Dream Sharing and the Rules of Inception
Note: This article contains some explicit language and a complete spoiling of the plot and story of Inception.
Inception is wonderfully and entertainingly confusing as hell. It took me two viewings to follow the who’s who of dream sharing, and I still have a lot of questions about the timeline and the mechanics of what happened. Like what did they do for a week after they were done with the mission? And why would they need so many kicks? Were they just kicking for the rush? Did Cobb and Mal grow old together or not?
But I’m getting ahead of myself. In case you don’t spend hours thinking about these kinds of things, let me catch you up on the parts I’ve been obsessing over.
How It Works (You May Say I’m A Dreamer)
In a quick moment of cheap exposition, Cobb (DiCaprio) and Arthur (played impressively by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) explain that dream sharing was developed by the military as a way for two people to enter the same dream, like the Matrix training software. Real combat, low stakes. Instead of a metal rod thrust into the back of your head, you get an IV line pumping sleepy-time drugs into your veins.
Get two people hooked up to the dream drug machine and you have a shared dream. The two people are, at minimum (and boy was this confusing to keep track of):
The Dreamer, who creates the dream world, and
The Subject, who fills the dream world with people from his subconscious, and who usually doesn’t know it’s a dream. (This is usually the person they’re trying to steal from, or in this case, plant an idea in.)
After that, you can hook up anyone else who wants to come along for the ride.
The Rules (Down Doobie Doo Down Down)
There aren’t any official rules that I’m aware of, but based on the story, this is what I gather about how dream sharing works in Nolan’s world.
- Time is crazy. According to Arthur, you get an hour of dream time for every 5 minutes of real time.
- Death is ok. If you die in a dream, you wake up in the level above.
- Oh yeah, dreams can have levels. You can fall asleep in your dream and have a dream within a dream.
- The subject’s awareness is disastrous. As the subject becomes aware of the dream, the dream world begins to collapse, which represents the subject waking up.
- Waking up is hard to do. There are three ways you can wake up from a dream.
- You die. Usually, this makes you wake up in the level above.
- The timer runs out. When the dream sharing machine’s timer runs out, the dream drug stops flowing and everybody wakes up.
- The Kick. A sudden feeling of falling or tipping, known as “a kick”, will jerk the sleeping dreamer awake.
The Inception
In order to plant an idea in their subject’s mind (rather than stealing one), Cobb’s team have to go down into three levels of dreams. The sedative required for that kind of dreaming depth changes some of the rules, we learn.
First, the passage of time is even crazier. I’ll spare you all the maths*, but instead of moving 12x slower as Arthur describes, time is moving about 17x slower. On a 10 hour flight from Sydney to LAX (Is Inception a LOST spin-off?), the first level would last a week, the second level would last 6 months, and the third level would last about 10 years.
Second, if you die in these dreams, you don’t wake up. Instead, you slip into LIMBO, described as “unconstructed dream-space, pure subconscious”. I don’t know what that means, and it’s not explained very well, but I guess it’s believable that they wouldn’t understand much about how LIMBO works, so I didn’t spend too much time trying to make sense of it myself.
The inception journey begins when 6 people fall asleep on a plane and enter the first level of the shared dream.
*I can’t really figure out or defend all the math here, so yeah, I’m suspending some disbelief.
Dream Level 1, The … Hospital?
The team gets ambushed by Fischer’s projections who have apparently been trained to defend his mind with lethal force. Arthur and Eames kidnap Fischer in a cab and they all meet up in an agreed upon warehouse. (Side note: where was this “hospital” that Ariadne referenced several times?)
Saito, the financier, has been shot and is in considerable pain, forcing Cobb to explain that dying here would be really bad. Eames (the thespian thief) decides it’s too risky and he’ll be sitting this one out. And here comes My First Big Problem.
My First Big Problem
Cobb reminds the team that 10 hours of Real Time gives them a week in Level 1, and that surviving an onslaught of attacks from Fischer’s hostile projections for a whole week would be impossible–they’ll all die and end up in Mindfuck Limbotown. The only solution is to continue with the plan.
As we see, the plan is to go two levels deeper in dreams, and then synchronize a kick to bring them all back up to Level 1. As far as we see, there’s no kick set up in the cabin of the plane, and since dying won’t do it, the only way they’re waking up from this shared dream is for the timer to shut off at the end of 10 hours. Which is what ends up happening, because they wake up and hear the intercom announcing that they’ll be landing in LA in 20 minutes.
