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.

Notes from a Reading Life: Wendy Doniger's Implied Spider

"When Kevin Costner wanted to learn an Indian dialect for his film Dances with Wolves, he didn't realize that there were different grammatical forms for men and women; he learned the language from a woman, and hence, apparently unknowingly, throughout the film referred to himself as 'she' and 'her'."

This delightful anecdote in Wendy Doniger's book The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth reminded me of my first attempts to learn the Mohawk language on and off reservations. In Mohawk the primary nouns and pronouns are feminine. So Okwari is Bear but in English it is also she-bear. If you want to specify you are talking about a male bear you must add a prefix and say Rokwari.

Doniger's Kostner anecdote comes in a discussion of how women's voices have been suppressed in the literature of many cultures. Throughout Doniger displays the fruits of her omnivorous reading and proves herself a worthy successor to Mircea Eliade as professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago.

Myths are her passion but she declines to give any fixed definition of the word "myth". You can catch her on the fly, however, saying things like this:

"A myth is a story that is sacred to and shared by a group of people who find their most important meanings in it."

And this:

"Myths from other people's cultures often provide us with useful metaphors that are more refreshing than our own."

I strongly endorse the last statement. Doniger gives an example of what it has meant to her in another provocvative book, Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India. Here she describes how she found her “seed text”, bija mantra, in the story of an Indian goddess, Saranyu. This goddess, little-known in the West, cloned herself in order to get away from a husband she detested, leaving a compliant Hindu version of a Stepford Wife at home while she ranged free as a wild mare. This story kept after Doniger for decades, prompting her to reach deeper and deeper into its well. Whenever she heard it, she would say, “That’s the story of my life.”

I weave  myths from every culture accessible to me into my courses, refreshing old stories as they refresh us. To touch our lives a myth must come vitally alive in our imaginations and our experience of the world.