Thread: Inception ideology...

I know I've probably said a swearword with that film but I was interested to see how peoples experiences follow the framework of the ideas in the film.

-Dream Levels, do they exist? Can you get lost in deeper levels?
-Setting up a "kick", sounds a bit cool but hard.
-Totem's? Useful as a RC or just silly?
-Dream-sharing? new to the forum so if discussed elsewhere link me, I'm interested as I've had an experience.

Would like to know the seasoned pro's opinions

Oh, kicks do really work, at least in terms of outside influence... consider the dream mask. During REM, it'll flash its LEDs to signal you -- in your dream this may materialise as a zooming ambulance with massive flashing lights. I've also had it where, whilst sleeping in a conservatory, my dream weather became incredibly stormy and rainy... with such clarity. I woke up to find the rain hitting hard on the plastic roof.

Totems are the presence of an object/idea/person/action that differ in some property from the real world. So they're like a blend of dreamsigns/RCs -- for me, the strength of gravity on my body is different in dreams than in real life. A good sign for me.

As for dream sharing and deeper levels... I'll remain silent there.

There is a lot of hollywood stuff in inception, but i can try to answer some questions.

-Dream Levels, do they exist? Can you get lost in deeper levels?

There are things like false awakening, basicly at that moment u are in ur dream. And u can sleep again, but that's just changing dream scenario. So no it's not possible as far as i know.

-Setting up a "kick", sounds a bit cool but hard.

Im not sure what u really mean with this, setting a kick in a dream shouldn't really do that mutch. Doing it in waking life, if ur really lucky with ur timing should be possible. But this will just wake u up. No idea how u would set this kick up. Probably missing the question here though.

-Totem's? Useful as a RC or just silly?

Just pinch your nose and try to breath through it. If u can, ur dreaming.

-Dream-sharing? new to the forum so if discussed elsewhere link me, I'm interested as I've had an experience.

There are a lot of discussions going on in the beyond dreaming section of this forum, i don't have any experience with it. Or atleast not on a level where i can say it is real. But im open minded about it.


It's been a while since i saw inception, just keep that in mind.

Originally Posted by Ekyu

There is a lot of hollywood stuff in inception

Of course, that's the main thing to remember -- it's a movie. Wouldn't it be so cool if I could just plug myself into your dreams. So I'm rather skeptical about dream sharing, unless of course, like I mentioned on other threads, people are sharing similar external stimuli while asleep (sounds, vibrations, lights, temperatures, etc.) For example, if we all are listening to a sound file of a dog barking while we are sleeping, I wouldn't be overly surprised if we have a dog appear in our sleep.

However, one thing that stuck in my mind from Inception is the comment about "you don't remember how you got here" in a dream. Once I actually *had* a dream and realized I was dreaming because I realized where I was -- but I had no idea how I got there.

I just think the "totem" is a Hollywoodized reality check.

First of all, I loved the movie Inception. I've watched it a couple of times and still get amazed by some of the special effects. It's literally one of my favorite movies in the last few years.

In my opinion (I'm not a neurologist or expert in dreaming so feel free to completely ignore this response):

Dream levels don't exist. At least not in the sense that they do in Inception. I don't believe dreams work that way. I have fallen asleep within a dream, but I just continued dreaming laterally. I did not enter a lower level of my subconscious and time did not slow down. I cannot prove this of course. I do believe that with practice and meditation, you can access certain parts of your subconcious that are not always easily accessible. However, I don't think you can do this by just falling asleep within a dream.

You can definitely set up a kick in real life (for example an alarm clock). Setting that up in a dream would be much harder and maybe impossible. It completely depends on if dream levels (see above) are real. You could spend time setting up your kick while dreaming, then go to sleep in your dream and then never witness your kick because your mind forgot about it because it's not real. It is possible that at some point during your dream your mind may remember the kick and give you an FA. This may make you think your kick worked, when really it was just your mind remembering that you wanted to wake up within your dream and give you an FA. It seems to me it would be impossible to prove either case.

Totems in the case of Inception are to make sure you are not in someone else's dream. For instance, the weight of the dice is only known by Arthur. Nobody else knows the weight so they could not replicate it. If Arthur notices the weight of the dice is different, he would know he is in someone else's dream. It would not necessarily work in the case of his own dreams. Since he knows the weight of the dice, his mind could easily replicate it, therefore he would not know if he is dreaming or not based soley on his totem.