They could have stuck together in Level 1 as a team of 6, with a conceivably unlimited supply of dream guns and ammo, and had a good chance of mostly getting out alive. Instead, their plan is to have 5 of the 6 people fall asleep in the back of a van and leave Yusuf alone to drive around, ducking and covering his head, miraculously avoiding an endless spray of bullets from the same hostile projections that Cobb was sure would kill them all if they’d stayed.
Not only that, but when they do wake up in the watery van at the end of the movie, I assume they still had the entire week to wait before the timer runs out in the plane. Presumably the hostile projections were still after them, as outsiders in Fischer’s mind.
The easy answer is that Cobb flat out lied because he needed the mission to succeed. But the others were stupid enough to fall for it? It’s a tough one to swallow.
Moving on, nothing worth mentioning really happens in Dream Level 2 except some awesome anti-gravity fight scenes. Arthur stays behind to kick a few floating asses while the other 4 drop into the last level.
Dream Level 3, the Ice World
This is where the inception happens, and it’s pretty believable, I think. They fed him the idea that his dad doesn’t want him to be like him, and now his subconscious is feeding that back to him as he helps them break into his own mind. Works enough for me.
Meanwhile, Saito finally dies and drops into LIMBO. And before Fischer actually gets his inception-induced catharsis, he’s shot by the projection of Mal, Cobb’s dead wife, and he drops into LIMBO too. Cobb and Ariadne (Ellen Page’s character) go after Fischer while Eames sticks around to blow shit up.
Down in LIMBO, Ariadne and Cobb find Mal in their old house. She agrees to let them have Fischer if Cobb stays behind. So he does, and explains to Ariadne that she’s going to have to improvise a Kick. And this is My Second Big Problem.
My Second Big Problem
As “the Kick” is explained, it’s a sudden falling or tipping sensation felt by the sleeping dreamer that jolts him awake. It’s clever because we’ve all felt that feeling and it definitely wakes you up (and scares the hell out of your bedmate, but they didn’t really work that aspect in).
In this case, they need a “synchronized kick” (sync-kick) to happen in all the levels so that their consciousnesses come back up to Level 1, where they’ll all sit around for a week, I guess, and hope they don’t get shot by Fischer’s still very hostile projections.
In Level 1, Yusuf is going to back the van off a bridge, which (conveniently) creates two kicks, one as the van smashes into the guard rail and a second when the van crashes into the river below. Everybody misses the first so they aim for the second.
In Level 2, Arthur has to improvise, since the falling van leaves its passengers floating in free fall, a state that’s passed down to Arthur’s level of the dream. With very little gravity to work with, it’s hard to make anyone have a feeling of sudden tipping, so Arthur rigs up the elevator with explosives and rockets the sleeping dreamers awake.
In Level 3, Eames will set off charges on the stone supports of the Ice World Mega Boss Fortress (no word if that’s the official name), causing the building to tip over and give them all a giant Kick.
But wait — why do they need a Kick in Level 3 at all? The sync-kick happens, I think, so the folks in Level 3 will be jolted awake by the rocketing elevator and pulled up to Level 2. Almost simultaneously, they’ll all be pulled up to Level 1 as the van smashes into the water.
As far as I understand, there’s no need for the Kick in Level 3. Which makes Limbo even more confusing. Ariadne just throws Fischer off a tall building, improvising a Kick like Cobb suggested, I guess. But again, I’m not sure why he needs a Kick, or how that would get someone out of Limbo anyway, since it’s supposed to be a crazy place that you can’t get out of that easily.
In fact, the only way we see anyone get out of Limbo is by killing himself. It’s implied that Old Saito and Limbo Cobb either kill each other or themselves when they reach for the gun at the big table and wake up on the plane, and we see Cobb and Mal lay their heads on the train tracks in front of an oncoming train and wake up from 50 years of Limbo-life.
But wait. Here’s my Third, well, Medium Problem.
My Third Medium Problem
Cobb and Mal put their heads on the train tracks so they’ll wake up from Limbo sleep and come back to the real world. They’re both young as they lay there. But later, Cobb tells Mal that they grew old together over the 50 years they spent in Limbo, and the scene cuts to a gray-haired couple holding hands and walking away from us down Limbo St.
So which is it?
Surprise! I Loved It
In spite of all my questions, I don’t think I’ve felt this way about a movie since The Matrix, one of my all-time favorites. Actually, I think it’s because of the questions.
Sweet dreams.