Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  The doctors and nurses did their damnedest to get head cases like me back inside our bodies. Most days they had us draw or paint a picture or play the bongos. They taught us the idea from a school of psychotherapy called DBT that when contemplating a path that appeared to fork in two directions, it was possible to walk down the middle of them. They provided a fridge full of apples. I munched the apples at every opportunity, discovering that one side effect of my antipsychotic medication was a hunger that I could never satiate. I had always had a sweet tooth. I asked Miriam and my two other visitors to bring chocolate.

  The first of those two other visitors was Ned. One evening he came to visit bearing a chocolate croissant. He understood in general terms why I was back in the hospital. But Miriam had spared him some of the goriest details. It wasn’t altogether clear to him that I had really intended to die. “I did,” I told him. “I’m really glad you failed,” he said. “Because if you’d succeeded”—his voice cracked with tears—“I’d have been so sad.”

  Sad. I had heard anger from Miriam and Sebastian. I had heard confusion from Dr. Browning. Ned was the first person from whom I heard sadness. The first person who didn’t make me feel like feeling suicidal was a sin that demanded an apology or a weird sickness with a scary label. Ned would miss me if I was gone.

  My second visitor was Tara, Ned’s wife. They had met about six months after I met Miriam, and he had moved to San Francisco to live with her. She was a performance artist with elfin features and the creative spirit of the sort of person whom I wondered might be an actual elf. When she was in her teens she was involved in a near-fatal car accident. In the midst of the collision she had a strange experience. Time and space dissolved. Everything was one. In the aftermath of the accident, she had no fear of death. No fear of anything at all. Nothing was solid. The only reality was Now. The point of being alive and conscious was to create something magical. She lived immersed in the present so acutely it seemed at times to border on disabling. If she threw a party, she wouldn’t do a single thing to clean up her apartment until the guests were arriving. It was nice to see Tara’s kind face and hear her wise and gentle voice. I told her about all my worrying and thinking and every single uncertain thing of the million uncertain things in my life and how I didn’t know what was going to happen. “That’s right!” she said. “You don’t know! Anything could happen!”

  IT WAS A SUNNY DAY when I followed the other patients and the counselors guarding us to the hospital rooftop. Through the high fence that bordered the blacktop to stop us from jumping off the building, I gazed at the city far below and the ocean stretching to the western horizon and far off in the distance the dark green pyramid of Mount Tamalpais. It was the first time I’d been outside in a long while. It felt good to see the horizon. I joined a group of patients throwing a ball, a young Japanese American man who talked to himself all the time—it was constant, this verbatim transcript of every single random private thought—and a tall, white, skinny meth addict who would sob like a little boy in group and make me wish I could still cry and a tall woman who down on the ward walked around with earplugs to block out all the voices she was hearing and who told me she was in telepathic communication with Eminem and had written half his songs.

  “Five minutes, guys,” said one of the counselors. “Chaos, violence, war, hell,” said the Japanese American man. Soon I would be taken back down below. I knew I wouldn’t see the sky again for many hours or even days. Not until the next exercise break tomorrow. Assuming tomorrow was a weekday. Monday through Friday they took us upstairs for thirty minutes on the blacktop in the afternoon. But Saturday and Sunday, they kept us down below. The counselors went home to their families, and the only staff who stuck around were the nurses. You were lucky if you saw a doctor for more than a couple of minutes to ask how you were feeling on your latest psych med cocktail and how much would you still really rather be dead and gone than go on living. What day it was, who knew.

  Run, I thought. Run before it’s too late and you’re stuck down there. Right now. Run.

  I set off at a sprint from the basketball hoop to the other end of the blacktop, and then back and forth, over and over again, until I could feel my chest moving up and down with each explosion of my breath; feel the beads of sweat forming on my forehead and then dripping down my face; feel the sensation of fast motion through space, see how my thoughts fell silent as my feet pounded on the ground, how the exertion became a kind of tangible bodily pain that soothed the intangible wound in my soul, a good hurt that filled in the aching abyss where the feeling of being me once had been; feel how the ground one step ahead of me transformed into ground underfoot, solid and undeniable, reminding me of all the parts that lived and moved in me that had nothing to do with thought. I kept on running until the counselors led me back to the ward.

