era following Bruno’s execution by the Catholic Church, for his dabbling in the occult and his heretical belief that the universe contains an infinite number of stars, the alchemical art of memory was superseded by the scientific understanding of the mind. The pioneering neurologists and psychiatrists of the nineteenth century, like Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud, were interested in a different sort of shadow: the enduring effects on the body and mind of psychological trauma. Where Bruno directed his reader to rotate imaginary concentric wheels, Sigmund Freud invited his patient to let their thoughts run free, talk about anything that came to their mind, and, in so doing, illuminate the links between the surface level of their conscious awareness—the nightmares, paralysis, and other baffling symptoms that had brought them to treatment—and the suppressed or repressed memories of terrifying experiences of assault or grief hidden in the shadow realm outside the frontier of everyday awareness: the unconscious.

  The ensuing era of modern psychology and neuroscience then yielded an understanding of this shadow realm of unconscious traumatic memory in scientific terms. Most of us go around thinking of ourselves as a single, unitary entity. The self feels continuous through space and time. But this sensation of unity is an illusion, a sort of conjuring trick of evolution. The self in reality is a constellation of states that evolve through time and vary across mood and situation. The movement from one state of mind to another is called dissociation. As the psychoanalyst Philip Bromberg wrote: “Self-states are what the mind comprises. Dissociation is what the mind does. The relationship between self-states and dissociation is what the mind is. It is the stability of that relationship that enables a person to experience continuity as ‘I.’”6

  Dissociation is a normal and healthy capacity of the mind. It is like an edit in a movie, a way of shifting from one scene of experience to the next. Under ordinary circumstances, there is nothing wrong with it. Daydreaming is a form of dissociation. To focus on anything at all, you need to collapse the circle of attention to one part of experience and split off everything else. If you’re splitting off meaningless distractions, that’s a useful thing to be able to do. You’ll never need to remember them anyway. But when the mind splits off experiences because they’re too frightening or incomprehensible to tolerate—a phenomenon known as traumatic dissociation—the feelings of horror, fear, or shame associated with the experience never fade away. Recent research on the neurophysiology of traumatic dissociation suggests that overwhelming stress releases pain-reducing chemicals that disconnect the neural networks lower in the brain that process emotion from the higher networks in the frontal cortex that support our capacity for self-awareness, reason, and memory.7 Trauma memories linger in the shadows of consciousness, forming an atmosphere around every single moment of experience, like runaways of the mind.

  Disaster strikes. Earth keeps turning around the sun. But trauma traps the mind in time, circling a nucleus of dissociated experience, like a planet in orbit around a dying star.

  I COULDN’T SLEEP. I couldn’t remember a single moment in my life when I hadn’t felt afraid. I had always managed to keep the fear at bay. To keep moving and run ahead of the darkness. But now the darkness was catching up with me. The mysteries of my past were vexing in themselves. But the past was only one of three problems. My other two problems were the present and the future. The present was a problem because I hated my current job as a grant writer but couldn’t think of what else I might want to do. Or rather, I thought of a new occupation every fifteen minutes but kept changing my mind. The future was a problem because I imagined it as a replica of the present, only worse. The future loomed like a windowless room from which no exit would ever be possible. Miriam and I had begun to speak of having children. Coming home from my long day marooned in an office cubicle, I tried to picture myself as a father—a much wiser and more calm future version of myself, a grown-up who understood his past and present and his forward path through life: it felt like science fiction. I was thirty-three years old. I had been pondering the mysteries of my childhood since I woke up one morning sad and lonely and grief-stricken seven years earlier and decided I had to know why. On that cold, dark English winter morning, I had forced myself out of bed and sat by my laptop, writing down memories of Cannon Road. For a while I could see the garden again. I could see the apple trees and the greenhouse and the leaves in the autumn, blanketing the grass, and Sebastian and I raking the leaves into piles and piling them in the wheelbarrow and pushing the barrow to the compost heap at the edge of the Jungle. For a long time, my mind circled between my cold, dark basement flat in London and this garden in memory, like Mercury circling back and forth for ages from Earth to Mount Olympus, but without ever delivering me a message I could really understand.

