“Dreams feel real when were in them,
it’s only when we wake up
that we realize
something was actually strange.”
-Dom Cobb in “Inception”
“Inception,” is made from the stuff of dreams. In this movie, a team of mind manipulating thief’s band together in efforts to plant a single idea inside the deepest level of a man’s unconscious being, believing that this idea will stir him to act in different ways once he is awake and active in the real world. For myself, sitting in a theater for approximately two and a half hours, enduring this wild, mind twisting thriller was exhausting yet rewarding not only in the sense that my thoughts and worries were completely lost in the false reality of this movie, but also in the sense that I exited the theater with an inspiration to make connections between “Inception” and Sigmund Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams.”
One belief that Freud and the movie “Inception” share is that “the multiple determination which decides what shall be included in a dream is not always a primary factor in dream-construction but is often the secondary product of a psychical force” (820). Freud thought this force was an unknown entity, however in “Inception” this force takes human form in the characters Dom Cobb (the inception professional, and leader of the team), Aurthur (Dom’s right hand man, the organizational genius), Ariadne (the architecture student who constructs the physical surrounding of the dream), Eames (the member who can forge signatures as well as projections of actual people), and Yusuf (the chemist who enables multiple people to inhabit the same dream space and time). Together, these people create and destroy the dreamer’s unconscious reality; they determine the dreamer’s location, and length of time spent there, the only task for the subject is to then fill the space with their secrets.
“Inception” centers on the idea that a single idea planted in a person’s unconscious mind has no limitations. Dom Cobb strikes a proposition with powerful business mogul Saito, promising that he can inhabit the unconscious mind of Saitio’s rival Robert Fischer. The goal is to plant an idea in Fischer’s mind that he can ruin his fathers business, and become his own businessman. Thus, Fischer would no longer be a competitor in the business and Saito would continue to hold control and power. In exchange for this, Saito offers Dom Cobb the ability to return to his home and children in America.
Dom Cobb has a past that refuses to let him rest, literally. His deceased wife infiltrates every dream he has. She yearns for his return to her, in a dream world that the two of them constructed together, and spent a dream’s lifetime growing old in. In fact, the dream’s reality was so enthralling that Dom and his wife couldn’t tell the dream from reality any longer. Dom convinces his wife that they need to die in order to wake from the dream, and return to reality, to their home, and to their children. However, once they are home Mal begins to reverse reality and the dream world. Dom Cobb sees that “the consequence of the displacement is that the dream-content no longer resembles the core of the dream-thoughts, and that the dream gives no more than a distortion of the dream which exists in the unconscious” (820). Mal then resorts to a framed suicide, in which Dom is the murderer. In her mind reality is the dream. Her dream- content and her dream-thoughts have been exchanged with the ultimate reality. Dom is then forced to flee the country to escape life in prison for his wife’s murder.
This significant experience in Dom’s life evidently weighs heavily upon every decision he makes in life. The team member Ariadne can see this, and pleads with Dom to explain his relationship with his wife. Finally, in a long monologue Dom talks about the alternate world he created with his wife; he tells Ariadne what it looked like, how long they spent there, about his children, and about the tragedy of his wife’s death. This scene shows that “dreams are brief, meager, and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of dream thoughts. If a dream is written out it may perhaps fill half a page. The analysis setting out the dream-thoughts underlying it may occupy six, eight, or a dozen times as much space” (819). Even though Dom Cobb wasn’t writing out his dream-thoughts, it was clear that he spent much time analyzing what happened in his long dream sequence with his wife. Interestingly, there is a scene towards the end where Ariadne shares in Dom’s alternate reality that he created with his wife. She finally understands all the sights that took Dom so many words to explain, with just once glance.
“Inception” embodies Freud’s statement that “dreams feel themselves at liberty. Moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream thoughts as a positive or as a negative” (824). By the end of the film, I wasn’t sure if in this context, controlling a person’s unconscious was beneficial or harmful, but I did feel that I shared in the excitement of a passionate love, a thrilling chase, and the unwavering creativity of dreams.
One last parallel that the movie “Inception” brought to mind has more to do with the writing process than with Sigmund Freud. When one is writing fiction, the process converts into a dream. The deeper one goes into the unconscious, the more creative one becomes. At one level the writer is simply the writer, sitting at a desk or a computer of some kind, on a deeper level, the writer is no longer conscious of being the writer, but is more conscious of the story they’re creating; their own work of fiction becomes their own world of reality. At the deepest level, the writer becomes their own protagonist, feeling, eating, breathing, smelling what their character smells; hoping to produce a believable, grounded character. At this level, writing and dreaming become synonymous in the sense that “it is never possible to be sure that a dream has been completely interpreted” (819). Writing and dreaming are such personal yet universal beings, knowing that one has been interpreted completely or correctly is nearly impossible.
Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. "The Interpretation of Dreams." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sd0ff1sbJU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3XzUYd6nrU
