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"Stealing Dreams: The Dangers of Tampering with the Subconscious Mind." A Review of "Inception"

Dom Cobb is an unusual corporate spy: he steals secrets from others while they are in a dream state, not consciously able to hide anything. He does so with the help of a drug and a technology that permit "dream sharing." Okay, it's just a premise, not meant to be "realistic." A hypothesis, like "What if?" and "if so, what could we do?" So we play along with the fiction, no matter how absurd (as long as it's entertaining).

Cobb assembles a "dream team" to help him make one last score, one that will finally take him home to his children. This time, he does not steal an idea, but rather, he plans an "inception" or "implantation" of a virus/idea that will cause a decision in an "heir" to disolve his deceased father's financial empire and shift the world balance of electrical power in favor of Cobb's employer.

The members of the team are all amazingly skilled, and each one makes a unique contribution, like a "Mission Impossible" team selected by Mr. Phelps. "Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it: Create a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream." Sounds simple enough. An impossible almost absurd to imagine feat. It's full of holes, but we go with it. 5 dream levels all packed with suspense, action, and mystery. A strange sort of cliff-hanger, unpredictable because of the fluidity of "dream reality," where there are no "rules" or "laws."

But as expected from a good suspense movie our team faces unexpected dangers: We learn that formidable images or dream projections can be aroused by the subconscious to protect the dreamer, including armed men and trains.

I understand that dreams are our mental defense mechanisms; they help us cope with our problems. The idea is that they can generate counter-images like anti-bodies to attack invaders. But there are greater complications as we discover that a dream is only as pure as its dreamer: enter the emotions of guilt, greed, and other matters of a fallen soul. The subconsious mind, after all, is only a machine at the service of the soul; it expresses the soul's torment in moving pictures, in color, with sound.

In order to change the will of the "heir," they must search the deepest, most protected recesss of his heart. In essence, they access and aggravate a protected wound and use it to their advantage. The "heir" had lived under his father's shadow and in the shame of his father's severe disappointment with him.

In this multi-leveled scam with smoke and mirrors, it's hard to tell what is real and what is a dream or rather, whose dream is whose. But if we speak purely on the level of good entertainment level, there are satisfying (if confusing) auto-chase scenes and gunfire, on a lower level weightless sleepers in a hotel, martial arts in weightlessness (as in "The Matrix"), on an even lower level, an assault of a snow covered fortress in the mountains, and in "limbo," searching on a beach trying to rescue a team member who was trapped there and had grown old in its near timeless environment.

According to my son, Jeff, there is a message here for this generation: consider the dangers of fleeing reality via drugs and ever more powerful technology. The '60s and '70s message of LSD et al has moved to a higher level. What was "Tune in, turn on, and trip out," has become an ever more dangerous game to play: Now we have computer avatars, CGIs, 3-D (Note the same concerns expressed in my review of Avatar). We are always in danger of losing touch with reality. And available on the near horizon, interface of neurons and artificial intelligence. We are already in over our heads. We must proceed with caution.

The film raises age-old questions, but suggests new options. Good dreams, evil dreams: Media, technology, and chemicals might make both possible.

Can we really explain the "ID [the deepest reaches of the subconscious mind]" chemically? Did it occur by chance, by natural selection? I would suggest that the complexity of our brains and nervous systems are only the tip of the iceberg. We are at the controls of our minds and bodies, machines so sophisticated that we can scarely understand them. As with the splitting of the atom, we were smart enough to do it, but did we really understand the nightmare that would follow? Are we not like toddlers treating high-powered guns as toys?

In my review of Pan's Labyrinth, I observed that a skeptic would see only the tragic death of a young girl, but a dreamer would want to believe that she had passed into immortality as a princess. "Inception" closes with the image of a top spinning. It was Cobb's link to reality. In real life, the top would spin a while, slow, and fall, rolling into ever weaker circles. But he knew that if he was in a dream, the top would never stop. Sort of like time in a place where everything is possible. Maybe like heaven?

Of course, I believe that this life is the bad dream, and heaven is reality. Cobb's guilt, redemption and thirst for immortality--not a Christian movie, but re-telling the Christian message, the greatest story ever told, the only story worth telling.  A Canadian friend, Kim Doucette, suggested a stronger allegory of the sin nature and the fall, a lie deeply implanted in our souls that causes us to think a certain way, the wrong way.

In the last few seconds of the movie, Cobb returns to his children. He spins the top. It begins shaking, but has he really returned home? The screen goes black. What do you think? What you believe is powerful.

RATED "M" FOR "MIND-BOGGLING"

Posted by Mike Thomas at 3:50 PM

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