  But after seven years of mental circling, my past remained a mystery. My anxiety intensified. I was anxious when I woke in the morning. I was anxious on my drive south on the freeway to work and in the evening driving home, contemplating the identical day that soon would follow. I became less anxious after drinking gin or wine or beer and eating ice cream and then lying down in bed, stupefied by booze and worn out by a day of worrying, but then I usually felt sad. I returned to Dr. Jensen every week for several months. He indulged my circular monologues with minimal interruption. I felt worse and worse. I begged the doctor for medicine to alleviate my suffering. He scribbled a note on his prescription pad and gave it to me. I went to the pharmacy and picked up a bottle of Klonopin. I went to a café. I sat down with a newspaper and a double latte. I opened the bottle and took out a little pink pill. I washed down the pill with a swig of foamy coffee.

  A feeling of serenity washed through me. I put down the newspaper and stared out the window. There is nothing to worry about. Nothing I need to do. I can just sit like this forever. I can let it go. My serenity persisted for about an hour and then my anxiety returned.

  I would wake in the wee hours, my heart racing, overwhelmed with terror. “I used to feel like I was going somewhere. What happened to my life? Who am I?” Miriam would hold me, saying, “Hush, darling. You’re here with me now. Everything’s going to be fine. I promise.” Her words pacified me only for a moment. “But I don’t know who I am!” I began to writhe on the bed. I wound myself into a fetal position. “Breathe, honey, breathe,” said Miriam. “I can’t go in there,” I sobbed, meaning the office, and she said, “Well, don’t go in—just call in sick,” and I said, “But I have to go in!” and she said, “Well, why don’t you go in for a few hours and do your best so at least you’ll get something done,” and then I cried, “But I can’t go into that place!” and so it went on, back and forth, until I fell asleep in her arms.

  In the morning, golden sunshine streamed through our apartment window curtains, consuming me with dread at the prospect of another day to get through. This sequence repeated itself night after night for months on end as I struggled with a chronic sense of panic and encroaching disaster. As each day dawned, I’d burst into tears and hold on to Miriam as if outside her arms I’d plunge through a hole into the center of the Earth.

  I compiled a list of instructions for myself. I hoped the list would console my panicked self with messages from its occasionally calmer counterpart. It began as follows: “You wrote this when you were calm and rational—a sane human being! If you lose your shit, read and know the followin
g.” I then listed these instructions:

  If you wake up in the middle of the night freaking out, get out of bed immediately! Go to the beach and get in the water. DO NOT STAY IN BED!

  If you hear negative or self-critical thoughts, DO NOT BELIEVE THEM! SOMEONE ELSE IS TALKING!

  Remember that Miriam loves you.

  Remember that you love Miriam.

  Remember that Dad and Sebastian love you.

  If you find yourself weeping, worried, and hysterical, tell yourself, You are a good person! You deserve to be happy!

  If you find yourself at work thinking, I should never have left London . . . I should have figured out what happened in 1986 . . . I should be doing something else for work . . . remember you can and will achieve these things in the future, but right now you need to focus! Do your work right now! Do it well!

  You create your own experience.

  You are doing this to yourself. You can stop it.

  All of this will pass. Nothing is permanent.

  When I awoke in a state of terror some nights later, I forgot to read my instructions, and wouldn’t have believed them even if I had. I endured the following six months in a downward slide toward a chasm of despair and panic that reduced my existence to the challenge of getting through each day without bursting into tears. It was hard to know which was worse, the sadness or the terror. The sadness was a constant. It lurked in the background, underneath the fear, moving into the foreground of awareness when I went to bed at night, and in the lulls between the waves of fear. The fear came along with the inchoate perception that something was going very badly wrong. I have to leave. RIGHT NOW. Quit my job. Go back to England. No. Then Miriam will leave me. Stay here. Look at the computer screen. Start typing again. Write the grant. “We respectfully request that the Blah Blah Foundation blah, blah, blah . . .” Oh my God, this is boring and pointless. I used to be someone. Now what am I? A chump in an office cubicle. This is my life now. Get out. Run. No. Stay. Runstayrunstayrunstay . . .

