Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath
"Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" is a short story by Sylvia Plath that explores the psychological landscape through the eyes of a young assistant at a psychiatric clinic. The narrator develops an obsession with transcribing and compiling the dreams of the patients into her own personal "bible," viewing the enigmatic Johnny Panic as a god overseeing these dreamscapes. As she immerses herself in the dreams, she imagines the hidden fears and traumas of the patients, feeling a deep connection to them through the shared experience of their nightmares.
The narrative is rich with unsettling imagery, reflecting the frailty of the human body and psyche, and presents a modern hospital as a place of both healing and horror. The protagonist's journey culminates in a moment of intense vulnerability when she faces the threat of electroshock treatment, leading her to confront her own fears and the omnipresent figure of Johnny Panic. The story serves as a haunting meditation on the nature of fear, identity, and the psychological struggles inherent in the human experience. Through its vivid and disturbing depictions, Plath invites readers to consider the complexities of mental health and the often hidden terrors that reside within us all.
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Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath
First published: 1968
Type of plot: Psychological
Time of work: The late 1950's or early 1960's
Locale: Roxbury, Massachusetts
Principal Characters:
The narrator , a young woman working in a city hospital's psychological clinicJohnny Panic , her imaginary godMiss Taylor , her supervisorMiss Milleravage , an insensitive nurseThe clinic director , a mysterious figure
The Story
The narrator, a young assistant in a large metropolitan hospital's psychology clinic, obsessively transcribes patients' dreams, which she memorizes from their hospital records, into a book that she calls her bible of dreams. In her book, Johnny Panic is the god. In order to read more of the patients' dreams, she hides in the women's room until she thinks that everyone has left the office. (Practical difficulties and fears keep her from sneaking the records home.) When she returns to the office and begins to read the medical records, she is caught by the clinic director. He ushers her to another floor in the hospital, where Miss Milleravage (the narrator cannot remember the name exactly) gleefully chases her, seizes her dream notebook, and overpowers her. With a bedside "Tch, tch," Miss Milleravage and the director chide her for believing in Johnny Panic. The narrator realizes that she is about to be given electroshock treatment. She is stunned with fear but trusts Johnny Panic not to forget his own.
The young woman sees herself as a connoisseur of dreams, which she reads, memorizes, and compiles from medical records, savoring them and playing them over in her mind. She also imagines what is in the dreams of patients whose records she does not see. She identifies the patients by their real or imagined dreams, rather than by their names.
The narrator also has her own dream—one of complete terror, in which she is suspended over a half-transparent lake that is so large she cannot even see its shores. Gigantic dragons swim on the bottom of this lake; hideous things float to its surface: swarms of snakes, human embryos, dead bodies, monsters in human form, the cutting and crushing detritus of civilization (knives, paper cutters, pistons, nutcrackers, and automobile grilles), and finally a human face rising up. The frightfulness of this dream makes her world shrink, with the sun shriveling to the size of an orange, only chillier. The narrator knows that she has something in common with the patients; both her dreams and the patients' are spun by Johnny Panic; her compilation is Johnny Panic's bible.
The story is full of gruesome and fearful accounts of the frailty of the human body and psyche. Lumbar punctures, skin problems, tumors, nerve disorders, medical students who play catch with the livers of cadavers, and the scene of the impending electroshock are among the details that contribute to the impression that the modern hospital is, in its own hygienic and scientific way, as much a chamber of horrors as its medieval counterpart. At the moment that the narrator thinks that she is most lost, facing the obliteration of her personality and memory through electroshock, Johnny Panic's face appears in a nimbus of arc lights. The story accumulates details of horror and revulsion until finally the face of the god of fear is revealed.
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