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Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir
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About This Book
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 Thompson to a San Francisco psychiatric hospital in January 2005. For years, Thompson had been tortured by his mind. First there was depression, then ineffective but highly addictive medication, and finally therapy, where he fell further into an inescapable darkness. After a suicide attempt, he spent weeks confined on the psych ward, feeling alone and trapped. One afternoon, during an exercise break on the hospital rooftop basketball court, he experienced a sudden urge. Run, I thought. Run before it's too late and you're stuck down here. 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 perfection 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 breath-taking debut 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 mind to snap and sink, and the unorthodox treatment that finally saved him. Running Is A Kind Of Dreaming is a luminous literary testament to the universal human capacity to recover from our deepest wounds.
Reviews
"A therapist might grant that revisiting the minute details of childhood serves as a healing process, but readers may be less patient with Thompson's tireless self-examination, which sometimes crosses into self-indulgence."
"Sometimes that's his only choice, since his memory is imperfect."
"[Thompson] eloquently captures the beauty of communing with nature in details runners will soak up, but the focus of this memoir is about a man who had suffered terribly with depression since childhood, and, in later years, overcame drug and alcohol addiction, but not before attempting suicide ..."
"This will beam a ray of hope to those dealing with addiction, as well as their loved ones."
"Thompson paints an incredibly detailed picture of himself that lets readers inside his head."
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