Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  When you can picture the world beyond the up-close version, shifting to a broader, global, or even cosmic perspective, new possibilities come into view. When our evolutionary ancestors progressed from crouching to walking on two legs, they could see farther. They also started to see themselves: the cave paintings of Lascaux depict hunting but also the Paleolithic mind’s emergent self-awareness. To astronauts viewing Earth from hundreds of miles above in space, the atmosphere looks like a razor-thin layer, and they are often overwhelmed by a phenomenon known as the overview effect, a poignant awareness of the planet as a single interconnected system. They realize that the sky must be protected so it will exist for future generations, that from the perspective of Earth’s orbit national boundaries are fictions, and that as living beings we share a single home.

  The high country extends beyond the mountains. It’s not so much a physical place as a way of being. It’s looking up into the night sky and wondering. It’s Stephen Hawking imagining black holes. It’s the view from the high country both literal and symbolic: the Tibetan plateau viewed from the summit of K2 and the equitable society conceived in the mountaintop vision of Martin Luther King Jr. It’s the best of who we are and what we might become.

  Everyone should see the horizon from a hill. Down below you see someplace you know from ground level. You spot somewhere else familiar. Then you see how the two places stand in relation to each other, the trails that link them together. The links have always been there. But down on the ground you couldn’t see them. Maybe down on the ground, the other side of town seemed like a different reality.

  Lines

  Days turned into weeks. The feeling of sitting after the hard effort on the bike with the coffee and muffin appeared every morning for about ten minutes and then was gone, leaving in its wake the same old ache and fear and looping thoughts. Nothing has changed. I still can’t think straight.

  One morning I was sitting in group, thinking, when everything froze. Time stopped. I stopped. Everything appeared with the machinelike quality of a world where there had never been any such thing as a human mind, a world where nothing was recognizable or had a name, a world where nothing felt like anything at all because there was nobody left to feel it. Not chairs but hard, cold squares of matter. No people on the chairs but round lumps atop the square ones. This is existence. It has always been this way. Fear took hold of me. What happened? Who am I? What am I? Fear flipped into terror. What if I’m stuck like this? I would rather be dead. This is much worse than death, whatever this is. Being frozen. Hell. I must be in hell. Help. Oh God, please help . . .

  The following series of realizations then took shape in my shattered consciousness: I’m thinking things. Seeing people and chairs and the gray light through the windows. Eyes that see things and ears that hear them. I am me, and all of this out there is not-me . . .

  A gap had opened up between perceptions and perceiver that restored me to a recognition of me sitting there, feeling scared, eyes darting around the room, until my gaze met Mike’s and I understood that he had seen me. I went to talk to him after group. I tried to put my horrific experience into words.

  “It’s called depersonalization,” he said in a calm and gentle tone. “It happens. It’s nothing to get too worried about.”

  “But what if it happens again?” I said.

  “Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. You’ll be okay.”

  “How do you know?” I cried.

  “Because I have faith in you.”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible,” I said, “if I don’t have faith in myself.”

  “I know you don’t,” he said. “And that’s why I have faith in you. I’m going to hold the faith for you.”

  He was looking right at me. I couldn’t remember anyone ever looking at me like that, the way his eyes really saw me. I couldn’t remember anyone ever talking to me like that, the way his voice was so soft and gentle. You understand what I’m going through, even though I don’t. You can see a path out of this darkness, even if I can’t. You’re not going to leave me alone here, crying in the dark. You’ve been here before. You know the way out.

  Day 40. Wish I could stay in Partial forever. Afraid to go back to work.

  I walked into the office building. I might as well be wearing a sign on my head saying MENTAL PATIENT, I thought. When Mike and the other therapists had mentioned the prospect of my eventual return to work, I was terrified. Returning to my isolated office cubicle had been unimaginable. I didn’t think I would be able to write grants in my disabled state of mind, and I worried about the way people would look at me. Everyone will know where I’ve been all this time. I won’t be me anymore. I’ll be that guy who lost it and went to the psych ward. The mental patient.

