#2: Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath

Released: 1977

Available in: Johnny Panic and The Bible of Dreams

 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reissue edition, February 2, 2000)

I have a guilty secret. Of all Sylvia Plath’s work, I have read only Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (and other Prose Writings) and Ariel . No Bell Jar, no Colossus , no Winter Trees.

Had I only ever read the title story of Plath’s collected prose, I would still consider myself a very lucky man, because as a collection of thoughts, insights and reflections, it's simply breathtaking.

The Story

An unnamed narrator works as Assistant to the Secretary in an out-patient department of the Clinics Building in the City Hospital; at least that’s what she tells people, avoid questions about the true nature of her work. In fact, she records the daytime trauma and night time dreams of mental health patients, as prescribed by her bosses: “Trouble with mother, trouble with father, trouble with the bottle, the bed, the headache that bangs home and blacks out the sweet world for no known reason.”

For the narrator, these troubles come down to one thing and one thing only, “Panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all – it’s the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.”

In her night time hours, she takes these recorded dreams and evokes them from memory, soaks them into her own soul so that she can become a dream connoisseur, a collector, a lover of dreams for Johnny Panic’s sake. As the narrator charts various patients’ journeys, she hints that said recollections of dreams is not nearly enough anymore. She starts daydreaming of taking a record book full of dreams home from the office, so she can mull over it in her own time, even if it means staying up all night.

Instead, she stays late one night, hiding in the bathroom until everyone else has left for the day. She makes her way to the record books cabinet, selecting the oldest book on the bottom shelf and taking it back to her desk. And as fantasies of an illicit double life take hold, she reads the dreams, takes them in until it is near 6am when she notices the crack of blue light that is now coming from the now open door of the cubicle beside her...

Why it Sticks

In Johnny Panic, Plath found a prose form tapped her poetic spirit in a way that none of her poems had up to that point. Indeed, the voice present in Ariel is hinted at in the dream listings, Plath spitting out pungent imagery as if it dwelled deep beneath her necessary calm facade.

More importantly, Johnny Panic feels free of the structural restraints of standard expectations of the form, taking the reader on a free-wheeling ride on a mental landscape that is both terrifying and intriguing.

As an exploration of madness, sanity and all points in between, it is striking, even by today’s standards. It is worthy of inclusion on many levels: the characters are striking, the bureaucratic setting belies the striking imagery and the journey of our unnamed narrator echoes Icarus, as she sinks into Johnny Panic’s expanding sea of dreams.

Plath once wrote of her writing that “it is the hate, the paralysing fear that gets in my way and stops me; Once that is worked clear of, I will flow.” In Johnny Panic she found a way out, if only temporarily.