Inception: The Calculus of Dreams

Inception seems to be one of those movies that people either love or hate.  When it came out last summer there were several complaints that I heard lodged against it.  One of the most prevalent ones was that the dreams were not strange and surreal enough, and that the endless complexity of rules laid out in the movie bore no relation to what dreams are really like.  Realism is a strange complaint to make concerning a movie about dreams, since dreams by their very nature are practically the antithesis of realism.  Still, I knew what these people were driving at.  The dreams in Inception do bear little resemblance to those visited upon our nightly slumbers.  However, these people were missing the whole point.  The surrealism lay in the concept of the story, not in its details.  The peculiar charm of Inception is that it takes a systematic and cerebral approach to an emotionally chaotic phenomenon.

The movie borrows from several basic phenomena of dreams to construct its elaborate rules.  It treats these phenomena as if they were precise variables in a complex equation, as things which can be measured and quantified with pinpoint accuracy, which is not actually the way these things work at all.  But the movie precedes as if this is the case.  The idea is absurd in and of itself, and I believe that this is done deliberately.  I'm sure Christopher Nolan has had the same lifetime of dreaming experience that we've all had.  Inception isn't meant to be a realistic portrayal of dreams.  It takes the subject of dreams and builds an abstract framework of intricate systemic design.  Dreams are merely a means to this end.  The following is a consideration of the pieces out of which this framework is constructed.

TIME EXPANSION & COGNITIVE COMPRESSION

In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud tells the story of a dream dreamt by a man name Maury.  In the dream Maury was on trial.  The dream was set at some time during the French Revolution, and this Maury was brought before the revolutionary tribunal.  After a lengthy trial, he was found guilty and thrown into prison to await execution.  The date of his execution arrived and he was led out to before the screaming crowd.  He was brought to the execution block, and locked into the guillotine.  When the hissing blade dropped, he awoke just as it hit his neck.  Upon waking he discovered that the headboard had fallen and struck him on the neck, which was what had woken him up.  Apparently, the entire long ordeal of the dream had merely occurred in the few fractions of a second when the headboard struck his neck.

Of course, we've all had similar, if somewhat less extreme experiences.  We've fallen asleep for a few hours and had dreams which seem to cover months or even years.  Mostly this is because events in dreams often occur in a more narrative than real-time fashion.  Just as a movie can cover the distance between March and June simply by taking a few moments to show us a tree flowering into full bloom, so too can our dreams give us the illusion of an epic passage of time.

Inception treats this phenomenon quite literally, however.  The dream infiltrators measure the time expansion with perfect precision.  They time things down to the second on the basis of this expansion.  They account for this expansion by crediting an acceleration of mental functioning.  The deeper the infiltrators descend into the dream-world, level by level, the quicker their minds are able to process information.  Since the dream is being sustained and created by the mind, the accelerated experience of it causes the actual real-world time that it covers to become more and more compressed.  Conceivably this compression could go on, descending down to an infinitesimal level.  At this level, which the characters refer to as "limbo", the mental functioning has been accelerated to the point that an infinite amount of experience can be compressed down to a single moment.

THE INCORPORATION OF EXTERNAL STIMULI

Have you ever fallen asleep with the TV on, and had the audio from the TV weave its way into your dreams?  Have you ever had the alarm clock go off, only to have the noise reinterpreted by your dream?  I know I have.  Maybe you've even heard the joke where the guy says he was dreaming that he ate a giant marshmallow, and then woke up to find that his pillow was gone.  Scientists have even done studies where they've tickled people with feathers or dripped hot wax on them, and then they've recorded how the stimulus showed up in their dreams.  Some have even argued that the entire content of dreams is constructed entirely out of stimulus external to the dream, whether it be a noise outside the window or the gurgling of our own stomach.

Inception takes a rather interesting approach to this phenomenon.  The film makes much use of the idea of "levels", dreams within dreams.  It uses this concept of external stimuli to demonstrate the way the dreams are packaged inside of one another.  When a van flips over on one level, the entire reality of the level below tumbles end over end.  When the van free falls through the air, the level below loses gravity altogether.  In addition to providing some  neat visuals, this also accentuates one of the spacial peculiarities of dreams.  In a dream, your physical body appears to occupy a space which resides inside your mind, which, of course, is  already inside your body to begin with.  As the infiltrators descend level upon level, their bodies are continually being tucked inside dream worlds that exist inside their minds.  It becomes a sort of existential Droste Effect, which again descends down to an infinitesimal level.  So limbo occupies not only an infinite point in time, but in space as well.

