A powerful, breathtaking memoir about a young man's descent into madness, and how running saved his life.
Life is movement. Even a leaf can turn toward the sun.
Shortly after moving to America in his twenties, Englishman Jason Thompson woke up one day in a psych ward in San Francisco, where he had been committed. After years of diagnoses, therapists, prescriptions, and hopeless attempts at keeping his seemingly fragile mind from slipping into darkness, Jason was certain his only escape from the torment of life was death. Inside the mental hospital, with long days of emptiness stretched before him, Jason began to run. What began as laps around an old hospital track turned into all-night marathons through the quiet of the mountains. Step by step by step, Jason's body and his mind begin to recover, strengthening with each step and every mile.
Now a gifted clinical psychologist and counselor, Thompson uses his expert knowledge of the inner workings of the brain, illness, and madness to show us why genetics, early trauma, and medication together plunged him into darkness, and how physical movement saved him. More than a medical mystery, Running Is a Kind of Dreaming is a hopeful and powerful account of the magnificent human body and its ability to recover from devastation, as well as the strength of spirit that allows us to endure and persevere. It is a beautifully told, meticulously detailed, and utterly entrancing memoir of a man who spent years distancing himself from his past, and then, finally, learned to run toward his present.