  “Don’t think of going back as all-or-nothing,” Mike had said. “We’ll take it one day at a time.” My return to work would involve a gradual transition, he had explained. In the first couple of weeks I would go to the office for just a single day per week. Being there might bring up difficult thoughts and feelings, he said. But I could bring those thoughts and feelings back to Partial. When I was ready, I would spend two days per week at work, then three, then four, and I would only go back to a full five-day week when I was ready.

  I walked upstairs to the second floor of the building. I saw Jessica, the receptionist. Uh-oh. “Jason!” she said with a big smile on her face. I approached my cubicle. A middle-aged woman in the adjacent cubicle spotted me as I neared my desk. Her name was Moira. “Welcome back, Jason,” she said, looking straight into my eyes and opening her arms, in the offer of a hug. “It’s so great to see you.”

  So great to see me? What? Moira had always struck me as a down-to-earth sort of person. But in the three years I’d worked for the organization I could count the conversations we’d had on the fingers of one hand. I was surprised she’d even noticed that I’d been gone.

  OH, THE HORROR OF another day. I wished I could go back to sleep. I wished I could close my eyes and never wake up again. I lay in bed, waiting for the ache of living to subside, waiting for the despair and dread and runaway thinking to ease, waiting to bear the idea of pulling back the covers and climbing out of bed, waiting for the vision of a tolerable future, waiting for hope to begin. I thought about suicide all the time. I went online and ordered a guidebook on how to do it. I forget the author and the title. But I will never forget something the author said, in between the passages outlining the pros and cons of the various standard methods: “For all I know, this might be the last book you’ll ever read. Please consider carefully whether you really want to do this.” There was something about the tone of that you: I could feel the presence of another human being, reaching across the chasm between us. I felt like he was talking to me. He wanted the best for me. He didn’t want me to die. He respected me enough to talk about this horrible thing, feeling so terrible I might need to kill myself, without getting mad at me or crying. He reminded me of Mike.

  I wished I could take up permanent residence in Partial. I felt safer there. But following the plan I had worked out with Mike, I was committed to a gradual transition back to work. I had to learn to cope with the world outside the hospital. I had to learn how to tolerate the ache that took hold of me from the very first moment I woke in the morning until I took my pills last thing at night and fell asleep. That was one thing I liked: the way those pills felt. There was this nice little reprieve, a few minutes after I took the pills, when the drugs started kicking in, when the ache faded away and left a calm feeling. In the hospital, Mike had told me to write down, every day, three things I was grateful for. Ideally, he said, it should be three different things each time. But if I couldn’t think of new things, that was okay. I could write the same things each time, so long as I was really grateful for them. “But what if I can’t think of three things?” I said. “What if I can’t think of even one?” “Do your best,” he said. So I wrote down “my pills.” I was grateful for that brief, calm feeling, the moment between
swallowing the pills and losing consciousness. I wished it would last longer. I wished I could lie there with my head on the pillow and my eyes closed, without the ache but still awake, forever. Sometimes as I lay there with the calm feeling I would also feel Miriam’s finger tracing little circles on my arm. It felt nice. So the second thing I was grateful for was Miriam stroking my arm. The third thing was chocolate. I’d never lost my appetite. Some of the pills made me feel hungry all the time. I could eat and eat and eat but not feel full. I devoured fistfuls of candy. Chocolate, pills, and Miriam’s finger: those were my only favorite things. The rest of the time, I tried to cope with the ache. Unless I was eating sweets or lying down in bed after the pills kicked in, or feeling Miriam’s finger, or sleeping, I was hurting. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could handle it.

