Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  What goes for muscles and tendons goes for everything else in the ultrarunner’s body and mind. Avoid taking care of blisters and they turn into bleeding wounds. Skip stretching out tight calves and they turn into horrible cramps. Skimp on food and you wind up woozy and horizontal somewhere, wondering where you went wrong. All of this is, if not preventable, at least predictable and to some extent manageable if you take care of little problems before they spiral into big ones. I climb across the rocks to the side of the creek where I’ve left my shoes. I can feel how after the cold soak my legs feel more limber. I dry my feet with a bandanna and put on fresh, clean socks. Then I put my shoes back on and climb over the mound and back down to the trail. This whole excursion to get water and soak my legs and feet and change socks must have taken thirty minutes, maybe even longer. But it was so worth it. I might as well have had a leg transplant from someone ten years younger. As I run down the trail, I can’t remember ever moving before with quite this same sense of strength and flow and freedom.

  English Male, Disheveled

  I woke to the sound of an old man snoring. He had the comatose look of a man sheltered like Rip Van Winkle in oblivious shut-eye to the horrors of the waking world for the entire preceding century, the lucky bastard. Consciousness: what a burden.

  “Get up, boys. It’s breakfast time,” said a nurse, entering the room. In the bed next to Rip Van Winkle was a bearded man in a biker jacket, reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. He had read the book six times in a row, he said. By the time he got to the end of the book, he couldn’t remember the beginning. But he was goddamn lucky he could still focus on a book, he said, on account of there being no TV in the room and not much else to do. “If we put TVs in the rooms, you guys would never come out,” said the nurse who’d shown me around the night before, in between letting me stash my spare underpants in my cubby and confiscating my shoelaces.

  I went to the bathroom. I washed myself in the shower with a little bar of hospital soap. There was this weird chemical scent in the shower from the kind of cheap disinfectant they use in jails and public schools in poor neighborhoods and other places where people are trapped and powerless. The smell of confinement.

  I went to the dining room and took my place at a table upon which was laid a plastic tray of inedible food in a seat across from the Prisoner of Azkaban. I ate some oatmeal and drank some decaffeinated coffee.

  I followed the other patients to a little room at the back of the unit. I sat on a couch facing a window through which gray sky and eucalyptus trees were visible. There were about ten of us patients in the room, many still in blue hospital pajamas. The Prisoner had the worst headache in history, he said, from his latest round of electroconvulsive treatment, or ECT. In addition to the plot of Harry Potter, he had no memory of the month prior to his hospitalization. Yet now he wanted to kill himself only a couple of times a day instead of every waking millisecond, he said. Better to lose his memory than his three score years and ten. The therapist gave us notepads and told us about how molehills were often misconstrued as mountains and asked us to write down our molehills, and I tried to think of what my molehills might be, but all I could picture were the actual moles that once left little mounds of dirt in the garden at Cannon Road, a whole bunch of them, appearing overnight like magic, in this amazing regular pattern. “Let’s hear about some of those molehills,” said the therapist, and a young Hispanic woman said that the police had taken her to the hospital because she wanted to drown her baby in the bathtub, and until she took the pills she thought she had turned into La Llorona, the ghost of a lady who killed her kids after her husband left her and then was condemned to wander the Earth in search of her lost children for the rest of time.

  Late that morning a young woman in a white coat found me in my room and introduced herself in the perkiest tone I had heard in rather a long while. “Hello, Mr. Thompson! I’m Dr. Browning, one of the psychiatry residents,” she said. “I’ll be the main doctor taking care of you.”

  She saw a slender English male, disheveled, good eye contact, speech normal in volume. I saw a doctor several years my junior, a person who’d likely had all her shit together since kindergarten and aced every test and been kind to dogs and spent her gap year helping orphans and had her choice of fancy medical schools and specialties but picked the really hard thing, the hospital where half the patients wanted to die instead of go on living, or wondered if perhaps they were already dead; a person who stood poised upon the threshold into grown-up life while I was still singing karaoke in a toy store; a person who surely looked at a loser like me and wondered what had gone wrong with him, and along with her pills and notepad pulled out lines like That sounds really hard to disguise her pity.