  Insomnia and panic wore me down. The horizon of my sense of time shrunk from getting through the day to surviving the next five minutes. I started to lose my mind. My attention was the first function to go. My thoughts ran around in circles that led nowhere. Memory was next to go. I was aware of losing the ability to retain any information. It scared me. Whenever I took the train to work, I would try to memorize Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By the time my train reached its destination thirty minutes away, I had learned the poem by heart. But by the evening, all I could remember was Xanadu. The rest of Kubla Khan had vanished from my consciousness. I felt terrified.

  Nothing is permanent, I had instructed myself to remember. It was true. My fear began to fade away. But in its wake came something much worse and weirder. Imagine an alien planet where it never got cold. The aliens have never encountered ice, only water. But you live on an ice world. One day the aliens communicate with you through some kind of telepathy. Tell us about ice, they say. It sounds a lot like our water. It’s made of the same stuff, right? Yes, you would say. But it has lost its ability to move. It is water in a solid state of matter. Spend too long in the frost and you go numb and freeze to death. Ice is nothing like your water. Nothing like water at all.

  I couldn’t laugh. I couldn’t read or write. It was even hard to speak. The problem wasn’t in my tongue or vocal cords but in the parts of the mind that put experience into language. A horrifying silent chasm occupied the space where thoughts had once existed. One small mercy was my discovery that despite my loss of speech I had retained the ability to sing. I would stand at the back in the bass section of a gospel choir I had joined in a San Francisco church called Glide Memorial, and when I opened my mouth and heard the deep sound that bellowed from within me and merged with all the voices around me, the chasm inside me filled with music. One song went as follows:

  I almost let go

  I felt like I couldn’t take life anymore

  My problems had me bound

  Depression weighed me down

  But God held me close

  So I wouldn’t let go

  God’s mercy kept me

  So I wouldn’t let go

  I almost gave up

  I was right at the edge of a breakthrough

  But I couldn’t see it

  When the music stopped, the silence inside me felt more terrifying than ever. I was right at the edge of a breakdown: I could feel it.

  I tried other medications. I saw Dr. Jensen every week for a year and spoke without interruption for the fifty minutes of each session about the holes in my memory and the impossibility of moving forward into the future until I had understood the past. I prayed. I visited a somatic psychotherapist—someone who understood the link between the body and the mind. Ned had gone to see her. “She’s different,” he said. “You won’t just drone on about how terrible you’re feeling with the therapist just listening and never saying or doing anything.” She had a soft voice and held me in her gentle gaze. She beckoned me to an armchair. She sat in a chair parallel to mine. I could sense an atmosphere of warmth between us. “Close your eyes,” she said. I felt calm and safe with her. “Would it be okay if I put my hand on your forearm?” she said. “Yes,” I said. I could feel the gentle touch of her hand upon my arm. I started crying. “Now I want you to try something,” she said. “Would that be okay?” “Yes,” I said, through tears. “Imagine somewhere that feels safe to you. Perhaps you’re sitting there, perhaps moving. Picture this place where you are absolutely safe and free.” I saw a trail through a forest. “Tell me what you’re seeing,” she said. “I’m running through the forest,” I said. It was like a green tunnel, flecked with sunlight. “How’s your pace?” she said. “A bit too fast,” I said. “I thought so,” she said. I slowed down. I ran through the green tunnel, feeling safe and calm and free. I was aware of the therapist’s gentle touch and her presence, even though I could not see her. Time passed. I sensed that the therapy session was drawing to a close. “What’s coming up for you now?” the therapist said. “I’m worried that we’re running out of time,” I said. “I don’t want to go. I want to stay here. But I know I have to leave.” “Yes,” she said, “that’s what’s happening now.”