  The Ground Does the Thinking

  My eyes open a few seconds before my alarm goes off. As a night’s sleep goes, two hours is about as minimal as you can get. But even this short kip has worked wonders on my brain. I feel totally rested and awake. I’m in a good mood and excited to get back on the trail. All of the head fuzziness and weird uncanny fears I was feeling just a couple of hours ago before I lay down are completely gone. It is really astonishing what sleep can do. No wonder insomnia drives people absolutely nuts and torturers use sleep deprivation as a weapon.

  I don’t have any clear recall of what I dreamed in the brief stretch of kip I’ve just woken up from. But I know I did dream. None of the images have stayed with me on waking. But I have a vague recollection of my mind becoming this crazy psychedelic maelstrom, like a Disneyland ride on LSD, and of my lucidity now upon waking as the outcome of the dreamworld chaos that preceded it, like calm waters after a storm’s swept through. I get out of my sleeping bag and sit on a camping chair while Miriam goes to get me a plate of food from the aid station. I clean my feet. I change my socks. Miriam returns from the tent. “Thank you,” I say. “Bye, darling,” she says. We kiss goodbye. I run down the trail that leads me back into the forest. In the cool air, with a clear head and a belly full of food and the feeling of Miriam’s love still wrapped around me, I fly along the trail as it leads downhill through the beckoning darkness of the forest. It’s about four in the morning.

  The sun rises. I pass several runners. I wish everyone good morning. I mean it. The morning really is good. It might well be the best morning I’ve ever had. I reach the top of a steep hill from which the route descends several hundred feet to a road on the kind of narrow, rough-hewn path, strewn with rocks and tree roots, zigzagging through waist-high bushes and little trees, that a reasonable person would navigate with caution. But right now I’m far from reasonable: run far enough on minimal sleep, and reason gives way to a dreamy flow of feeling. I leap down the mountain, flinging my body left and right like a downhill ski racer.

  Everything is moving. I have the sense of the ground rushing beneath me at a speed that exceeds my capacity to make any conscious decision. I have disappeared. The captain of the conscious ship of selfhood, the I, the planner and rememberer, surrenders his command post. Mind and body are being propelled by deeper forces. One might say that I stop running, because there is no I. What emerges is two feet dancing, root to rock, a sudden turn, the impression of Earth itself as running. I don’t need to think about how I’ll get down the mountain. Sometimes you don’t need to think about the ground. The ground does the thinking for you.

  THE STEEP DESCENT ENDS at a cul-de-sac about three hundred vertical feet above Lake Tahoe. I’m back in civilization. The asphalt feels artificial and alien. I sit down on a curb to take care of my feet. I take off my shoes and shake out all the dust and pebbles and little sticks and bits of foliage. I take my time cleaning my blackened feet with alcohol wipes. I dress one or two small blisters between my toes. I dry my feet with baby powder. I put on a fresh pair of socks. The course markers lead me down the road to the edge of the lake. As I walk along the road, I can see a caravan of hagg
ard ultrarunners marching on the sidewalk ahead. I head in their direction. It’s about eight in the morning, and there are joggers and walkers out down by the lake edge with us, out for a casual bit of exercise on a nice Saturday morning, their faces registering an emotion partway between astonishment and pity upon hearing that our morning started twenty-four hours ago.