I do not believe in dream sharing. Lots of people do and will talk about "proof". I've yet to read anything that convinces me that it's possible. The brain is a very powerful thing. I definitely thinks it's possible for 2 or more people to dream of the same thing on their own and think that they experienced each other in the same dream.

In no way do I think that I'm 100% right. I'm no expert. These are just my impressions and I would love to be proven wrong.

Remember that the dream sharing in Inception is done using that mysterious machine. The dreams are artificial. Heck, even the sleep is artificial since they sedate themselves. The team might not even be real lucid dreamers. They might rely entirely on the machine to create lucidity for them. Nothing that happens in Inception is in any way similar the reality. 99% fiction.

Originally Posted by GreyBeard

Totems in the case of Inception are to make sure you are not in someone else's dream. For instance, the weight of the dice is only known by Arthur. Nobody else knows the weight so they could not replicate it. If Arthur notices the weight of the dice is different, he would know he is in someone else's dream. It would not necessarily work in the case of his own dreams. Since he knows the weight of the dice, his mind could easily replicate it, therefore he would not know if he is dreaming or not based soley on his totem.

Ah. I didn't quite get that part about totems but you gave me another idea for it. For Cobb's case he used his totem to check whether is he asleep or in a dream, something like a reality check. They had probably been playing with dreams so much that the normal reality checks we used like noseplug, etc doesn't work for them so they needed the totem.

I know there is another member on dream views who uses a totem to perform reality checks.

I think the other reason why Arthur stopped the girl from finding out the weight of the dice is because his subconscious will record that and the DC of that girl will know the weight of the dice too.

Originally Posted by dms111

They might rely entirely on the machine to create lucidity for them.

Not necessarily. The girl didn't realise she was dreaming when she used the machine for the first time, it was till Cobb told her then she realised and started losing lucidity. Others are probably already seasoned lucid dreamers so they knew it straight away.

Anyone else noticed a dreamer having shapeshifting skills in dreams?

Thanks for the replies! Its interesting reading all your comments, I am a great fan of the film but do agree with a few of you as I know Inception is quite a story but not very close to real Lucid Dreaming.

I do wish I could get my hands on that mysterious Machine!!!

The totems in the movie were less about distinguishing the dream world from reality and more for distinguishing their own reality (waking or sleeping) from someone elses. This was a tool used to verify they were not in someone elses dream because the dreamer would not know specifics of the persons totem (weight, balance) so this would be off if they were unknowingly in someone elses dream. That is why it was important not to let anyone else touch the totem.

However, that doesn't mean a totem couldn't work for you as a tool to aid in reality checks.

Well, at least this was the best-worded Inception OP to date...

Originally Posted by Mikeyfish90210

-Dream Levels, do they exist? Can you get lost in deeper levels?

No, and definitely no ( I think I would be lost in them by now, if either were true!).

-Setting up a "kick", sounds a bit cool but hard.

Yes, someone in waking life could certainly dump you into a bathtub, and you might even see a flood before you wake up, But no, since a) there aren't dream levels and b) once something in your dream leaves your immediate perception, it no longer exists, so you couldn't even set up a kick in a one-level dream (unless of course you constantly remember the kick, which would make it sort of redundant, I think). Also, anyone who has struggled to wake up from a nightmare or unwanted dream will know that a "kick," or any dream-created stimulus, has little chance of alerting your reticular system (the physical bit that wakes you up) to wake you up.

-Totem's? Useful as a RC or just silly?

Silly. period. A totem is not some magical device that will defy the nature of dreaming and always do the same thing regardless of your expectation or the whim of your dreaming mind. In other words, those dice can have any weight or no weight at all, and the guy who uses them could just as easily find them lighter or heavier, simply because he feared, or wanted them to be, or something in his unconscious felt like doing so. Things like totems betray how little the writers really know about dreams.

-Dream-sharing? new to the forum so if discussed elsewhere link me, I'm interested as I've had an experience.

You must be careful about asking questions like that on this site, because you open the door to a 50-post slugfest that amounts to "Does not!" vs "Does too!" with evidence on both sides firmly glued to "Because I said so!" So far it looks like you dodged a bullet! And for what it's worth, the writers got dream-sharing amazingly wrong as well -- an "architect" designing, and then navigating, someone else's dream would need to possess a genius that would make Einstein look downright dopey, and a transcendental sense of "selves" that defies human imagination...and I haven't even mentioned the levels of power and complexity that dream-sharing machine must have to not only insert the same dream in several people's heads, but to also hold the attention, perfectly, of all the participants unconscious minds. Something like that would still fill a room at IBM (rather than a small box just big enough for jack-in sockets), and take decades to program, if it could exist at all.

