John Dutton and your dark thoughts
Yellowstone's good advice on how to have better dreams
“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature”
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Far too often I feel besieged by thoughts, images, ideas, and words I wish I did not even know. Some days it’s something simple like a song you heard at the bar or gym and it is super annoying, a total ear-worm. At times you’re at the office and supposed to be working, but your mind is on a shocking video you watched days earlier. Something about it just won’t let go of your attention. Other times this comes at night as you’re alone, awake, and surrounded by silence and darkness. You feel a sneaking fear. The horror film from deep in your past creeps back into your mind. For me, it’s Paranormal Activity and The Amityville Horror (the Ryan Reynolds remake). There is this scene in Amityville when Reynolds goes into the basement of his haunted house and encounters the specter of John Ketcham, this sick bastard from long ago who used the house to torture Indians. Ketcham opens up his own throat, tossing blood all over Reynolds. There’s fire, meat hooks, and grim red light. Reynolds then becomes possessed and violent, threatening his own family. I don’t know why it still bothers me at night, 15 years later. It just stuck. I still see it at night when I don’t want to.
But that’s the thing. We don’t have control over what sticks. We don’t even have full control over what we get exposed to. My first exposure to pornography was in 5th grade at a friend’s house. It was just pulled up and put in my face. I didn’t want to see that. But it stuck. It changed my relationship to and view of sex for most of my adolescent years. I wish it never happened.
It’s not prudish to say no to things. Violence. Gore. Sex. Bad language. Certain types of music or experiences. You have zero understanding going into those things what will linger beyond its welcome, what will follow you when it’s done or visit you late at night.
People who tell you that an open door policy to any of these things above is the mark of a full and interesting life are either deluded or dishonest. Choose carefully what gains entry. Because what’s seen and heard cannot be unseen or unheard.
But what about when we had no choice? This is important. In Kevin Costner’s hit series Yellowstone, there’s a scene where Costner is sitting with his grandson, Tate, who was recently kidnapped, abused, and traumatized by white nationalist militants in Montana at the end of Season 2. It’s a really sad part of the show.
In the opener to Season 3, Tate opens up about his nightmares, the reason he wakes up screaming, and how he wants it to stop. What Costner tells him is simple, distilled, and true wisdom. Change the ingredients.
“Dreams, it’s your memories and imagination all mixed together into this soup of what’s real and made up. But the thing about soup is that you can change the ingredients, Tate. You can put in whatever you want to. Any memory, any fantasy — Decide what you’re going to dream.”
Do you believe this?
I do. If your soup is over salted, over peppered, too sweet…you can’t undo what made it that way. What’s done is done. What comes next is that you can rebalance the dish by adding more. In the case of Tate’s trauma, he needed to get back outside and camping under the stars again. He experienced evil and ugliness in a profound way. So to rediscover a balance in his mind, he needed more beauty, more serenity. Tate wasn’t going to find that hiding in bed.
Easy to say, hard to do, but forever true.
If you’re not pleased with the quality of your thoughts, your daydreams and fantasies, then you’ll need to change the ingredients. What’s done is done. You either made some bad choices or had things forced upon you that you weren’t ready for. Okay. Enough looking backward.
It’s time for new experiences, imagery, films, music and people who can update the quality of your thoughts. Every single day I am rewriting my mind to be more like the mind I’d like to have. You can do that too.
This is the way.