Dream and Inception

Being a dream lover, it would be impossible for me to not watch the film Inception, a movie masterpiece on dreams. In this movie, the fantasy of dreams become overt and is somehow exaggerated, even so, it gives you reflection on dream and leads you into a fantastic world.

In Inception, the basic theory is that people can get into the other’s dream and even build other’s dream. Once the dream is being built real enough it could confuse people’s distinction between the reality and the dream. To finish the whole “invasion”, they need the special medicament to make people fall asleep and connect to the same dream, they need to construct and act like a normal person in the dream, to wake up, either they are killed in the dream or they are kicked in the reality.

Dom Cobb and his colleagues Arthur and Nash fail in a dream-stealing operation against Japanese energy tycoon Saito. Afterwards, they are used by Saito. Saito coerces Cobb, who is wanted in exile, into helping him break up his rival company. He wanted to take extreme measures to plant in the deep subconscious of the company’s sole heir, Robert Fisher. The idea is about abandoning the family company and setting up his own business. In order to return to America, Cobb accepted the mission and secretly turns to his father-in-law Miles and absorbs the young dream designer Ariadne, dream actor Ames and pharmacist Joseph to join the action. In a progressive dream world, Cobb not only deals with the instinctive resistance of Fisher's subconscious mind, but also faces the sabotage of his dead wife Mal.

One thing interesting enough is that, the action of inception is just like a brand new project management. The whole movie pictured us a talented team with well division work: in this project, Cobb becomes the project manager, who wants to finish the project the most so that he could come home without being caught by the police. And Arthur is the assistant to help do all the background research. Ariadne, a young constructor, is going to build every detail of the environment in the dream. And Ames is going to design the main action plan and act like others in the dream. Lastly Joseph is responsible to provide the pharmacy that could make people get into deep sleep.

The entire project has gone through the processes of background research, action plan, conception and preparation, and the final execution. They firstly do a thorough research on the subject Fisher to discover his background and his relationship with his father so that they could find a way to insert the idea. Then the whole team gather to make out the plan to insert this idea into Fisher’s mind during three layers of dreams, from the superficial to the deep mind. After all the project conception, it’s time for each one to prepare their own work: Arthur keep track on the background research, Ariadne begins to build the environment in the dreams, Ames learns to act like Uncle Kotler of Fisher and Joseph prepares all the pharmacy needed. After all is planned, they calculated the time and Fisher’s schedule and finally come to the implementation. In the action, reality and the three layers of dreams are going on as planned before, except the incidents of attack from Fisher’s subconscious dream protector and the coma of Fisher as well as the death of Saito that creates one more layer of dream and the Limo(the space of the edge of consciousness). Based on this, the main contents of the movie is outlined.

In the whole movie, two concepts arouse my thoughts.

One is the reality and the dream. “You keep telling yourself what you know. But what do you believe? What do you feel?” The words of Mal(Cobb’s dead wife) is like a spell. It strikes people’s basic belief: Do we really know what is the reality and what is the dream? What is our standard to distinct them? Reality and dream, which is more true and more real? Do you want to believe what is beautiful or do you want to go back to a misery reality? …… When you think in details and more deeply, this thoughts could be somehow terrifying. Once a person relies too much on the dream, they could not get out and could not gain back to the normal life. When people start to doubt the reality, all the things become vague and subtle. In reality, for us, the challenge could sometimes not merely come from the dreams, but the fantasy people make for themselves, the virtual game life that they are digging into, or the memories that they could not leave behind. Indulging in those mazes, people bear a risk to lose the balance in real life and fantasy.

Another one is inception. “An idea is like a virus, resilient, highly contagious. And the smallest seeds of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.” What is powerful for people is their ability to think. It is their strength and could be the weakness. Once your idea is under other’s control, it’s more dangerous than any other weapons. In this movie, Fisher is actually using the self-consciousness to protect himself from the outside invaders, but still, he has been influenced by the inception. We might think that it’s only a movie but in the human life, there is actually no difference: one is always dealing with the ideas that the others convey to them and them deal with them with their own thinking system to decide on accept or not. People that have soft self-consciousness might be easy to be controlled by the others’ mind, without knowing that their mind is actually going through the inception and invasion. This fact could be horrified yet that’s why we should put such much importance on a critical thoughts, it not just a slogan, its our conscious protector, to protect our own thoughts and logic from being invaded.

Lastly, what is even more mysterious is that the movie makes us think: what if our dream is actually controlled by others(not necessarily by other human but somehow by the other creatures)? what if our dream is going to convey us with some messages? …… we would never know the answer of them. But the dream world, it is always something worth discovering.

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Pictures from: Douban