Thread: Some questions regarding Inception and lucid dreaming!

*SPOILERS FOR INCEPTION*

Hello everyone! I don't think this is my first post here, but I've been absent from this site for a few months and I'm only just coming back now

Anyway, I bought Inception at the weekend and I watched it earlier on in the week. Needless to say, much like everyone else after watching it I was slightly confused! I have been practising lucid dreaming for almost a year now so I understood the concept of 'waking up' inside a dream, and the idea of the 'dreamer' filling the dream with projections of their own subconscious. However, some other stuff was in the movie that I didn't know if it happened during lucid dreaming or not.

For example, when Dom is stabbed by Mal during the last part of the movie in Limbo and he is in obvious pain. In lucid dreams, do you feel pain? I always thought you didn't feel pain, but only the force of actions, e.g. hitting the ground after falling from a plane wouldn't break your bones, but you would definitely feel the force of hitting the ground!

Another thing was the idea that you should never recreate places from the real world, otherwise you might become confused about which world is actually reality or not. Is that true? Or does dreaming of real life places or events not matter that much?

Thanks for any help!

You don't feel pain unless you expect to(?)
If you recreate a place from the real world, you may forget that it's a dream(?) Edit: I don't think it's very likely that you will.

I don't really know, I never had a lucid dream. I also just watched Inception like 2 days ago.

Originally Posted by Xandy

You don't feel pain unless you expect to(?) If you recreate a place from the real world, you may forget that it's a dream(?)

I don't really know, I never had a lucid dream. I also just watched Inception like 2 days ago.

It's OK, and thanks for your help anyway. Also, I forgot to mention but I've only ever had one lucid dream before, and it wasn't the best quality either.

Inception is incorrect on many subjects, but that doesn't really matter, cause the whole movie is probably Cobb dreaming.

Your questions:
Yes, you can feel pain in a lucid dream

No, it's no problem recreating from the real world, actually most dreams are recreations from the real world.

Anything you can feel in your waking life, you can feel in your dream life, because both our created by your brain. The only difference is in waking life, the brain uses stimuli from the environment. You don't need to expect pain for you to feel pain in dreams. For example, I once had a dream about just my hand. And every two seconds everything would go red, and I would feel pain in one of my fingers, and then the next, and so on, until I woke up, with an aftertaste of the pain. I have felt pain multiple times in dreams, but never pains that were unbearable, only just uncomfortable. I wouldn't worry about it. You probably won't ever feel excruciating pain. I've never heard anyone say they have, although I'm sure it's within the realm of possibility.

Also, although people often talk about confusing reality and dreams, I don't think it truly has ever happened to anyone. You always know when you are awake. Sometimes, real life might remind you of dreams, or have a dreamy feeling but you still know you are awake. Also, you might forget if a memory is from a dream or real life, it's happened to me, but it's rarely ever important, and you will rapidly realize it was just a dream.

Both of these fears are not to be worried about.

Inception was a great movie, a great science fiction, with its created world and new physics. Dreams work nothing like Inception. You don't have an architect construct a world, no one dies in dreams, there is no such limbo, dreams are much less stable, there would be a lot more abstract content. There are no dreams within dreams. Although you can dream of dreaming within a dream, you are not in a "deeper level", you are just in the same dream. It's like reading a book. Maybe the character in the book goes inside another book and then into another one, but in reality, it is all happening in the same book. There are no other book levels. It's only part of the story.

Even Totems are irrelevant, because even if dream sharing exists, I really don't think you could take this object of yours out of your pocket and check if you are in your own dream or someone else's dream.

Anyways, I really enjoyed Inception, I wouldn't take it as a documentary though

Originally Posted by Occipitalred

Anything you can feel in your waking life, you can feel in your dream life, because both our created by your brain. The only difference is in waking life, the brain uses stimuli from the environment. You don't need to expect pain for you to feel pain in dreams. For example, I once had a dream about just my hand. And every two seconds everything would go red, and I would feel pain in one of my fingers, and then the next, and so on, until I woke up, with an aftertaste of the pain. I have felt pain multiple times in dreams, but never pains that were unbearable, only just uncomfortable. I wouldn't worry about it. You probably won't ever feel excruciating pain. I've never heard anyone say they have, although I'm sure it's within the realm of possibility.

Also, although people often talk about confusing reality and dreams, I don't think it truly has ever happened to anyone. You always know when you are awake. Sometimes, real life might remind you of dreams, or have a dreamy feeling but you still know you are awake. Also, you might forget if a memory is from a dream or real life, it's happened to me, but it's rarely ever important, and you will rapidly realize it was just a dream.

Both of these fears are not to be worried about.

Inception was a great movie, a great science fiction, with its created world and new physics. Dreams work nothing like Inception. You don't have an architect construct a world, no one dies in dreams, there is no such limbo, dreams are much less stable, there would be a lot more abstract content. There are no dreams within dreams. Although you can dream of dreaming within a dream, you are not in a "deeper level", you are just in the same dream. It's like reading a book. Maybe the character in the book goes inside another book and then into another one, but in reality, it is all happening in the same book. There are no other book levels. It's only part of the story.

Even Totems are irrelevant, because even if dream sharing exists, I really don't think you could take this object of yours out of your pocket and check if you are in your own dream or someone else's dream.

Anyways, I really enjoyed Inception, I wouldn't take it as a documentary though

Haha, I liked it too, and I get what you're saying. Thanks for your advice! I was only slightly worried that I might end up having a lucid or non-lucid dream which resulted in me experiencing unbearable pain or torture

Originally Posted by liam12345677

Haha, I liked it too, and I get what you're saying. Thanks for your advice! I was only slightly worried that I might end up having a lucid or non-lucid dream which resulted in me experiencing unbearable pain or torture

Asses problems as they arise, my friend. You will experience much more positive experiences in your dreams than negative. Focus on racking up the lucid count before worrying about scary lucids!

Liam, you might be surprised when you do put the dreams in which you were tortured on your list of favorite dreams...

I don't know if you've heard of the The Old Hag Attack. When I was in South America, where the phenomena is talked about by even adult academics in biology, I had the experience of the old hag. The way it goes, is that you wake up paralyzed in your bed. You can't move. And there's a hag at the door. She slowly comes up to you and the fear is unbearable. In my experience, it was funny, because I had already had sleep paralysis before so I was not scared, but I was not completely lucid so when I saw the "hag" in the doorway (I couldn't see her), I thought it was the woman who owned the house. I thought she was merely coming in to wake me up. She came so close, I thought she was pulling a prank on me to wake me up. I wasn't scared, but then, she pinched my ear, causing pain (nothing horrible though. The pain was surprisingly intense but very bearable at the same time). Then, confused, I realized it wasn't the woman I know. And then I woke up. I found that dream very interesting, because I could relate to all the people around me who had experienced it. over there, there was even a myth about a man, who did the same but raped women. To fend him off, you need only put men clothes beside your bed.

You'll see, when I try, I remember 6 short dreams or 2 long ones per day. That makes up a lot of dreams. I would say, only 0.1% of my dreams involve pain, but because they are so rare, they become curiosities. And no dream pain, for me, has ever surpassed the pain of a paper cut. And even if you were tortured in impossible ways, you would probably wake up, there's also no real physical damage happening, so when you wake up, you're fine.

I wish you good luck in your dream exploration. It is probably the most curious of explorations that there is. (And although I gave examples of scary experiences, these are very rare occurrences for me... Oh, and do you have dream terrors or nightmares? I think only such people could worry about this, and lucid dreaming is actually one of the cures for it, so, again, it's all safe!

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