Dreams : Retrospective Ramblings on Inception
“You’re waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you can’t know for sure.
Yet it doesn’t matter . . .
Because you’ll always be together.”
― Christopher J. Nolan, Inception: The Shooting Script
No matter how incoherent and illogical dreams and the act of remembering dreams may feel like, Inception brings clarity and coherence to the chaotic encounters of a strange, surreal world we encounter after we doze off.
Dream analysis, especially in the pre-Freudian age, relied on cultural signifiers to establish a tenuous, albeit superstitious link between dreams and the real world. Whether these traditional beliefs are still practiced or not, one need only look at historical inscriptions and texts for comprehending the prophetic significations attached to the interpretation of dreams.
Ancient conquerors and men of military might like Hannibal, Genghis Khan and Tipu Sultan are thought to have paid a great deal of attention to dreams and their analytical implication in personal and political manoeuvres. Alexander the Great and the High Priest of Jerusalem Jaddua’s mutual cognizance of each other in their dreams would later have profound implications for the former’s invasion of Persia and his relationship with the people of Jerusalem.
Rejected by scientists and cynics alike, Oneiromancy, an art of dream divination flourished in several parts of the Orient and the Occident. Medieval English poetry is replete with dream allegories which appealed to the masses and the royals alike. Geoffrey Chaucer, father of English poetry, penned dream allegories by exploring Continental as well as pre-Christian humanistic traditions which are still taught in prominent academic institutions globally. In Japan, the first dream one sees in the new year termed as Hatsuyume, foretells of the ensuing luck of a person as the days unravel.
Interestingly, the Greek philosopher Aristotle scrutinized dreams under a rational lens. He took a dialectical approach as he is wont to do, undermining any supernatural implications of dreaming. He opined that dreams manifested as a result of sensory organs’ response to stimuli in tandem with the mental goings-on of the person asleep. No wonder then Sigmund Freud cited him in his much-read work The Interpretation of Dreams.
Although Freud’s psychoanalytic tradition is rife with sexist controversies and most of his theories of understanding the mind are considered outdated, yet we cannot deny the profound impact his works have had on our society, culture and art. His statements on dreaming and the abstract demarcations of the mind into layers that represent varied and complex thought processes have inspired plenty of literature and films.
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, the groundbreaking neo-noir film for instance, blurs the line between reality and dreams, almost like a hallucinogenic drug to depict a traumatic experience. Or David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, which explores the contentious relationship between Freud and his student Carl Jung.
When I first watched Inception a decade ago, I was awash with its visual dexterity, dream depictions and its foray into the mind’s subconscious and its projections.
Back then Freud was a paper-tiger to me. I was in my first year of graduation and his name occasionally popped up during classroom discussions of literary works. But it was only in the final year of my baccalaureate that I became properly accustomed to the theories of psychoanalysis and the bittersweet relationship of (French) Psychoanalytic Feminists with Freud. As my curiosity about the complex interfacing of the human mind with the external phenomena grew, so did my voracious appetite for artful explorations of the mind/reality dichotomy.
Recently I had another go at Christopher Nolan’s labyrinth of dreams. If Inception were to be described in any other way — mazes, vaults, caverns, anything that involves hidden recesses, would not seem misleading or inappropriate. It is a journey inside the human mind and its clandestine corridors.
Characters are literally entering someone else’s dreams, stealing or implanting ideas and even facing or overcoming internal demons. They inhabit a pre-designed dreamscape like a structure of architecture; an alternate reality, where buildings fold into each other like origami; time and space cast aside their clockwork mechanisms; mental projections turn deadly or stay innocuous depending upon the perceptions engendered in the subconscious.
I must accede that the excitement with which I re-watched the film after such a long hiatus seems to have waned a bit. Time does that to you, isn’t it? There are moments when you can reconnect with something you once cherished with unchanging or even magnified emotions. And then there’s an abrupt, unexpected disconnect.