THE NESTED PERMUTATIONS OF FALSE AWAKENING

False awakenings are like the evil cousins of lucid dreams.  A lucid dream is where the dreamer realizes that they are dreaming and are then able to take control over the dream.  The lucidity of the lucid dreams lies in the fact that the dreamer seems to be in full possession of their mental faculties, which are normally blunted and limited in dreams.  In a sense, they seem wide awake and yet still dreaming.  If you've had the experience you know how odd it can feel.  Well, a false awakening is sort of the opposite experience.  This is where the dreamer believes they've woken up, often with the same surroundings where they fell asleep reproduced with amazing accuracy, but actually they're still dreaming.  This is usually accompanied by an eerie sense that something is wrong or "off".  Then something disturbing usually happens, and the dream flies out of control again.

Inception uses this phenomenon to construct the concept of dreams within dreams.  It employs it in a backwards manner, as the characters are usually seen descending down into the next level.  However, it should be noted that when this idea is first introduced to us, it is in the form that we're more familiar with.  The characters awake from a dream, which we the audience think is the waking world, only to find that it is just another dream, one level above.   Having the "level" concept demonstrated to us in this fashion, allows us to accept it when it's used backwards later on.  In reality, the phenomenon of false awakening doesn't imply any kind of nesting of dream levels.  The false awakening is just another of a multitude of common dream experiences.  It falls in a sequence of events, rather than demonstrating a layering of levels.  I don't believe it has even been shown that events in the false awakening dream affect the reality of the dream that proceeded it.  But then, how would you know?  Nevertheless, this nesting concept provides an ingenious means to demonstrate the  peculiar spatial architecture of dreams mentioned above.

PERPETUAL EXPERIENCE OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS

At one point in Inception, the main character, Cobb, explains that in dreams we create and experience our world at the same time.  This is absolutely true, and its really quite amazing when you think about it.  Dreams seem able to tap into a deep reservoir of creativity and invention that we can only access the merest fraction of while we're awake.  While we might struggle in our waking life to squeeze out the simplest shred of an idea, dreams create with a disposable abandon as though drawing from an endless well of inspiration.  This well, of course, is simply our imagination.  Awake, we keep it in check to various degrees by our intellect, but in dreaming it has free reign.  Like our inner monologue, it flows continuously, but we only seem to tune into it completely in our dreams.  It is as if we climb inside our imagination and then experience it as though it were reality.

Robert Louis Stevenson was said to have gotten his idea for Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde from a dream.  Coleridge was said to have gotten the idea for Kubla Khan from a dream as well.  There have been countless other cases of people getting ideas for everything from songs to paintings from dreams.  I myself, have gotten the idea for several stories from dreams.  Sometimes a dream seems to provide an inspiration that never would have occurred to you in a million years, but the ideas are there waiting.  They just required a loosening of the intellect and a lowering of inhibitions to bloom into their full form.

In a sense, the story of Inception can be seen as a metaphor for this process.  The title refers to the planting of an idea in someone's mind, a seed in the soil that takes deep root in the subconscious.  Again the level concept is employed to ingenious effect.  The deeper the level of the dream the deeper into the core of the subject's psyche.  Like space and time, the subject's identity becomes more compressed and concentrated as you descend.  A small detail, planted deep enough, expands up through the levels until it reaches the level of waking reality where it can become a fundamental part of the subject's personality.  This implies a model of the mind spatially equivalent to the psychological concept of formative development.  The further you regress in time to a person's earliest experiences, the more fundamental those impressions are to the foundations of the person's personality.  Like the seed planted in Inception, as the core of the person's life experiences grows, the more this foundational impression expands.  While these seeds often grow into weeds in the garden of our life, occasionally they can flower into something beautiful and creative.

WAKING TO THE REAL WORLD

The ending of Inception spawned endless debate.  Was he really awake or still dreaming?  Did the spinning top fall or not?  Unfortunately people were picking up this metaphysical ball and running in the wrong direction with it.  Too often people focus on the issue of "what really happened" in the story's plot, rather than appreciating the meaning behind it.  Inception leaves the story open-ended, not to encourage speculation about the narrative, but rather to encourage the viewer to speculate about the nature of reality itself.  The top is meant to demonstrate the old philosophical notion of whether we can truly determine the difference between reality and an illusion.  The idea is not a new one, but the truly clever thing that the movie accomplishes is to present the conundrum not in words, but in a single image.  This is the final result of the elaborate equation.  Everything in the movie is set up to converge on that single image.  The movie is like a complicated chess problem with all the pieces put perfectly in place for this final checkmate.

The levels concept introduces the possibility that there might be another level above what the characters consider reality.  Cobb's wife Mal introduces the enigma of what we require to accept something as reality.  The concept of inception itself introduces the idea of the mind's capacity for self-deception.  The concept of sub-conscious projections introduces the dilemma of being together with the ones we love or alone with only our idea of them.  The limbo concept introduces a dream reality that  in its infinitesimal compression can transcend space and time and the consequences of the waking world.  And finally we have the totem, the spinning top, representing an anchor to solid, physical reality, ambiguously caught between spinning and falling, caught between the world we live in and the world we dream of.  It begs the question of what really matters, what really makes the difference between the two?