  WHAT TIME IS NOW? The present moment has a duration. Listen to the notes do, re, mi with the sounds close together and your mind binds them in a musical phrase: do-re-mi. Separate the sounds by a long gap and you hear them as disconnected notes: do, pause, re, pause, mi. Separate the sounds by only a millisecond and they pile on top of one another, sounding as if they are being heard simultaneously. These upper and lower thresholds of perception define the borders of now. As the nineteenth-century German philosopher Edmund Husserl described in his writings on the psychology of time perception, now has three parts: an echo of the moment just gone, the immediate present, and an anticipation of the moment to come.8 You don’t experience a stream of disconnected moments: the present always enfolds both the time just gone and the expected time just ahead.

  But there’s no bright dividing line between the feeling of now and its recession into the past. The present is elastic, shrinking in emergency to a tiny sphere, expanding in reverie or reminiscence to enclose echoes of times past. Trauma and tragedy can split the flow of time awareness into a feeling of before and after, as if the world prior to the instant of disaster and the world that succeeded it are forever and irreparably severed, even if before in literal terms was only yesterday.

  I sat down at the piano. I put my fingers on the keys. I hadn’t played since my teens, but the memory of the major scales was still in my hands. I watched the fingers of my right hand press the keys in succession from middle C up an octave—do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do—and then back down again. I placed the little finger of my left hand an octave below middle C and then both hands moved together. Up and down I went, from do to do, feeling the rhythm become smoother, the pressure and velocity of each keystroke more even. I felt a sort of solace in sensing how each finger’s movement always matched its corresponding sound, the right thumb’s do, the index finger’s re, the mi of the middle finger. Soon I switched from C major to D major, and then E major, F major, G major, A major, and B major, and as I listened to the sounds climbing up and then down again, the circular monologue in my head went quiet. I experienced the notes of each scale forming a kind of whole, how re contained do’s echo and the anticipation of mi, how the sound just gone and the sound still to come, though nonexistent, had a kind of presence, the way now spilled over into portions of time past and the yet-to-be. I stopped playing and went for lunch. As the circling sound of do-re-mi fell silent, all I could hear was the loop of sad and frightened thinking in my mind.

  A NURSE LED ME into a tiny windowless room. “Hello, I’m Dr. Hewitt, the attending,” said the woman who greeted me. She had long black curly hair and the somber air of a serious person put in charge of a dismal situation. She wore a Timex Ironman waterproof watch with stopwatch and lap-counting functions. “Tell me how long you’ve been feeling depressed,” she said. The doctor listened to me as I spoke, scribbling notes now and then. “Your depression has lasted longer than most,” she said. “But depression is a finite phenomenon.”

  In the evening I sat in the dayroom, listening to other patients as they spoke.

  It was almost impossible for me to speak. But I could listen. And to do so was to shift the focal point of my awareness outside myself: for a moment my painful inner monologue fell silent.