I would like to put myself somewhere between these two extremes. Saturated and lukewarm. Although that in no way undermines my fascination for Nolan’s cinematic tour de force. Inception is certainly no exception.
Whether or not this virtual experiment can be clubbed together with Tron, The Matrix, Paprika and even Nolan’s own Ready Player One, it certainly excels at creating a cohesive, well-planned hypothesis of subconscious manifestations within a dream state. For an uninitiated newbie, the plot could feel overwhelming and bewildering but certainly not boring. Unless you yawn at the conceits and incredulous nature of sci-fi films.
(Spoiler Alert! Wait. You still haven’t watched it?)
Inception can be read along several lines.
A heist espionage of stealing valuable information from one’s dreams for personal or political ends. A grieving husband’s inability to find closure from his dead wife. An architect’s imaginative freedom to create real-world defying imaginary spaces for dream stealers to inhabit. A non-sexual Oedipal exploration of a father son relationship where the son longs for the father’s affection, feeling insignificant in his behemoth shadow, unsure if he should follow in his footsteps or carve out his own individual path. It can also be seen as a cinematographic meditation on the mind’s subconscious. Some have also gone so far as to interpret the film as an allegory of the process of filmmaking.
Leonardo Di Caprio fits into the shoes of the perceptive and brooding Mr Cobb quite seamlessly. His job as an extractor entails extracting secrets, mostly for corporate interests, by infiltrating people’s minds like robbing a bank or attacking a military base. In his heist(s), he partners up with Arthur the Point Man, Eames the Forger, Yusuf the Chemist and Ariadne, the Architect. Each person brings an invaluable skill-set to the table, which must be synchronized with that of the others for maintaining the efficacy and secrecy of the mission.
Nolan spent many years developing the idea of the film and he uses a substantial part of it to explain its intricate methodology. The story itself begins with a dream, where Cobb washes ashore to be dragged by bodyguards inside business magnate Mr. Saito’s home. Arthur appears alongside Cobb, and together they brief Saito about the rise of novel dream-sharing technology and its dangers in hacking people’s thoughts for clandestine information, with far-reaching consequences. They offer their security-services to protect Saito’s thoughts from hackers.
After he is gone, we find Cobb stealing documents from a safe and Saito re-appears with a woman named Mal. Arthur is taken hostage by guards and Saito smugly informs Cobb that he is well aware they are all asleep in reality, their conversations and actions being mere dream projections. Mal seems threatening and hell-bent upon jeopardizing the mission. Before things can get further out of control, Cobb shoots Arthur, who loses consciousness in the dream to wake up in an apartment where both Cobb and Saito are asleep.
This scenario too is a dream where Saito discloses that he was testing the dream purloining potency of Cobb and his partners. Soon they come back to reality in a moving train and later on, Saito makes a tempting offer to Cobb that he is unable to refuse. An opportunity to end his status as a fugitive on the run and return back to his children if he manages to incept an idea inside the subconscious of Robert, son of Saito’s business arch-rival Maurice Fischer, about dissolving his father’s company.
Nolan does two important things here. First, he provides us a useful demo of the larger canvas of dream representation that would constitute the surreptitious invasion of Robert Fischer’s subconscious later on. Simultaneously, the enigmatic presence of Mal, Cobb’s dead wife is pushed to the foreground and the pivotal role she would play in highlighting repressed trauma. Before we witness the final heist, which is slightly over an hour long, Cobb and Arthur start recruiting members for their mission.
This is where we must pay close attention and maybe brush up on Freudian basics.
Cobb seeks out a skilled architect who could help design a dream labyrinth. Ariadne, his father-in-law’s bright student is chosen for the task. Once inside Cobb’s dream in a Parisian café, Ariadne is made to discern the strangeness of the atmosphere. Cobb asks her to remember how they ended up in the scene. Ariadne fumbles. She cannot remember and is astonished that they are literally in another dimension. An illusion concocted by the mind. Cobb tells her to stay calm and remarks that one never remembers the beginning of a dream. Like the notion of In Medias Res (in the midst of things), one finds himself right in the middle, with no memory of when or where it began.