  Had it been possible, I would never have left the green tunnel, the feeling of running through it, not too fast, not too slow, just right, one step after another, surrounded by the trees. The session ended. I stood from the armchair.

  Months passed. My emotions cycled between panic and despair. Sometimes it was hard to tell where the fear stopped and the heavy sadness began. It was hard to tolerate even a single waking minute. My mind fled to a million imaginary horizons in a search for sanctuary.

  My first thoughts of suicide had a frightening and alien quality. Picture the effort entailed in solving a difficult puzzle, a Rubik’s Cube, say, and the moment when you reach a point of frustration, ready to give up, only the Rubik’s Cube is your own mind, and giving up means you have to kill yourself. Before long I thought about killing myself many times every single day, and then every hour, and then all the time, until the idea of self-annihilation became the background of every single other thought and feeling and memory in my awareness, like the air surrounding my body. My mind wore down from constant, unbidden contemplation of self-execution, an inner violence that eroded any defense against its murderous intention. The idea of oblivion flashed into my awareness like an empty sky above a distant mountain, as if death were a kind of sanctuary beyond the horizon of the living, a safe place I could run to, the next frontier on the journey that had taken me from England to California. But kill myself? No. It will hurt. And if I die, I’m not going to the Land of the Dead. My body will rot in the ground. There will be nothing left of me at all. Just the sorrow of everyone I leave behind.

  Miriam and I joined her mother and stepfather on vacation in Hanalei on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. She had had enough. We spoke of divorce. Her parents understood that our marriage was on the ve
rge of dissolution. They had heard that I was depressed. No one recognized the severe nature of my illness, which at the time I felt powerless to put into words.

  “I don’t want to leave you,” said Miriam. “But you’re sad all the time. I don’t know what to do. I want to have kids. I know you said you did. Or do. But I don’t know if that’s what you really want anymore. I don’t know what you want.”

  Earth seemed to conspire to keep me alive. The island manifested marvels of almost comic-book images of natural enchantment. One afternoon I paddled out in giant surf and looked back toward the shore. A rainbow formed above a tall green mountain. Giant waves crashed all about me. I wondered if the surf was big enough to guarantee death by drowning. A double rainbow formed above the mountain.

  That evening I found a book of Buddhist scripture on the bedside table in our rental home. I opened the book to a random page, in a search for comfort. I found a passage that addressed the fate of a person who elects to die by suicide. Such a person would not be reborn in the realm of Buddhas or human beings or even the lowest animals, the book informed me. Such a person would be condemned to inhabit a hell realm for as many eons as there were grains of sand in the Ganges. I put the book down and laid my head on the pillow. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a trillion eons in a hell realm, and I tried to ponder whether being in hell that long would be any worse than the torment that already afflicted me. I remembered meeting Miriam and the joy and hope I once had felt in being with her. Now our marriage lay in ruins. I had only myself to blame, I thought. I lay in bed aware of the hell where my mind used to be and the impossibility of expressing such torment in language. I understood that Miriam was angry. I understood that Miriam was sad. I understood myself to be the principal cause of those feelings in Miriam. I wished that I could say something. Long ago I would have spoken. But no more. Not that I wished to defend myself. Or to tell her she was wrong. Or that it was going to get better. Because it wasn’t. She was right. There was no defending it, this lump of flesh I’d turned into. Nothing I could think to say. Not only about me or her. Or the rights or wrongs of being sad or mad. About anything. I could hear her crying. “I married a zombie,” she said, in between sobs. And it was true. I’d become a zombie. Knowing this didn’t make me sad. Or not any sadder. I’d sunk to the sadness floor. There was nowhere lower to go. I wasn’t a person anymore. No, if I could speak, I would have said, Miriam, you’re not wrong. I’m so sorry. Sorry this happened. Sorry I turned into a zombie. Sorry the man you remember has gone and this is what I am now. Sorry, sorry, sorry.