Running is a Kind of Dreaming: A MemoirA 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.