Countless fruit crates, books, cutlery and furniture burst forth into air, exploding like surreal confetti around them. As soon as Cob is hurt and she interjects him, regarding the implausibility of the sense of experiencing pain inside a dream, the mass of debris hits her too and she wakes up in Arthur’s workshop beside Cobb, gasping. We do not disagree with Cobb when he calmly states that what we experience in a dream certainly feels real while we are in it.
Think of all your worst nightmares and erotic fantasies and the feelings that hit you, with their strange approximation of emotions felt in the waking world once your eyes snapped open. Or is it that you wake up with a blank sense of wonder, remembering nothing at all?
Let us return to psychoanalysis for a while. Both Freud and Jung passed a handful of interesting commentary upon the meaning and significance of dreams that should be taken with a pinch of salt. The former’s popular analogy of the iceberg with the mind is as good a starting point as any to understand what Cobb and his pack are up to.
Freud went after the mind obsessively like a harpoon after fishes. He theorized that the mind comprised of three layers: the conscious, the preconscious (or subconscious) and the unconscious. Like the visible part of the iceberg, the conscious mind refers to all the mindful sensations we are aware of in our waking state. They involve our thoughts, feelings, memories and wishes that are flowing through our consciousness or could be brought into awareness.
The layer of the iceberg submerged just below the water but still visible through the watery filter represents the preconscious (or subconscious). Although just below the conscious mind yet tethered to it, the preconscious more or less refers to unrepressed memories that could be voluntarily or involuntarily accessed.
For instance, if the conscious mind tells us immediately the route to our grocery store when we are about to visit, the preconscious mind could throw us a memory of someone we met there, aided by some sensation or conscious thinking on our part. It also acts as a funnel between the unconscious and conscious, filtering what information could be passed into the latter and what ought to be pushed back into the former.
The unconscious, as per Freud, is where we bid farewell to what we think we know or feel and stirs up whatever has been suppressed because those experiences have been painful, traumatic and even taboo. Things we unconsciously do or say(the Freudian slip), the strange images that haunt our dreams, repressed or forgotten memories that may intrude upon the consciousness sometime later. Freudian psychoanalysis provides the troubled patient a discourse of free association, the freedom to build, break and rebuild their dark and lost stories, bring fragments from the unconscious into focus, engage in cathartic self-narration.
Tell, retell your saddest tale. Find succor. Save your mind. That sort of thing.
Of course I am simplifying too much.
Jung investigated dreams from another interesting angle although similarities with Freud abound. He saw in them an almost prophetic purpose as much as he retained the significance of their therapeutic impact. Dreams communicated like teachers from the unconscious, pulling people back into reality, through their symbolic compression of images and subterfuge. A subject’s illusions about his greatness or excessive self-pity is brought into sharp criticism by the dream objects, leading to greater self-awareness about one’s own strengths and weaknesses. Jung also stressed on the prospective function of dreams. How certain dreams could be roadmaps and guide people on their personal quest of life.
The Freudian sense of psychoanalysis plays out overtly in the film. Cobb, though a skilled extractor, can no longer be trusted upon in designing dreams. Since the death of his wife, the mysterious Mrs. Mal, Cobb’s subconscious is haunted by the weight of all their shared memories, the remorse stemming from his belief that he had a hand in her suicide. (I would go for the term “unconscious” over “subconscious” since that would be more accurate but Nolan uses the term subconscious throughout the film).
Trauma and repressed emotions complicate his dreams as Mal appears out of nowhere in them and disrupts all his strategies.
When dreamers enter a pre-designed dream, they populate it with their subconscious plethora of emotions, desires, feelings and worries whose balance or imbalance depends upon the equilibrium of the subject. Moreover, these elements are projections of the mind of the dreamer. If a subject is struggling with traumatic events from the past, as Freud would insist, he could meet his personal demons in his sleep. A troubled mind would ensure that the subject brings his real world problems into the complex tapestry of dreams.