  The closer I get to the lake, the bigger the houses. I reach the northern lakeshore. I pass huge mansions with metal gates and stone walls in front and surveillance cameras and signs that say PRIVATE PROPERTY—NO TRESPASSING. Beyond the gates and warning signs, I see no evidence of human habitation. Beyond the mansions, I can see the giant azure mirror of the lake, shining in the dawn, circled by distant mountains. The mansions stand empty of their wealthy occupants. Asphalt smothers the earth. This is Washoe land. Before the Washoe, the land belonged to no one. Now the land lies slashed into little pieces, colonized by so-and-so as mine. At times like this, seeing civilization through high-country eyes, I understand why I used to need MDMA. My world felt split into bits back then. With the Eye of Cyclops, all I could see was the patch of reality in front of me. It was easy to forget how everything fit together: even that it ever fit together at all. Easy to forget that the way I thought of things, split into little fragments of reality, was just my way of seeing. When I was high and dancing, everything felt connected again and whole. The feeling sometimes lingered into the morning. But then it was gone. The comedown, as we ravers used to call it. And then I felt more disconnected and alone than ever, stuck in the empty mansion of my isolated mind. The feeling of bliss and unity on the dance floor was impossible to remember. Over time, this became its own sort of violence. But now I’m down by the lake, and I can still remember the feeling of running in the high country, seeing the horizon from far above.

  VII

  Saturn

  The Field

  The road by the lake leads to the highway, on the other side of which I can see an aid station. Tunnel Creek: mile 65. There’s no sign of Miriam or my kids at Tunnel Creek. I get why. Miriam would have needed to drive from Brockway back to the rental house to get the kids and then schlep all the way to Tunnel Creek. I bet she’s in bed. Good. I feel just about competent to take care of myself at this aid station. But only just about. I can feel the wheels of my thinking mind grinding just to manage even simple decisions. Volunteers are making pancakes on a little electric griddle. I have this sense of a gap between the drive to keep moving and the need to attend to a nonnegotiable but at this point fuzzy set of basic needs. To get the pancakes entails approaching a volunteer and saying, Please can I have a pancake? But hang on a second. What’s this over here? Potato chips. Slices of watermelon. Would that make more sense first? What about changing shoes and socks, drinking . . . Is there anything else I’m supposed to do now? Is there an order? I stand by the table, waiting for my pancake. “What can I do you for, 108?” says one of the volunteers. “Please . . . can I have a pancake?” I manage to say. The volunteer puts the pancake mix on the griddle. I pick up a paper plate and load it with a quesadilla, some chips, and a couple of slices of melon. I pour a cup of coffee. I find a nearby camping chair. I sit down with my plate of food and my cup of coffee. I put the coffee cup in the little cup holder, put my plate of food on the chair, and then go look for my drop bag so I can change my socks. The bags are laid out on a tarp about a hundred feet down a slight slope closer to the road. I approach the pile. My eyes scan through the pile until I find the gray bag with my race number on it. I pick up the bag and go back to my chair. I put down the bag. I pick up my food plate and sit down. I put the food plate on the ground while I open the bag and hunt through it for a fresh pair of socks and a medical kit. I find what I’m looking for. I take off my shoes and socks. I wipe my feet down with alcohol wipes and dry them with baby powder. I wrap my blistered toes in medical tape. I scarf the pancake and chips and melon and quesadilla and chug the coffee and then I put on my fresh socks and heave myself from the chair before my legs seize up, and I yell, “108 heading out—thanks, everyone!” and I put on my earbuds, blaring house music, and march uphill in the morning light at the start of another massive climb back toward the high country. It’s only nine in the morning and already it feels hot.

  I’M HIKING UPHILL AROUND noon on a two-thousand-foot slog back to the high country. I’m facing east, with the sun right above me, baking down. Maybe it’s not actually hotter than this time yesterday. But it sure feels that way. The experience of being outside in the elements has lost the smiley vacation feel of the early hours of the first climb yesterday and has turned into a feeling of exposure. The sun didn’t change. I did. I’m tired and grumpy, and I have the start of this fuzzy-headed feeling that I know I need to do something about pronto. If I don’t cool off soon, I’ll end up like Boiling Man yesterday.

  I spot a little creek. I drench my shirt and cap. The instant the cold mountain water hits my head, I feel better. As I hike up the trail, I can feel the water trickling down my neck. I eat a GU and pick up my pace.

