Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  SIX MONTHS AFTER I got back from Tahoe my brother sent me a text asking when I had last heard from our mother. I checked my phone. Two weeks had passed since her last text. The silence was unusual. She was a prolific texter. I made some phone calls. I tracked her down in a public hospital. She had fallen. She had lain on the ground for two days. She was found when a neighbor heard her banging her shoe against the radiator. Why she had lain there all that time was something of a mystery. In the public housing unit where she lived, the social services had installed an emergency cord for frail seniors to pull in an emergency to summon help. Mum had been lying right underneath the cord. She surely could have reached to grab it if she’d wanted to. Like so many other falls in our family across the generations, this one was a mystery.

  I got on a plane to England. She looked frail and much thinner than the last time I had seen her. She must have weighed a hundred pounds. She smiled when she saw me entering the ward. I sat down by her bed.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “I fell,” she said. She couldn’t remember the moment of the fall. Why she lay on the ground all that time, she couldn’t say.

  We were silent for a while. I told her that I had driven past our old house earlier that day. I could remember our lovely garden, I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Apples. Peas. Potatoes. Roses. Lavender blooming.”

  I could remember visiting Ireland in our summer holidays, I said. I could remember the beach and the sea and the mountains. I could remember a farm we visited nearby. “I think you went there as a girl,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “There was a river. And stepping-stones. We played in the river. It was very deep—I was very little.”

  “You used to sing,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I won six medals.”

  “You were a dancer,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Irish dancing.”

  “Hard,” I said.

  “Yes. Very hard.”

  “You would climb the mountains,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I remember the day we climbed Slieve Donard and I ran down without you,” I said. “Do you remember what happened? I always thought you must have been angry with me. Can you remember why I ran away?”

  She shook her head. “You probably wanted to be first,” she said. “First down the mountain.”

  We were silent for a while again before resuming our reminiscence. As we spoke, I was conscious of a trail that seemed to form between our two minds that traveled back through time to a life we had once shared. I could remember how I had once needed to run away in fear of a mind I did not understand. I was conscious of sitting close to her now, and how, as I held her in my attention, she seemed to be present in one moment and then absent in the next, like a mind that circled between daytime and the night.

  Time passed. I stood to leave.

  “Are you going now?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “But I’m coming back tomorrow. Good night. I love you.”

  AT THE FARTHEST REACHES of the solar system some astronomers say there’s a ring of distant objects called the Oort Cloud. The objects number in the tens of thousands, a ring of misshapen frigid lumps, wandering their lonely course over the hundred thousand years it takes them to complete a single orbit of the sun. The gravitational force of the sun extends outward in a zone called a Hill sphere. The objects at the outer frontier of the Oort Cloud lie at the very edge of the sun’s Hill sphere—perhaps a light-year from the sun: six trillion miles. From out here the sun looks nothing like the warm, friendly yellow circle you can see from here on Earth. From a perspective exiled way out in the Oort Cloud, the sun shrinks to a point of light in the firmament, as Arcturus or Rigel appears to us on Earth. At the limits of the sun’s gravitational force, objects in the Oort Cloud sometimes spin off into interstellar space.

  There is an Oort Cloud of lost human possibility. This is the space that enfolds the runaways that disappeared: lives cut short by trauma, violence, addiction, or suicide. Their lives were incomplete. They lived with pain that became unendurable. They never came to experience the lives that might have existed for them. This space also contains frozen distant objects at the far frontiers of the unconscious mind: parts of our self and our history so painful we’ve pushed them to the very outer orbit of the light of consciousness, our deepest shame, sadness, regret. The force that binds these broken parts of us is so weak, sometimes they split off from us altogether and wander into the spaces beyond. These lost souls, these abandoned parts of the self, now reside in a virtual zone, a distant circle of being that persists like the Oort Cloud at the far frontier of awareness, barely still contained within the orbit of consciousness. Some of their names are known to us as people we once knew alive. Others are unknown, unmourned, forgotten. The task of honoring the unlived potential of those whose names are remembered, imagining the potential of those names whom history passed over in darkness, and acknowledging the parts of our individual and collective histories that we have denied or forgotten falls to those of us still living.

