Sylvia Plath's "Johnny Panic & the Bible of Dreams"
commentary by rbadac
Sylvia Plath wrote a story in December 1958 that was a departure from her usual style: "It's so queer & quite slangy that I think it may have a chance somewhere. Will send it out 10 x before I get sorry: by then I should have two or three more stories."
It was eventually published in Atlantic Monthly in September 1968, a bit late for her, unfortunately. The story is "Johnny Panic & the Bible of Dreams," & can be found in a collection of her stories, prose, & diary excerpts published under the same name by Harper & Row in 1979, edited by Ted Hughes.
Based on her job at the time in the records office for mental patients at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, it concerns a young lady who copies out the dreams of people who come in for consultation. She is keeping a parallel book of her own at home, which she calls Johnny Panic's Bible of Dreams, & which chronicles the domain of Johnny Panic himself, the Maker of them all.
She dreams herself of a lake that encompasses them, the dreams, in which are the real dragons: "Dream about these long enough and your feet and hands shrivel away when you look at them too closely," and the surface of which is "swarming with snakes, dead bodies puffed as blowfish, human embryos bobbing around in laboratory bottles like so many unfinished messages from the great I Am."
Patients continue to arrive, the woman whose tongue protrudes involuntarily because she detests people she must be openly nice to, the young man who works in a flourescent light factory & is afraid of the dark ("Johnny Panic injects a poetic element in this business you don't often find elsewhere"); she knows the secretary of the Observation Ward, Miss Milleravage, a hard woman who has seen more than most: "I've seen medical students cutting up cadavers, four stiffs to a classroom, about as recognizably human as Moby Dick, & the students playing catch with the dead men's livers. I've heard guys joke about sewing a woman up wrong after a delivery at the charity ward of the Lying-In. But I wouldn't want to see what Miss Milleravage would write off as the biggest laugh of all time. No thanks & then some. You could scratch her eyes with a pin & swear you'd struck solid quartz."
She longs to bring home one of the old casebooks to copy out at her leisure into the Bible, but decides instead to try staying at the Hospital after working hours.