Hello estreb, and welcome to the Monastery!

As toolic says, to construct a hash you need to change the braces to parentheses:

my %hash = ( ... );
...
print Dumper(\%hash);
[download]

Alternatively, keep the braces (which construct an anonymous hash and return a reference to it) and assign the result to a scalar variable (because a reference is always a scalar value, regardless of the type of thing it refers to):

my $hash_ref = { ... };
...
print Dumper($hash_ref);
[download]

Either will give you the output you were expecting. See perlreftut, then perldsc.

Hope that helps,

Update: Fixed typo. Thanks to AnomalousMonk and Anonymous Monk.