  IN THE MORNING, I went to my mother’s flat to organize her belongings. In the kitchen, I saw some photos taped to the fridge. One of them was a black-and-white image of some schoolgirls. I recognized my mother, seated in the middle of the group. She looked about ten. She’s all dressed up in her smart shirt and blazer, beaming with pride. I wondered what kind of life she had dreamed of back then. I could see such hope in her smiling face. Perhaps she knew nothing yet about the soldier and the model. But perhaps she did know and the discovery didn’t trouble her, when there was so much else to think about. Dances. Singing competitions. The infinite possibility of the future, the way it seems to a ten-year-old, stretching ahead to a far horizon across a vast and spacious land. I wondered if the story of the soldier and the model, her original parents, the ones who ran away, was the way she began to make sense of herself when she was older, looking back at the voids in history, and then at the void within, the parts of her own mind that transcended comprehension, her scattered thoughts and frantic feelings, the runaway parts that refused to cohere in any kind of meaning, and then understood the two mysteries as one, as if the possibility of ever feeling whole again ran away with her parents across the sea.

  Another photo depicted Sebastian and me with our mother near the summit of Slieve Donard when I was ten. It occurred to me that the photo must have been taken on the day when I ran down the mountain. But the little boy in the picture was smiling. The look on his happy face reminded me of a certain cute expression I loved to see on my nine-year-old son. I wondered about the hole in my memory of that day, the space I had filled for so long with the thought that I must have been angry or afraid. It seemed hard to believe that the happy boy in the picture could have felt such inner turmoil. There was joy before the fear. There was light in the time before the darkness came. There was light inside the darkness in the beginning and through all of time.

  In the closet there was an old teddy bear. He had the august and threadbare look of a beloved childhood companion. From the bed—I could see from the angle—my mother would have been able to see him, seated several feet above her in the closet. I could picture her alone in the nighttime, feeling the imaginary comfort of this old friend, the lovely old bear who watched over her. I wondered if she could still see him after her fall. I could imagine her collapsed on the floor, with a toy bear as her only friend in the universe. I felt a great wave of grief, absorbing the knowledge of how long she must have suffered such isolation.

  In the back of the closet there were some battered black leather briefcases. The briefcases were stuffed full of old bills and junk mail. Sorting through the papers, I found some notebooks. They were full of her poems. She must have written hundreds. There were dates underneath the poems. They went back years. Cannon Road was in them. England in the wintertime. The Irish mountains in the summer. Her two little boys. Her son, a doctor in the family. One of the p
oems read as follows:

  First

  Kiss

  Not

  Forgotten

  Stay

  Awhile

  Remember

  Happy

  Childhood

  Childhood ends. But you never forget your first kiss. Childhood’s joy and wonder is always present, if you look for it, in the wild places, the forest of the mind.

  I couldn’t reverse what had happened to my family in the ’80s. I couldn’t rebuild my childhood home in my mind. I had to lay the past to rest. But letting go of the past didn’t mean running away from it. It meant learning from the lessons of history: understanding the knowledge in the shadows.

  IT WAS A WARM summer’s day when I returned to visit my mother again a few months later. Following her long rehab, she’d moved to a nicer flat with more support from social services. She had made only minimal progress in physiotherapy. She was confined to a chair, immobilized, shuffling to the toilet with a walker and the aid of the caregivers who visited four times each day. She had given up. I offered her my hands. She stood. She walked in slow steps, holding my hands for balance. We went outside into a grassy courtyard in whose center stood an oak. We walked in a circle around the tree and then settled on a bench. I could see she was out of breath. “How do you feel?” I said. “Exhilarated!” she said. “Like my feet are coming alive.”