  My first assignment back at work was the kind of task that a functional twelve-year-old could have done. The task in question involved reorganizing text documents in the folder architecture of my desktop hard drive. Review all the old grant files on the hard drive, Glenda said. Sort the files into topics. Make one folder per topic. If there are lots of files on one topic, sort them into categories, and make subfolders. But my thoughts refused to sort themselves into subfolders. Marooned inside my cubicle walls, I felt a strange restlessness. It was less the physical desire to flee the building than a mental discomfort with every single instant of experience, the need for each present moment to vanish and turn into the past. Make this now go away . . . and this now . . . and this now . . . I had a bizarre perception of time moving too slowly, and the weird anxiety that without my conscious willing this temporal momentum into being, time might stop and freeze me in an eternal now.

  Folders and subfolders . . . categories and topics . . . It was hard to tolerate being alone with my own mind. My mind was dangerous: it had tried to kill me. I yearned for contact with anything outside it, no matter how mundane or trivial. I would open my email inbox and read every new message, even junk mail and spam. “Esteemed friend, Greetings from Lagos—I have recently come into possession of one hundred million dollars.” What comfort I felt in the awareness of another human mind, trying to reach mine, even if only in an attempt to deceive me. I discovered an underground office subculture of time-wasting resistance expressed through the exchange of winking emoticons and silly chats on instant messenger. What relief I felt in joining this kind of talk, which was never about anything so much as the wish for talk itself, the feeling in each electronic ping announcing the arrival of a new IM of a fellow human soul in the universe and the assurance that I still existed in the minds of others and they in mine.

  Between acknowledging every smiley face emoji and Nigerian email scam, my progress on the subfolders was halting. I showed Glenda what I had done. She provided further instructions. I returned to my cubicle. I tried again. This cycle repeated itself. With an audible sigh of a busy person at the end of her patience, Glenda then narrated the exact sequence of computer keystrokes required to assemble the folder hierarchy. I wrote the instructions down. I returned to Dr. Jensen. He prescribed a high dose of Effexor, an antidepressant whose mechanism of action combines the effects of serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, as well as Abilify, an antipsychotic medication often used as an augmentation strategy for treatment-resistant depression. Soon after I took those drugs in combination, I felt a subtle shift in the void that had engulfed me. It is hard to express this shift in language. It was like some sort of restoration of an inner brightness. As spring turned into summer, my suicidal thoughts began to fade. But they did not disappear. The idea of death by suicide still loomed in my thoughts as a sort of psychic escape hatch, a horrific yet necessary exit strategy from the pain of staying alive if living hurt too much.

  One day I saw a trailer for the forthcoming remake of The War of the Worlds. How exciting that looks! I thought. I should definitely see it before I kill myself. It occurred to me that a person who really wants to die doesn’t make a plan to see a movie.

  Still, the ache of depression did not subside. I didn’t feel quite so bad—but neither did I ever really feel good. I went back to the ocean. The freezing-cold water took the ache away. When I rode a wave, I felt a little spike of euphoria that made a whoop sound come out of me. But I was a terrible surfer: if I even got up on a single wave, I was lucky. And after I was dry and warm and back at work, there was the ache again, as bad as ever. “I want you to whoop at work,” Mike had said. What a joke. Fuck yeah, today I’m writing grants! When the world ended and aliens wrote the history of Earth, I bet they wouldn’t find a single human who’d ever said those words. Whoop at work? If I could have made a sound, it would have been a whimper like a sick dog in a cage. So I sat in my cubicle, typing nonsense in IM, eating candy.

  I MADE EYE CONTACT with a young man in a hoodie. “Sorry we crashed your party, man,” he said. “My friends and I were talking, and we decided we ought to try and make it up to you. We came up with a proposal.” In his pocket the man had a small bag of what back in England I used to know as Charlie: cocaine. “I accept your proposal,” I said. I led him to the bathroom. He poured out the cocaine and chopped it into lines with a credit card. I snorted a line. A sphere of euphoric focus formed around me. Hello, Charlie, I said. Hello, little one, said Charlie.

