Yellowstone dreams

 

I was not a fan of the young Kevin Costner, but he is very good as John Dutton, the patriarch of a Montana livestock empire in the series "Yellowstone".  Happily I have found it gripping enough for me to get to season 3, and its treatment of dreams, which is mature and intelligent. We are invited to discern when we can deal with nightmares through interior work and when dreams are showing us a possible future that requires action in physical life. 

In the first episode of season 3, John Dutton talks about nightmares with his grandson Tate. 

“I’m in that room,” says Tate. “The floor just disappears, and I fall and keep falling. I scream, but no sound comes out. No one hears me, so no one comes to help me.” It seems he is reliving the trauma when he was kidnapped by a white militia working for his family’s enemies.

John Dutton offers these insights:

“You know what dreams are? It’s your memories and your imagination all mixed together, into this soup of what’s real and what’s made-up. But the thing about this soup is, you can change the ingredients, Tate. You can put in whatever you want to. Any memory, any fantasy. You can be a baseball star who opens Christmas presents all day long. So when you close your eyes later, decide what you’re going to dream. That’ll be the dream.” 

Now this is an admirable approach with some kinds of dreams, but we are about to learn that it may not work with dreams that portend the future. John starts to recount a scary dream of his own. He says he dreams there is a family in need on the side of the road. When he pulls over to help them, they no longer want his assistance. They want something else. He won’t say more. We are left to infer that there is something terrible in his dream he won’t share with the little boy.

In the season finale, the dream plays out in the daylight world. John stops to help a mother and child broken down by the side of the road. As he changes a tire for them, killers pull up in a van and riddle him with bullets. Sometimes a dream of the future requires action in the physical world, to avert an unwanted scenario or move towards a desirable one.