&n
bsp; “I’ve never not been sad or scared,” said a middle-aged woman with short brown hair. “Sometimes the sadness is worse, other times fear. Sometimes I’m sad but not afraid or scared, and other times I’m sad and scared both at once. But whichever it is I feel terrible, all the time. Except when I’m sleeping. I do get good sleep, so I’m lucky, I suppose—I know there are lots of folks like us who don’t. Yeah, I’m lucky. I have an apartment and this little job in a store. I think about all those poor people out on the street, you know. I have it so much easier. But I think that and then I’m even sadder and it all just seems pointless. Life, I mean. Really, no point. Nothing and nobody to live for. No husband, no kids, no friends. And it’s not like I do some job that makes any difference to anyone. I work in a stationery store, for chrissakes. But I guess Mom and Dad would miss me. They’re old now. So I need to wait. But it’s hard, you know? ’Cause I think I’ve really tried. I’ve been good. I take the pills. Never miss a single one. Never miss a single therapy appointment. I must have done ’em all, every type of pill and therapy. But everyone has limits, right? Can’t I go? Maybe Mom and Dad would understand. But I worry it would hurt them. People always say, ‘Hold on. It gets better.’ Like it’s this religion we’re supposed to believe in: It Will Get Better. But I’m not sure I have the willpower left to believe in anything. I’m tired. So tired. I wanna keep trying. I do. But the word that comes to mind is cynical. I get cynical. I wanna think one day I’ll be happy. Someday, somehow, somewhere over the rainbow. But I’m running out of energy. I’m not sure how much longer I can keep on going.” The Shopkeeper paused. Then she said, “I don’t know if any of this makes sense to you.” “It does,” I said. “You know something,” said the Shopkeeper, “you’re a great listener.”

  “HOW ARE YOU FEELING this morning, Mr. Thompson?” said Dr. Browning, entering my room. Several days had passed since my arrival on the ward. I was in a state of undress. The doctor averted her gaze as I put on my shirt. “Any suicidal thoughts at all?”

  Mr. Thompson—her formal salutation induced a feeling of distance between us, constraining any capacity I might have had to respond with candor.

  Nothing had changed since the door on the locked unit had closed behind me five days before, except my being stuck inside. If I went back outside, I’d still be me, the world’s worst worrywart. But I would be me outside. I could go get drilled by giant waves. Eat whatever I wanted. Shave without a nurse in surveillance. All that being inside did was put the world’s worst worrywart somewhere with nothing to do. Being inside just added boredom to all the worry. How am I feeling, Dr. Browning? Much worse, if you really want to know. And I know you do want to know. You’re really asking. It’s not some bullshit question. You find out people’s feelings for a living! I know it’s supposed to help, having another person know how you’re feeling. Trust no one, keep the secrets, stuff it all inside where no one else can see . . . Isn’t that how I’ve lived my whole life? And look where it got me. So I guess I should tell you, if I want you to help me. That would mean saying, Yes, Dr. Browning, lots and lots of suicidal thoughts. One every minute! But then you’d know I’m not getting better, and you wouldn’t let me out of here. Then I’d be stuck inside. And I don’t see how that would help. Show my insides to you on the outside so I don’t feel so alone there, and you’ll keep me locked up in this place.

  Unlike an illness of the liver or the lung, an affliction of the mind is much less conspicuous in any medical scan than the credulous exaggeration of rainbow-colored brain maps in popular science articles typically tends to imply. In reality, the doctors had my words to go on and not much else. They could listen to my silence. They could listen to what I didn’t say. They could observe my movements on the ward and interactions with other patients and from this paucity of data they would infer a picture of my mind and in particular my stance upon a single question: Did I want to live or die? How I yearned for the kind of trust in the care of another that would make it possible for me to answer this question with candor. But if I let Dr. Browning know my true thoughts and feelings, I feared it would turn her from doctor into captor. “I’m feeling fine now,” I said. “Much better, actually. I’d like to go home soon if that’s all right.” I have her fooled. She saw right through me. “If patient decides to leave AMA,”* she wrote in my medical chart that night and I read years later, “strongly consider 5150.”*

  One morning I found a man with a bandaged forearm sitting at the piano. I watched his fingers flurry across the keys to produce a sound like a maestro in a concert hall. The music started loud and fast and angry and then got slow and quiet.

  “That’s incredible,” I said. “What is it?”

  He glanced over his shoulder to reply. “Holst,” he said. “The Planets.”

  “I thought you needed a whole orchestra for that,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s something I put together,” he said.

  “You must be a genius,” I said.

  “Whatever,” he said with a shrug.

  I listened to Holst until he finished playing, and then I returned to my circular walk around the ward.