  * * *

  The vast blue lake looks so close now I could almost leap right into it. The finish can’t be more than a quarter-mile away. On a morning like this, running down the mountain, crying happy tears, my mind runs wild. Anything seems possible. I can imagine a run that never ends, on a circle going all the way around the world, on a sunny day when every child comes skipping from the schoolhouse, when madmen run laughing on the rooftops, when every prisoner runs from liberty to redemption, when every river runs with clear, clean water, when deer leap through living forests that stretch to every horizon, when every runaway finds home.

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of nonfiction. In the course of writing these pages, I considered every salient trace of my past. In addition to my own memory, and the relevant scientific and philosophical literature, I reviewed multiple further sources, including letters, diaries, emails, photographs, videos, my medical records, and interviews with family members about their recollection of events at which they were also present. I have left nothing important out. I have not compressed multiple events into single scenes, created composite characters, or invented anything. I have represented dialogue to the best of my knowledge with fidelity. The following names are pseudonyms: Miriam, Chris, Don, Emily, Sebastian, Ned, Clara, Joseph, Dr. Jensen, Thelma, Dr. Browning, Dr. Hewitt, Mr. Butler, Roland, Mr. Martin, Sam, Mr. Keene, Sandra, Tara, Naomi, Mike, Andrew, Martha, Jim, and Dr. Carson. I have altered the names of some locations to protect the privacy of the individuals concerned.

  —JMT

  Acknowledgments

  The visionary mid-twentieth-century English psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion believed that a new mother “dreams” her baby’s mind into existence: the self first forms in an intersubjective realm, an imaginary space in which parent and infant are one. The story in this book is mine. But in writing it, I was never alone. Many wise minds helped dream these pages into being.

  I bow down to my ancestors and to all my teachers. I thank great teacher Shakyamuni, Bodhidharma, Eihei Dogen, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Shosan Gigen, and all of my brothers and sisters on the path of liberation.

  I offer my deep respect and gratitude to the native peoples upon whose ancestral lands I have been fortunate to run: the Ohlone, the Coastal Miwok, and the Washoe.

  Thank you, runners, for your company on the trail. Special thanks to the Saturday Morning Tam Runners, the San Quentin Thousand Mile Club, and to Candice Burt and Angel Mathis and everyone at Destination Trail.

  I am grateful for all the teachers and fellow writers, beginning in primary school and continuing into my adulthood, who introduced me to the magical world of books and literature, and who taught me how to read, write, and think. Thanks to my Oxford University tutors, Nicola Trott, Seamus Perry, and Philip Wheatley. Thanks to Steven Poole, Rupert Brow, Renee Swindle, Rebecca Wilson, Geoff Dyer, Larry Smith, and Josh Davis, for encouraging me during my long genesis as a writer.

  Thanks to Bonnie Nadell and Austen Rachlis at Hill Nadell Literary, for believing in this book from the moment I met you: I appreciate your patience, insight, and professionalism. Thanks to Gideon Weil, Sydney Rogers, and everyone involved with this book at HarperOne. I could not have hoped for a more skillful editorial team: in working with you as I delivered drafts and then a final manuscript, I felt like a nervous parent, passing a firstborn child into the warm hands of a trustworthy extended family.

  Three close friends provided astute feedback to drafts. Thanks to Debbie Berne and Aran Watson. Special thanks to Ben Lewis: psychiatrist, ultrarunner, and scholar of philosophy (is there anyone else on Earth more uniquely qualified to comment on this book, or gab together for hours about neuroscience and Zen in some faraway desert or canyon?). I am lucky to know you and your lovely family.

  I am forever indebted to my healers: the mental health professionals who saved my life. I do not name them in these pages, because to do so might complicate their relationship with their current patients. I am thankful too for the fellowship and solidarity of peers in recovery, whose anonymity I have likewise preserved.