In the film, since multiple people walk inside a dreaming mind, if any of their minds is troubled or suspicious, the sneaking visitors would have an uphill battle in their sneaky mission.
In any case, as Cobb mentions, a mind likes to protect its secrets from foreign invaders and attacks like white blood cells going after a foreign parasite if it becomes aware of any external threats. However when the mind is depressed, what the subconscious conjures up can be much more unpredictable and dangerous. Cobb’s wife may simply be a mere projection, knowing all his hidden thoughts and feelings, but in the dream space she can be as real a hostile force as a bullet through the heart.
Mal and Cobb dedicated a lot of time to experimenting with the creation and sharing of dreams. There, Mal became obsessively drawn to the phantasmagorical landscape and her own ability to shape her own reality. When Cobb puts Ariadne’s skills to test and warns her while touring the dream space alongside her not to use scenes from memories for construction, only employ vague details, we realize later the severe consequences of using real world replicas into the dream space when we come to Mal’s tragic story.
The dream world could become so addictive and alluring that one might become untethered from the real world, finding it too prosaic to inhabit. One could lose himself in the world of the mind, no longer able to distinguish between the real and the unreal, resulting in a state of dream paralysis.
The addictive aspect of dreaming is highlighted when Cobb goes in search of a chemist to prepare a special hallucinogenic for his mission on Fischer’s subconscious. In the chemist’s workshop we find people voluntarily coming to share dreams for hours under strong, stable drugs. People who can no longer dream without Inception, people whose dreams have become more important than their reality, and who view sleeping as a form of being awake.
The passage of time in dreams is also not equivalent to clock time. We can all speak from personal experience that when we wake up from a dream, we often feel unaware of the passing of time. While dreaming, our bodies are tethered to an alternative construct of reality, akin to temporary paralysis. Time dilates or shrinks based on the ambience engendered in our heads.
Think of it this way. When we are engrossed or really feeling upbeat, time seems to fly. When we are sad and sulking, time seems to stand still. Time’s passage is therefore quite linked with our psychological state.
Nolan uses the theory of time-dilation in the film. As Yusuf explains, brain function inside dreams is amplified twenty times that of normal. As more and more dreams are successively layered, the time in each dream layer keeps getting compounded. In the film, real time of half a year could mean ten years in dream time. This time increases as one dream is stuffed inside another like gift boxes, one inside another and another, until the final stage of limbo is unboxed.
Limbo is raw, infinite subconscious. The extreme inversion of an ordered, linear reality. Time dilation is intensified and all sense of certainty is lost. Dreamers must keep away from it at all cost if they seek to return back to reality without being sucked into its sinister wonder like a black hole.
So how must one keep track of where one is or know if one is awake or dreaming?
There are two techniques of keeping dreamers aware. One helps in keeping track of passing time. The other helps in knowing where one is situated.
Every member who performs Inception is expected to carry a “totem” inside the dream. A totem means anything that works as a reminder for the subject, whether he or she is in their own dream or in someone else’s. Every totem has its own secret specifics, the feel, weight and balance of it kept only to its subject. If its owner senses it feels odd, then he realizes he is in someone else’s dream. Otherwise it would feel perfect in one’s own dream.
For example, Arthur’s totem is a weighted red die. It is carved with a heavier side so when it rolls up and lands on the ground, the heavy face would lie at the bottom with its opposite end facing up. If that doesn’t happen, then the subject is in someone else’s dream. Cobb uses a spinning top for the purpose which once belonged to his wife. If he spins it and it keeps on spinning, it would mean he is still dreaming. If it topples over, that would mean he is awake.