  YOU CAN’T THINK YOUR way out of severe depression. Indeed, a certain kind of runaway thinking is one of depression’s defining characteristics. A group of brain regions connected to learning, memory, and the experience of self-awareness, called the default mode network (DMN), goes haywire as the thinking mind turns in on itself. Look at the neuroimaging maps from a person with major depression and you’ll see the signs of neural signals sprinting up and down the paths between the interconnecting regions that constitute the DMN like a panicky runner lost in a labyrinth of forking forest trails.9 But that part of the brain goes quiet when a person disengages from the inner world of thinking and remembering and engages in their five senses and the outside world. You can’t turn off the DMN—remove those regions of the brain and you’d no longer know or remember things; it’s part of what makes human consciousness so special. But the sphere of human consciousness is larger than reason. Humans are also embodied, feeling, sensing beings—creatures who see and touch and hear, who love and hate and fear, who feel shame and compassion and joy. This embodied and feeling dimension of consciousness is neither more nor less important than the thinking mind. Being human means doing both, finding a way to think, feel, and move between these elements of the mind and integrate them.

  I circled the corridor of the ward lost in thought: worrying, remembering, contemplating one pole of something binary and then the other, pondering where I should live and what I should do for a living, considering whether or not I was ready to be a father, feeling my mind form knots with every terrified rotation, sensing that despite my wish to put an end to this ceaseless cogitation it would not end until one pole of any binary made more sense in a final and irrevocable form—resolving, for instance, that California was doubtless superior to England, yet in the instant of determining California as superior, feeling the loss of England as a possibility, forever sealed off and now unreachable, and then thinking, No, the answer must be England, but then feeling California likewise vanish into oblivion. As my thoughts continued to circle in this manner, I walked around the unit, reflecting on my awareness that my mind had run in precisely this intolerable form for every second of every minute not only since that morning but for what felt like many months if not years. Something had gone wrong in my brain. My disturbance felt so profound that I assumed it had to be permanent. How I wished for something or someone to help me! Please, oh God, please help me, won’t you? But I didn’t believe in God. I didn’t believe in anyone—least of all myself. It was hard to see the point of carrying on the charade of hoping for recovery or rescue. I was alone. Abandoned. No one was listening. No one had ever been listening. If anyone was ever going to do anything to put an end to all my worrying and all my ceaseless oscillation between this thing or that thing or this thing or that thing and help me run away from my unbearable, unspeakable, unending runaway thinking, it was me, only me,
just me.

  Gravity

  Trees. Everywhere I look, trees. A switchback fifty feet ahead. Left, right, left right. Plant one pole, then the other. Huff, puff, get it done. Reach the turn. Go right. What’s ahead? Yup: more trees. Another switchback, a couple hundred feet ahead. Left, right, left right. Huff, puff, right, left, plant the right pole then the left one, breathe in, breathe out, huff-puff, get it done. Reach the turn. Guess what? More trees. . . .

  It’s been going on like this forever. I haven’t been slogging uphill through the forest since the beginning of time. It just feels that way. Judging by the course profile, I’m somewhere in the middle of a two-thousand-foot climb. At some point I’ll reach the top of the climb, then head all the way down again to the mile-30 aid station, by a little town near the lake’s northwestern shore, Tahoe City. But it’s hard to translate numbers that land in my mind like pure abstraction—two thousand feet—into grunts and fatigue and the reality of a destination beyond the limits of what I can see right in front of me, or expect to see twenty or ten or even five of these turns ahead, at some point becoming here.

  In theory I could stop, look at the satellite map on a GPS app called Gaia, which the race organizers asked us all to download, so I’d know exactly where I am. But it seems like too much effort. Not to mention, sometimes it feels like I’m better off not knowing. When you know how far it is to the end, and there’s still a long way to go, that can be a tough kind of knowledge to bear. Fixate on some future that isn’t here yet, and the present is a bad place to be. Drop that fixation, and the present is neither good nor bad. It just is.