  The trail climbs about two thousand feet in around five miles on the way toward the Tahoe Rim Trail. A memory comes to me of a summer’s day eleven years ago when I first ran there. My mind fills with images of the trail back then and the identical one now in front of me, two trails separated in clock time yet merging in my consciousness into one, as if each footfall on the ground propels me on a backward step in time.

  It was my second attempt at a fifty-miler, on a hot day in early July about two years after I got out of the hospital. I stood among the runners in the cold dawn. Nobody asked me where I was from or what I did for a living. I’d left behind all the parts of me that weren’t about getting my body up and down fifty miles of mountain trails. High school dropout or summa cum laude—it wasn’t going to matter at ten thousand feet. It was chilly before the sun came up. I stood shivering next to a generator for warmth until the race director summoned us to the start line a little before 6 a.m. I heard the countdown from ten to zero and then I ran down the trail through a dark pine forest, the dusty ground illuminated in ghostly circles from a constellation of runners’ headlamps, mirroring the stars, luminous above. The runners soon spread out and I had the trail to myself. By sunrise I had climbed to a high ridge from which I saw the lake thousands of feet below to the west, framed by a line of snow-flecked peaks. I followed the pink ribbons that marked the course every few hundred yards. I felt relieved from any worry about getting lost, from worry about anything. I knew where I was going, but I was in no rush to get there. Legs flowing, breathing easy, I traveled each mile in around ten or eleven minutes, a comfortable pace that felt just right—not too fast, but not slow either. With enough snacks and a nap now and then, I felt I could run like this across the whole world. I’d crossed a frontier into the unknown, aware that I was going to need to make do now with the body I had and not the fitter body I might have wanted. My life at home in San Francisco was in the past and the finish was far in the future, leaving the next few miles as the only reality.

  Everywhere I looked there were beautiful lakes and mountains. A feeling came over me that I hadn’t experienced in a long time, perhaps ever. I felt calm and alert and every sense dialed up a notch, the blue alpine sky and the smell of pine needles and sunscreen and the patch of trail right in front of me transforming with each step and the ease of my legs flowing and my chest rising and falling all merged and dancing together: it was bliss. I moved in this state of rapture longer than seemed legal. The Sierra Nevada is made from quadrillions of tons of granite, and my feeling of bliss felt equally massive, big enough to block out, at least for a while, all the anxious thoughts I’d been coping with for years, to provide a bodily answer to the ceaseless and seemingly unsolvable mysteries of my past that had put me in the hospital. As the hours passed and my legs tired from miles and miles of ascending and then descending steep mountain trails and the temperature climbed into the 70s and then into the 80s, I slowed and felt weak and a little l
ight-headed, and I was suddenly aware of myself as isolated and seemingly close to total exhaustion, miles from help, and needing to stop soon while I still could voluntarily, rather than risk becoming a story in the local newspaper: ENGLISH MENTAL PATIENT SLAIN BY HIGH SIERRA HEATSTROKE, STUPIDITY. I followed the turns up the trail to a summit that I started to believe might actually be mythical, a symbolic rather than literal peak that would only come into existence if I believed in it. In response to the question Why am I doing this? I turned my mind toward each perception itself—a tree, a stone, the sun—as an answer in the form that Yoda might give to a young Jedi’s inquiry about the nature of the Force: Keep going on the trail you must.

  It was hard later to remember what I spent all those hours thinking about. But afterward, the long void of non-thinking felt like a kind of thought, but of a different quality than the thinking I did sitting down, although that difference eluded words. The thoughts I could recall were profundities like Ow, that hurts, when I stubbed my toe on a rock, or Peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches are so much tastier when I’m hungry! or Wow, I’m tired—when I was, uh, tired. But those thoughts arose within a space of non-thought that had tangible qualities, as if the trail at my feet and the trail of my mind were the same trail. The state had some similarities to the way I used to feel on psychedelic mushrooms, but it had a quieter, more sustainable feeling with fewer fireworks.