The other thing referred to as the “kick”, can be seen as a gear or a switch that tries to be a wake-up call to the dreamers for a shift from one dream zone to another. It can be given as a sharp jolt, a physical attack, a sensation of falling in water or anything shocking that can wake and transfer dreamers from a particular dream level to another. A kick must be so synchronized that it must impact all the levels while targeting one so the dreamers are ready to be awake in another dreaming reality.
Yes it could sound confusing but trust me, it makes a lot of sense if you follow through the narration with rapt attention. Now let us get back to the story. From that dark, intense bit of the separated couple.
We meet Mal only through Cobb’s flashbacks and memories mostly as a subconscious projection. He must have shared a profound and intense relationship with her as he still keeps visiting her in dreams constructed from their shared memories.
Mal and Cobb used their private memories to construct their dreams. They used houses they inhabited in the real world, built their own dream house, basically spent years together in their lucid dreams, carving out their own corner of love. Dream time-dilation made them (their consciousness) grow older together. Upon returning back to reality, it was like coming back with matured selves thrown back into younger bodies.
Eventually, Mal would no longer desire to “wake up” in the real world, hooked to the limitless possibilities of the dreamscapes. Cobb, looking at her mental situation, would incept an idea in her head as an experiment — that her world wasn’t real. Mal would lose her touch with the real world, substituting limbo in place of it, desiring to never return. She would finally commit suicide, unable to convince Cobb to join her in her presumed way of transcending into the imaginary realm. And frame him for her death.
Cobb’s subconscious projection of Mal is a product of his guilt and grief. She is the enemy his mind creates as a barrier between him and anything he seeks to incept or extract, like a looming shadow. This is why Cobb no longer builds dreams. Whatever he knows, his wife knows.
Ariadne learns about Cobb’s dark subconscious as she proves her worth in dream designing. Despite her worries over Mal sabotaging the operation, she is on board with his team. Arthur gives her a lesson in creating dream sharing levels by taking her inside one he has built. Here Ariadne is the subject and Arthur is the dreamer so he holds the reins of spatial manipulation. He shows her in the office building how the dreamers can toy around with the architecture, defy real world rules and create spaces like closed loops to extract information from the subject. Arthur cites a fascinating and mind-boggling object created by Lionel and Roger Penrose, later made trendy by M.C. Escher, in which a staircase continually ascends in a looping circle. Such manipulations would help buy time, stalling the subject before his subconscious becomes aware and its projections start attacking the dreamer. He also tells Ariadne that a subject cannot control how one’s subconscious responds which is why Cobb doesn’t risk designing dreams anymore.
At long last, the quid pro quo assignment of invading Robert Fischer’s mind, the fulcrum of the film, is underway. Cobb implanting in Fischer’s mind the idea of dissolving his father’s company so Saito’s company could rise while providing him a way back home to his children and terminating his fugitive status.
The journey into Fischer’s mind is the pinnacle in my opinion of what Nolan wishes to showcase. I was amazed when I looked up on the internet, still abuzz with exploring the dream sequences and even getting into word scuffles over disagreements. People have gone at great lengths to explain Nolan’s vision.
Fischer’s dream has three layers, a feat that Cobb’s team has to manage within the ten hours of his flight from Sydney to Los Angeles where he is carrying his father’s body. The group takes Eames’ advice that the simplest way to manipulate him would be to stir up his emotional bond with his father. They drug him and the complex and tense web of dream within a dream within a dream takes off.
The dream layers are as follows: the rainy city which seems like a surreal version of New York is Yusuf’s dream; the confined hotel structure is Arthur’s dream ; the snow-clad mountains with the fortress is Eames’s dream.
Yusuf’s dream starts with heavy rain because he drank a lot of champagne before joining the dream and didn’t go for a pee! Fischer is taken hostage by Saito and Eames in a cab while being attacked by gunmen. Meanwhile in a van, Ariadne, Yusuf and Cobb find a freight train coming out of nowhere and smashing into them. As the bewildered members finally get together, Cobb lashes out at Arthur for being slack in his research.