  If I could have frozen the feeling of being held by Charlie until the end of time, I would have done so. Charlie and I were old friends—lovers, even. One summer in the late ’90s, a couple of years before I met Miriam and moved to California, I was at a friend’s house in London during a giant annual street festival when someone poured a packet of white powder onto a glass table and chopped it into lines. The party guests took turns inhaling them. The young woman beckoned me to the table. I was conscious of standing at a threshold. I had done a lot of drugs by then, but the optics of powder substances retained a distinct illicit frisson and sense of peril. I remembered public health ads on television depicting zombie-like figures who’d ruined their lives through heroin addiction. The drug on the table was cocaine, not heroin, but legally and perceptually they were members of the same taboo class. I took the rolled-up banknote lying on the table and snorted one of the lines. Within seconds a feeling of warmth and calm stillness radiated through me. I noticed how the others were talking faster, compelled to put their racing thoughts into language. I remember listening to a young man deliver what amounted to a sort of personal manifesto, describing his passion for documentary cinema, circling back on how he was uniquely suited for a life committed to that industry. I remember responding only with the nod of my head and the words yes and uh-huh and my willingness to meet his gaze and listen to him without interruption, yet sensing the great value he was apparently deriving from my stance of rudimentary validation, and observing internally the liberation I felt from any desire to speak, the way the young man’s need to be heard formed the mirror image of my silent contentment in attending to him, and noticing myself witness this act of witnessing, in a sort of fractal iteration of consciousness. Everyone did another line of coke. I followed the others through the crowded street to a stage from which tall loudspeakers played house and techno. “This is Sancho Panza,” someone said. Time vanished as the music’s merger with our dancing bodies formed an imaginary island, a structure perhaps manifesting the mythical insula promised to Sancho Panza for his years of service by his insane master, Don Quixote. High on cocaine in a San Francisco bathroom several years later, I remembered that first coke rush in London and an intensity of euphoria that no subsequent usage of that substance could ever quite replicate. The high lasted ten minutes or so and then began to fade. I found the young man with the hoodie and the drugs in his pocket and asked him for more.

  About a week later I walked from my apartment to a downtown street corner with a reputation as a hub in the city’s drug trade. I was aware of an embarrassing lack of whatever combination of secret winks and street smarts that equipped a person to purchase illegal substances in public from stran
gers. It was a problem I’d been aware of since college—some stiffness or formality in my bearing that made dealers think I was more likely an undercover cop than a customer. I had no luck at 16th and Mission Streets. I wandered one block to Valencia Street. Two young men in hoodies walked by. One of them muttered something fast under his breath like weed-pills-rock—a compound word advertising his wares. “Got any coke?” I said. He shook his head. One of the men beckoned me into an alley. “I ain’t got coke,” he said, “but I got something better—it lasts longer.” He exchanged a smirk and a knowing look with his companion. “Yeah, way longer,” said the other young man. It was crystal methamphetamine. “Okay, sure, why not,” I said. The man named his price. I handed over my cash. He grabbed my hand in a gesture mimicking an energetic handshake in which he transferred a little ziplock bag into my palm.

  I was aware of meth’s reputation as one of the hardest street drugs available, up there with PCP, the stories of users staying awake on meth runs that could last an entire week, at the end of which they were out of their minds, until they crashed and slept for days. Almost everyone I knew had done some kind of recreational substance at least once in their life: at minimum marijuana, and in most instances MDMA, coke, or hallucinogens, at least on special occasions. But I’d never met anyone socially who’d done meth. It was in a category all its own. Of the stigma meted out to drug addicts, those addicted to crystal bore the most ruthless opprobrium. Even crack addicts turned up their noses at meth heads. I had come to understand that there was a sound neurological basis for regarding it with the most serious caution. Among the substances you can put in your brain, methamphetamine is perhaps the most neurotoxic. Brain scans of long-term meth users show parts of the brain with holes in them. I didn’t need to read the peer-reviewed neurobiology literature to know that meth would fuck up my brain. Yet that knowledge inspired feelings not of fear or revulsion but of rebellious transgression. I have crystal.