Inception

A thief who steals corporate secrets through the use of dream-sharing technology is given the inverse task of planting an idea into the mind of a C.E.O., but his tragic past may doom the project and his team to disaster.

Dialogues

Mal: If I kill him he’ll wake up, but if I am to hurt him he’s going to feel it, because pain — Pain is in the mind.

Cobb: They say we only use a fraction of our minds true potential. Now, thats when we are awake. When we’re asleep, our mind can do anything. Now imagine you’re designing a building, all right? You consciously create all aspects. But sometimes it feels like it’s almost creating itself, like you’re discovering it. Genuine inspiration. Now I’m out dream, our mind continuously does this. We create and perceive our dreams simultaneously. And our mind does this so well that We don’t even know it’s happening. That allows us to get right in the middle of that process, by taking over the ‘creating’ part. You create the world of the dream. We bring the subject into that dream, and they fill it with their subconscious. And to answer for, how do you acquire enough details to make them believe its real, well, dreams, they feel real while we are in them right? Its only when we wake up, we realise that something was actually strange.

Let me ask you a question; you never remember the beginning of a dream do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what’s going on. So how did you get here? Ariadne tries but cant recollect. Cobb tells her that she’s actually sleeping in the workshop and its her first lesson in shared dreaming.

Cobb: In a dream, your mind functions more quickly, therefore time feels really slow.

Arthur: 5 minutes in the real world gives you an hour in the dream.

Cobb: The people you see all the projection of my subconscious. Remember you are the dreamer, you built this world. I’m the subject. My mind populates it. You can actually talk to them. That’s one of the way we extract information from the subject. Another way is by creating something secure like a bank vault or a jail. The mind automatically fills it with information its trying to protect. Then we break in and steal it.

Ariadne tries to play around with the physics of this world & the people starts to look at her

Cobb: They’re looking at you, because my subconscious feels that someone else is creating this world. The more you change things, the quicker, the projections start to converge on you. This is the foreign nature of the dreamer. They attack like white blood cells, fighting an infection. They are just going to attack ‘you’, and remember it’s my subconscious so I can’t control them.

Ariadne creates a bridge

Cobb: I know this bridge this place is real. Isn’t it. never recreate places from your memory. Always imagine new places. only refer to your memories for details like a street lamp etc. Never entire areas. because building your dreams from your memories is the easiest way to lose grasp on what is real and what is a dream.

Mal kills Ariadne in her dream and she wakes up. Cobb tells Arthur that she needs a totem.

Arthur: so a totem, you need a small object, potentially heavy, something you can have on you all the time that no one else knows. It can’t be a simple object like a coin. It has to be more unique than that. I have a loaded die and I can’t let you touch it because that would defeat the purpose of it. See only I know the balance and the weight of this particular loaded die. That way, when you look at your to them, you know beyond a doubt that you are not in someone else’s dream.

Eames: We’ve tried inception before. We got the idea in place but it didn’t take. Not that we didn’t plant it deep enough but we realised its not just about the depth. You need the simplest version of that idea in order for it to grow naturally in your subject’s mind. Its a very subtle art.

Arthur: In dreams you can cheat architecture to create impossible shapes. That lets you create closed loops. Like the Penrose steps; the infinite staircase. It’ll help you disguise the boundaries of your dream. In terms of the size of the levels, it could be anywhere from the floor of a building to an entire city. But they have to be complicated enough so that we can hide from the projections. Like a maze. And the better the maze, the longer we have before the projections catch us.

The team visits the chemist who can provide the sedative required to enable a stable dream. There we see a bunch of people coming in to share dreams for 3-4 hours daily. In dream time it’d be approx 40hrs. The dream has become their reality. They essentially come there to be woken up. Who are we to say otherwise anyways

Cobb: “I will split up my fathers empire” — Now this is obviously an idea that Robert himself will reject, which is why we need to plant it deep in his subconscious. The subconscious is motivated by emotions, not reason. We need to find a way to translate this into an emotional concept. His relationship with his father is stressed, to say the least. We can push him to dissolve the company as a “screw you” to the old man. But no, because I think positive emotions trump negative emotions all the time. We all yearn for reconciliation. For catharsis. We need Robert to have a positive reaction to all this. Something like “My father accepts that I want to create myself, and not just follow his footsteps.” Could work.

Eames: On the top level, we open up his relationship with his father and say, “I will not follow in my father’s footsteps.” Then the next level down, we feed him, “ I will create something for myself.” Then by the time we hit the bottom level we bring out the big guns, “My father doesn’t want me to be him.”