Running Is a Kind of Dreaming
A Memoir
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A powerful, breathtaking memoir about a young man's descent into madness, and how running saved his life.
“Voluntary or involuntary?” asked the nurse who admitted J. M. Thompson to a San Francisco psychiatric hospital in January 2005. Following years of depression, ineffective medication, and therapy that went nowhere, Thompson feared he was falling into an inescapable darkness. He decided that death was his only exit route from the torture of his mind. After a suicide attempt, he spent weeks confined on the psych ward, feeling scared, alone, and trapped. One afternoon during an exercise break he experienced a sudden urge. “Run, I thought. Run before it’s too late and you’re stuck down there. Right now. Run. ”
The impulse that starts with sprints across a hospital rooftop turns into all night runs in the mountains. Through motion and immersion in the beauty of nature, Thompson finds a way out of the hell of depression and drug addiction. Step by step, mile by mile, his body and mind heal. In this lyrical, vulnerable, and breathtaking memoir, J. M. Thompson, now a successful psychologist, retraces the path that led him from despair to wellness, detailing the chilling childhood trauma that caused his depression, and the unorthodox treatment that saved him. Running Is a Kind of Dreaming is a luminous literary testament to the universal human capacity to recover from our deepest wounds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this stark debut, Thompson, a trauma psychologist and ultramarathoner, recounts his difficult path from severe depression and substance abuse to sobriety. After meeting his wife at the Burning Man Festival in 1999, the author emigrated from England to San Francisco to marry her. Struggling with the severe depression that he'd lived with since childhood and medicating his pain with a variety of drugs—including crystal meth and cocaine—Thompson checked in to a psychiatric ward in 2005. Later, while in recovery, he channeled his energy into ultra-long-distance running (running anywhere from 50 to 200 miles), opting to let his body's endorphins lift his spirits and help him rebuild "a feeling of togetherness" with his family. "Ultrarunning can sound like insanity," he writes. "But ultrarunners understand its mad logic: running for days and nights nonstop brings you right up to the edge of breakdown but also to the opportunity for breakthrough." This "breakthrough" eventually led Thompson to seek a career in psychology and a career helping others work through the same shame, guilt, and fear that he details here with heart-wrenching clarity. This will beam a ray of hope to those dealing with addiction, as well as their loved ones.
