Fan CastingJohnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1975)

Based on the vivid, violent, body-horror, surreal, fantastical, postmodernist, absurdist, allegorical, semi-autobiographical, mechanophobic, hyper-rational, short-story written by Sylvia Plath in 1958. The story sees a young woman working as the Assistant to the Secretary in an insane asylum's out-patient clinic. She transcribes doctors' analyses of mentally ill patients. She copies dream-notes by Johnny Panic to compile them into a "bible" and spends a few nights at the office to finish her work. Soon she is discovered by the Clinic Director and taken to a wing of the hospital for in-patients and is given shock-therapy. Johnny Panic is a representation of her mental issues. As her vision, muse, deity, and captor, as well as her writer's block, he becomes a figure of worship and devotion. Her obsession spirals to the point where she re-creates "dreams that are not even written down at all" as "...some kind of prayer." In other words, she must have met Morpheus, the Dreamlord of the Endless. Somewhere Neil Gaiman touched upon the timeless.