Reflection: This was my favorite assignment from the entire semester. For this assignment we needed to watch a sci-fi movie and talk about it in class. The goal was to explain if it was possible for what happened in the movie to happen in reality. The movie we chose was Inception and we needed to explain if it was possible to enter someone’s dream world and manipulate their thoughts.

➢   Introduction – What is the film about? Basic summary–DO NOT COPY-PASTE FROM WIKIPEDIA OR IMDB. When was it made? Who made it?

Christopher Nolan’s 2010 Inception depicts a fantastic science fiction story about dream sharing. Previously used by the military, dream sharing allowed soldiers to practice fighting without actually hurting each other in the real world. Eventually, this military technology was phased out. Dominick Cobb and his team repurpose the technology to extract information from people’s dreams. 

The film opens with his contract to extract information from a businessman named Saito. Sadly for Cobb, he figures out Cobb’s intentions; Saito instead contracts Cobb to perform inception–having someone conceive an idea. He is contracted to have the heir of a multibillion dollar company to split up his father’s company. The plan is to have a three level dream–“a dream within a dream within a dream.” The first level will start with getting the heir to open up with his relationship with his father. The middle level will involve the son realizing he  will create something for himself.  Finally, the last level would convey the father’s desire for his son to make his own empire. 

Overall, the storyline illustrates this plot very smoothly. However, a major source of conflict that permeates the film is Cobb’s relationship with his wife Mal. Mal has committed suicide because Cobb gave her the inception that her world was not real, that she was still in the dream world when actually she was living in the real world. In the dream world, Mal continues haunt Cobb and his team throughout the movie, spoiling the dream world’s structure and psychologically eating away at his mind. In fact, Cobb only accepts Saito’s contract because of Saito’s offer to allow him to return to his kids. 

When Mal committed suicide, she had staged that Cobb was abusing her. Thus, Cobb had to abandon the country and leave his children in order to not be wrongfully charged for Mal’s death. The resolution to this awe-inspiring movie is Cobb’s completion of the mission and Saito’s fulfillment of his promise, allowing him to return to America to live with his children.

Methods – Where’s the science coming into the fiction? What makes the world of the film different from our world?

Science comes into the film with the whole idea of dream sharing. Cobb’s team has this machine that allows multiple people to connect to it and exist in a dream together. With current neuroscience technology, no such machine can actually exist yet. However, in 2011, researchers at the Gallant Lab at the University of California had found a way to reconstruct low resolution videos of what they were viewing using only their brain activity (Hu 2018). In an interview, Christopher Nolan, the director of the movie, elaborates, “fMRI now allows scientists to view three-dimensional brain activity scans as they occur, but brain activation is a long, long way from interpreting neuronal output as visual and tactile metaphors that can be re-constructed as sensual reality (Hurd 2010). 

The world of the film is significantly different from our world because of the materialistic aspect of the film. In the dream world, anything can be created, you can become anyone, you can enjoy the luxury of time. A person besides the dreamer can also design the dream. A few minutes in the real world can also translate to a couple of years in the dream world. In the imagined world, you cannot even die. When you are shot dead, you just wake up from the dream. Anything that does not kill you is felt as excruciating pain. 

➢   Results – How accurate is the representation of science/technology? Give the facts, using references. Consider when the film was made–what technology was available; what was going on in the world?

The world in the movie Inception can be seen as an uncertain possibility for the real world. We can emulate some of the things shown in the movie but not to the same effect or scale. In the film, Cobb’s team used a machine and a chemical mixture to force people into a dream state. We can copy the effects of the chemicals using other means, but we are unable to create a machine that allows us to invade the subconscious of others because we don’t have the technology for it. And even if we somehow manage to create the device, it would not be portable like in the movie. The central part of the film was inception, the ability to go into someone’s dream world and plant an idea. In the movie, inception was used to make Robert Fischer give up his father’s business and trick Mal into killing herself in the real world. We can’t do anything to that degree in the real world, but we can still use a lesser version of inception. If you start talking to someone about the color blue, their mind will immediately think about the color and things that can be associated with it.

Even if we can use inception in the real world, we can’t use it to manipulate a subject’s thoughts or decisions. In the article“Is Inception Really Possible?” by Ciaran Murphy-Royal, the author writes about the results of an experiment that was performed and explains why inception isn’t possible. In the film, people were able to enter into other people’s dreams and control them. Here, people were in their own dream and aware of the fact they were dreaming.” (Murphy-Royal 2016). Inception isn’t possible in the real world because we don’t have the technology and we aren’t able to plant ideas in people’s dreams since they become aware that they are dreaming. Even if we were to go way into the future and ask the same question we wouldn’t have a clear answer. Going into the subconscious minds of others is still an abstract idea. At the climax in the film they ended up in a dream within a dream times four. The idea of going that deep in a dream is unrealistic since the dreams we have in real life can only stick with us for a short amount of time before our “dream world” is changed or destroyed.

➢   Discussion – What is the film saying? Why does it use science fiction to convey this message? What would people learn from the film? Analyze all your collected information.

The film is trying to tell us that chasing after a dream can sometimes make us forget about our reality and in the end leave us with regret. Inception is centered around the idea that reality is fake, it’s depicted as a dream state. Science fiction is used in the film to give the illusion that what you desire is within reach when in reality it’s all in your head. In the movie, Cobbs was obsessed with going deeper into the dream world with his wife. He let his ambitions take over him and ended up spending 50 years in the dream world with his wife. He wanted to learn about the dreamworld but he ended up being caught in it and confused it with reality. They ended up living their lives there while forgetting about the children they have in the real world. Mal ended up confusing dreams with reality and took her own life in the real world. She ended up getting lost chasing after a dream and in the end lost everything.

People can learn that while they should chase after their dream they shouldn’t chase it to the extent that they put their reality at risk. The people in the film were chasing after a dream that put all of their lives at risk. If you chase a dream for too long then that dream will become your reality or you’ll forget the dream you were trying to obtain. In the film, Saito kept talking about his goal of being rich, young men with Cobbs. Towards the end of the movie when many years had passed in the dream world Saito became an old man full of regret. He talked about being left with regret if you don’t take a leap of faith but ended up that way when he did. This is the same in the real world where people blindly chase after a dream and end up forgetting their original goal. You need to at least have some time to think about how you would get there. Also, our sub consciousness has unlimited resources which we could put to use. In the movie, each dreamer is able to create anything they want in their reality which is actually their dream. These creations can be a mirrored city which was seen in the movie or even a town being flipped upside down; there is no limit to the type of creations made. 

A group of people in the film decided to spend the rest of their lives in their dreams instead of the real world. These people took the shortest path to realizing their dream instead of working for it. The movie can also be interpreted in a way where it tells us that the future you set out for can easily be affected by others if you allow them to influence your decisions.  People should always do their best to make their dreams a reality but they should also look back and see what they’re leaving behind or putting at risk. If you run in blind and reach the end and there’s nothing there you’ll be left with regret and only remnants of a life you had forsaken.  

References

Hu, C. (2018, May 21). Theoretically, Recording Dreams Is Possible…Scientists Are Trying. Retrieved from https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/theoretically-recording-dreams-is-possiblescientists-are-trying

Hurd, Ryan. “Dream Studies Press.” Dream Studies Portal, June 2010, dreamstudies.org/2010/06/10/inception-mutual-lucid-dreaming/.

Murphy-Royal, Ciaran. (2016, May 19). Is Inception Really Possible.

Is Inception Really Possible?