Fischer’s subconscious has been trained to thwart off extractors and seems already militarized considering the alarming presence of attackers. What Cobb doesn’t say however is that the freight train is a product of his unstable unconscious bursting forth into the first level of the dream. It is reminiscent of the train that ran over Cobb and Mal because via Inception he convinced her that only by killing themselves in their dream, they could return to reality.
Saito is wounded in the attack. Eames offers to end his misery by shooting him and waking him up but a wary Cobb and knowing Yusuf tell everybody that it could take him to limbo. The administered sedative is too strong for the mission so they must improvise accordingly.
Eames, who excels at manipulating as a shape shifter, disguises himself as Fischer’s godfather Peter Browning to start implanting the idea inside him that his father desired for him to end the empire. Soon after, they get into Yusuf’s van where he stays behind, driving the van away from Fischer’s subconscious projections, to send the team back into the second layer.
In the second layer Cobb tricks Fischer into believing he is on his side, trying to help him from extractors breaking into his mind. Fischer is also duped into believing that his subconscious projection of Browning is his actual godfather whose intentions he must mistrust. They lie to him about performing Inception into Browning’s mind as in reality it is Fischer’s mind they are further going inside. Here Arthur stays back just like Yusuf does in the first level, to send the remaining dreamers to the third layer.
In the third layer beside snowy mountains and a fortress, after several complications and improvisations, Cobb and his group are almost about to succeed when Mal appears and shoots Fischer, taking him to limbo with her. Saito too enters limbo, passing out from the gunshot wound.
Knowing well that Mal is his Achilles Heel, Ariadne joins Cobb to confront his wife in the raw and volatile landscape and rescue Fischer before time runs out. Mal’s dead serious in keeping her husband in limbo. She tries to emotionally manipulate him and when he doesn’t give in, she stabs him with a knife. Ariadne immediately kills her (and remember she is Cobb’s projection of his wife, for the actual Mal is dead).
Ariadne finds Fischer and he is sent back to the third level where he unwittingly incepts himself with the idea that his father wanted him to break the empire not because he didn’t believe in his son but because he wanted him to carve out his own destiny. Of course all this is simulation. But for Fischer it is real. Fischer wakes up believing in the implanted idea and things apparently seem to come to a deceptive close after that. We hear echoes of Freudian catharsis and notes of Jungian self-improvement here. Young Fischer now truly believes his father had faith in him and he must seek his fortunes on his own terms.
You must remember we talked about kicks sometime back. So in the three interconnected dreams of different time duration, there are synchronized kicks to shift dreamers from one layer to another until they find their way back to reality. Yusuf’s van hitting the water, Arthur exploding the hotel floor, Eames’ explosion in the fortress are kicks in sync which let the dreamers return safely.
Although the ending seems to imply that Cobb is free and returns back to his children cleared of his charges, we can never really be sure. He had stayed back in limbo to find Saito who was stuck there after being shot. What makes for an even uncertain ending is that the film ends with the top Cobb borrowed from his wife to be used as a totem, spinning on and on without dropping. Does Nolan imply that everything we watched onscreen was a dream?
I guess we will never know.
(P.S. Edith Piaf’s masterful French song Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien is a fitting melody for Cobb’s story as its lyrics resonate on a personal level with his grieving mind and the whole ambience of the film. I am feeling a bit lazy to go into its purpose in regulating the dreamscapes. But listen to it. It’s quite haunting. Also people think it’s sort of a meta-joke as Marion Cottilard (Mal) played Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose. Here’s part of the English translation of the song from the internet :
No, I regret nothing…
No! I don’t feel sorry about anything
Not the good things people have done to me
Not the bad things, it’s all the same to me.
No, nothing of nothing
No! I don’t feel sorry about anything
It’s paid for, removed, forgotten,
I’m happy of the past
With my memories
I lit up the fire
My troubles, my pleasures
I don’t need them anymore
Broomed away my love stories
Broomed away for always
I start again from zero)
© Kaustabh Kashyap
