A review by elfs29
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

4.75

Perhaps I should give this five stars for the brilliance of Johnny Panic and The Bible of Dreams alone for its maybe one of my favourite short stories I’ve ever read. None of these are bad but of course collections fathomed over a lifetime always take dips, but not only were these surprisingly consistent but some were absolutely exceptional. Of course, for Plath is a seriously gifted writer and a brilliant mind. It was especially fascinating seeing events that crop up again and again in her writing, feelings and experiences she hunkers to completely perfectly depict and understand. I found Tongues of Stone a fascinating precursor to The Bell Jar, as well as Stone Boy with The Dolphin, The Wishing Box, The Fifty Ninth Bear and Above The Oxbow amongst my favourites. I could write at length about any of them, but really here Plath proves herself to be an almost perfect writer, with never tiring prose and a very honest imagination.

I've a dream of my own. My one dream. A dream of dreams.
In this dream there's a great half-transparent lake stretching away in every direction, too big for me to see the shores of it, if there are any shores, and I'm hanging over it, looking down from the glass belly of some helicopter. At the bottom of the lake deep I can only guess at the dark masses moving and heaving are the real dragons. The ones that were around before men started living in caves and cooking meat over fires and figuring out the wheel and the alphabet. Enormous isn't the word for them; they've got more wrinkles than Johnny Panic himself. Dream about these long enough and your feet and hands shrivel away when you look at them too closely. The sun shrinks to the size of an orange, only chillier, and you've been living in Roxbury since the last ice age. No place for you but a room padded soft as the first room you knew of, where you can dream and float, float and dream, till at last you actually are back among those great originals and there's no point in any dreams at all.
It's into this lake people's minds run at night, brooks and gutter-trickles to one borderless common reservoir. It bears no resemblance to those pure sparkling-blue sources of drinking water the suburbs guard more jealously than the Hope diamond in the middle of pine woods and barbed fences.
It's the sewage farm of the ages, transparence aside.