Thread: Inception Totom. Does It Work.

Originally Posted by dreamcatcher81

The inception picture i have above clearly states that if the top stops spinning your in the real world. This was cobbs purpose for the totem. Cobb never saw the top totem continue to spin if he did he was going to kill himself thus the gun in hand shown in the pic. Unfortunately that wasn't even his totem it was his wife's totem that she left behind for him after she jumped off the building supposedly killing herself. Cobbs's right hand man explains to the architect girl that a totem has to be exclusive to the dreamer or it wont work. The only time cobb's top (really mal's top his wife) continues to spin is at the end of the movie when he takes his attention away from it and goes to hug his kids. I think Nolan was playing with the idea of willing things to happen the way you want them to in the dream. Which in that light is more accurate to the real lucid dreaming experience. I thought Nolan wasn't privy to the real lucid dream experience but now i think the inaccuracy of the movie was done on purpose. Brilliant.

The purpose of the totem is not to tell them whether or not they are in the real world. (That it tells them that is actually a residual benefit, not the purpose.) The purpose of the totem is to tell them whether they are in someone else's dream or not. They are extractors, and dream hacking is a common crime in their time. The totems are used to protect the team from having someone else invade their mind and extract from (or otherwise manipulate) them. If someone dragged them into a dream that they designed, the team can use their totem, knowing how it's supposed to behave in a dream. If it does not behave the way that they know it's supposed to, then they are in a dream that someone else designed, because that person doesn't know how to create the pre-established behavior of the totem.

So, to answer your initial question; the totems don't work (in the way that they are intended in the movie), unless you believe that shared dreaming is possible. Even then, their concept is completely fictitious, and they would not even make reliable reality checks, as all reality checks are fallible.

[Edit:]
Also, I believe the only significance of the top spinning at the end was so that Nolan can build the suspense and show the top only begin to wobble, before cutting to black and letting the audience draw their own conclusion about Cobb's Fate. (Planting an idea, as it were.)

I also believe he wasn't dreaming, at the end.