  In my own subsequent training as a psychologist, I have benefited from the mentorship and guidance of many gifted clinicians, researchers, scholars, supervisors, and colleagues in the health professions and other fields. Thank you to Steve Hinshaw for inspiring me with the notion that I could become a psychologist because of—rather than despite—my challenging prior personal history. Thank you to Willi McFarland, Anu Banerjee, John Sadler, Peter Zachar, Rebecca Gitlin, Jeannie Celestial, Sandra Macias, Joyce Chu, the late Nigel Field, Janice Habarth, Lynn Waelde, Rowena Gomez, Jarred Younger, David Spiegel, Fletcher Thompson, Helen Hsu, Maria St. John, Allison Briscoe-Smith, Barbara Stuart, Daniel Mathalon, Anda Kuo, Tom Boyce, Nicki Bush, Danielle Rubinov, Rick Hecht, Eve Ekman, Dean Schillinger, Shannon Wozniak, JayVon Muhammad, Karuna Leary, Dominique McDowell, Brooke Lavelle, and Jeff Duncan-Andrade.

  Thank you to the hundreds of individuals in whose healing I have been honored in recent years to participate through my work as a psychotherapist: it has been a privilege to walk the trail of transformation with you.

  Thank you to my friends. Trauma is a disease of loneliness—but you never gave up on me. I would like to acknowledge, in particular, Steve Rolles and the Rolles family, Lucy Platt, Nick Lockley, Gavin Rees, Edward Purver, Robin Batt, Victoria Coren Mitchell, Charlie Skelton, Tom Hooper, Peter Sweasey, Daniel Fugallo, Roy Ackerman, Ursula Macfarlane, Batul Mukhtiar, Lenny Oliker, Jamie Eder, Ronni Kass, Rama Kolesnikow, Shelby Campbell, Carlos Ambrozak, Alisa Mast, Timothy Wicks, Patsy Creedy, Jeffrey Schneider, Line Dam, Emilia De Marchis, Aaron Eash, Nettie Pardue, Jeff Pflueger, and Tara Kini. Space does not permit me to mention all the wonderful people who have touched and enriched my life: please know that I appreciate you.

  Finally, I would like to thank my mother, father, and brother, for the unforgettable life that the four of us once shared in a little town in England: I wouldn’t be here without you. Above all, I wish to thank my brilliant wife, my darling daughter, and my astonishing son, for your love; for your forbearance during the many months in which I was secluded at my writing desk; but most of all, for being your spectacular selves.

  Resources

  If you are in crisis, the following organizations are available to help:

  National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

  https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org

  1-800-273-8255

  Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline

  1-800-662-4357

  Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline

 
; https://www.childhelp.org/hotline

  1-800-422-4453

  National Runaway Safeline

  https://www.1800runaway.org/youth-teens

  1-800-786-2929

  National Association for Children of Addiction

  https://nacoa.org

  1-888-554-2627

  National Alliance on Mental Illness

  https://www.nami.org

  1-800-950-6264

  Notes

  1.Corpus Hermeticum XI: The Mind to Hermes, quoted in F. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964).

  2.A. Dietrich, “Transient Hypofrontality as a Mechanism for the Psychological Effects of Exercise,” Psychiatry Research 145, no. 1 (2006): 79–83.

  3.D. S. Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair (San Francisco: Paul Elder and Morgan Shepard, 1902).

  4.D. W. Winnicott, “Fear of Breakdown,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 1 (1974): 103–7.

  5.G. Bruno, De Umbris Idearum [On the Shadows of Ideas], trans. S. Gosnell (CreateSpace, 2013; Rome: Aracne, 1582).

  6.P. M. Bromberg, “Multiple Self-States, the Relational Mind, and Dissociation: A Psychoanalytic Perspective,” in Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-V and Beyond, ed. P. F. Dell and J. A. O’Neil (New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2009), 637–52.

  7.E. Nijenhuis, O. van der Hart, and K. Steele, “Trauma-Related Structural Dissociation of the Personality,” Activitas Nervosa Superior 52, no. 1 (2010): 1–23.