Now. Any chance this will be the final thread on Inception? The movie really wasn't that good, and pales in comparison, dream-wise, to rarely referenced movies like What Dreams May Come, Vanilla Sky, The Last Wave, or, hell, Any of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies (notice I left out The Matrix? Me too!). I doubt it...

Q: is X anything like the way it was in inception?

A: no.

-∞ < X < ∞

I was saddly disappointed by Inception. I had not even known it was out until Sageous one time said it was junk. I went and watched and sure enough, it does not relate to real LD stuff at all. It is just an action packed shoot-out.
Dream levels? Never experienced or even heard about anything like this.
Totems? Just a twist on RCs. They may or may not work, just as any RC may or may not. Nothing more than one person's RC.
Dream Sharing? Like Sageous said, a thousand threads exist with both sides represented. I do not feel like another one of those threads. I would like to think it could be done, as I do have experience with meeting entities who claimed to be dreamers. One claimed to be a Canadian girl in a comma ward. I feel like I have ran into other-worldy beings, but I think that is far easier than the idea of shared dreams.
Why? First I believe both dreamers would have to be brilliantly gifted at LDing, that is a rare thing to start with. They would have to have perfect timing and a way to find each other. So, maybe it could be done, but I think it would be more rare than almost any other mystical event.

Originally Posted by sivason

I was saddly disappointed by Inception. I had not even known it was out until Sageous one time said it was junk. I went and watched and sure enough, it does not relate to real LD stuff at all. It is just an action packed shoot-out.

In my non-expert opinion:

Calling the movie "junk" seems silly. Maybe you didn't like the movie, and that is just fine and completely your perogative. However, it's hard to argue that the movie was poorly made. It is true that it was not an accurate representation of lucid dreaming. It's just an entertaining story made up by Christopher Nolan and was not meant to mimick reality. You need to suspend your disbelief and accept that a certain technology exists that allows people to share each other's dreams. If you are not good at suspending disbelief, then this movie (and the matrix for that matter) would not be for you. Doesn't mean they are junk though. The story was engaging and interesting (which is more than I can say for most movies today), the special effects were awesome (I loved the gravity manipulation) and the acting was really good (Leo and JGL are always great).

I think Sivason may still have a point, Graybeard.

In the context of cinematic production, yes, it would be silly to call a glossy, well-produced and well-acted movie like Inception "junk."

However, Sivason (and I) was not speaking in that context; he was speaking here, in the context of people who watched the movie and decided that everything in it was true and possible. In light of the false face -- and false hope -- that Inception puts on Lucid Dreaming, I think Inception truly is junk...

Originally Posted by Sageous

I think Sivason may still have a point, Graybeard.

In the context of cinematic production, yes, it would be silly to call a glossy, well-produced and well-acted movie like Inception "junk."

However, Sivason (and I) was not speaking in that context; he was speaking here, in the context of people who watched the movie and decided that everything in it was true and possible. In light of the false face -- and false hope -- that Inception puts on Lucid Dreaming, I think Inception truly is junk...

I got ya. If I had watched the movie with that mindset, I'd probably feel the same way. In all honesty, I consider myself lucky that I got into lucid dreaming well after I saw this movie.

Originally Posted by Mikeyfish90210

-Dream Levels, do they exist? Can you get lost in deeper levels?
-Setting up a "kick", sounds a bit cool but hard.
-Totem's? Useful as a RC or just silly?
-Dream-sharing? new to the forum so if discussed elsewhere link me, I'm interested as I've had an experience.

- No, you can get the illusion of multiple dreams within eachother or "dream levels", but it remains the same dream, just the environment changes.

- Obviously works, but as you said it's hard to do. Outside things influence our dreams, let it be smells, sounds, lights, movement, ect...

- No, i don't believe they would be too useful. There is no rule that a totem will always behave unrealistically in a dream... it might just act totally normal, so it wouldn't work everytime as an RC... There are more sure methods. But totems can be fun little things that you can bring with yourself when you are bored

- Maybe... it's not proven. Some people say it exists, some say it doesn't... but you know, some people say that lots of unbelievable things exist... like astral plane, demons, ghosts, gods, ect... It's just like those, althrough since shared dreams play out in our heads (supposedly) i consider it more possible than the other things mentioned. I'm currently trying to test it too.