Haunted by the remembrance of a horrific ambush and driven to find the sources of violence in the institutions of American culture, Smothering Dreams is the summation of Reeves' "Vietnam" works. Reeves called this thoroughly convicted work "an autobiographical videotape concerning the myths and realities of organized violence as experienced through the imagination of a child and the eyes of a soldier." Shortly after the tape was completed, he wrote, "What I learned about myself, morality, mortality and responsibility during my year in combat has been the focus of most of my life and life's work." Drawing on the commentary of Wilfred Owen's antiwar text, and revisiting America's "television war" through the technology of its disengagement, Reeves makes a work as relevant to its time as Owen's poem was to World War I.