Inception

[3DStudent]

*** Spoilers ***

Hmm, I think I might be swayed more to thinking it was all a dream now. The article AI posted gives some credence to "positive dissociation", in that you can still have a real experience within a dream/illusion. And comparing it to densities, that reminds me how we see 4D battles as weather.

I thought that Mal had lost her sanity after the 50 years in a dream. But with this interpretation, she seems sane and maybe Cobb was the one believing the illusion. Maybe when Mal fell off the building she created a jump for herself and went to reality... or exited one more dream LOL! I agree with your explanation Endymion.

But either way, I guess it doesn't matter, he got what he wanted. Even if it was still an illusion, he chose it and was able to experience something real. And don't we only experience vestiges of the real in our realities? Parts of grand cosmic archetypes?

 

[Jefferson]

I couldn’t help but think after I watched this movie the other week was what the Cs had said in Wave 5, something to the effect about dreams being excellent ground for planting suggestions. How that is practically done is beyond me, likely using some 4D technology, which I assume is only done sparingly to conserve energy (as we know 4D STS is the epitome of Wishful Thinking and does not want to expend a lick of energy if ‘hoped’ that it won’t be necessary).

But it was a way to entertain me for a few hours away and I’ve spent time on worse films. Approaching Infinity found an interesting interpretation however:

I like this interpretation: [spoiler alert]
_http://www.chud.com/articles/articles/24477/1/NEVER-WAKE-UP-THE-MEANING-AND-SECRET-OF-INCEPTION/Page1.html

I personally didn’t find a lot of opportunity to apply discernment to this film and I didn’t see much symbolism pertaining to higher realities or revelations about our matrix control system or elements of the ‘feeding dynamic’ so evident in our 3D existence, except for the possible allegory of dreaming=illusion. 3D Student summed up this similar idea quite clearly:

But it definitely raises the question of what 3D and 4D can do to us concerning planting ideas in us. Our whole reality is filled with ideas. I guess those that are "real" would be the "B" influences leading to consciousness. Surely, knowledge protects, and working on oneself will help to cut through the illusions and any false ideas that may have been planted.

However, the quote by svjetlonosa did make me think about how easily we disassociate and gravitate towards illusion in our life:

Even the best among us, experts in 'illusion management' will be trapped by density of illusion

As G said we need different kinds of alarm clocks to wake us up as we tend to slip back to sleep! And this forum with its members can be act as those "alarm clocks".

Also when watching movies I tend to also wonder what, if any, subliminal effects the movie, it’s plot, imagery, characterization might have on me (i.e. any programs set off that will run automatically later).


ps. btw this is one way as a Newb to get some practice here on the forum using quotes and so forth :D

 

[chachazoom]

Well, I happened to catch this movie a few weeks ago and I think it fell flat. DiCaprio's acting was really uninspired - he was going through the motions only (or so it seemed to me). The basic premise was definitely an interesting one, but they just didn't pull it off - at all. All in all, I felt that the movie would have been much better served with a different lead actor and some clarity of execution - seems a wasted idea on a cloudy script and actors doing it for the paycheck, not the spirit of the film. Just my take though!! :P

I just saw it last night and totally agree. The leads were very miscast and I too really liked the concept but the ingredients were off and this type of concept requires percision, so the whole thing was off/under baked. I was always waiting for it to catch fire and get intense. It started too many times but it never became roaring.


On the other hand, the role of the wife was played with the most passion and her character felt more real and I wonder if that contributed to my understanding that she was trying to pull him out of the dream? Was she just a better actress or was her role purposefully designed to be that way? It was like she was the only one in colour.

 

[3DStudent]

On the other hand, the role of the wife was played with the most passion and her character felt more real and I wonder if that contributed to my understanding that she was trying to pull him out of the dream? Was she just a better actress or was her role purposefully designed to be that way? It was like she was the only one in colour.

That's interesting. Maybe all the others were dull because it was a dream still. And she was the only one who represented a real part, and thus was more lively. So maybe it was whoever was dreaming that couldn't cast the best "actors" :P.

 

[primechild]

I didn't particularly care for this movie. Just watched this mind mush for social reasons at family gathering or the group would have picked a worst movie.

[quote author=svjetlonosa]
1. Death is an exit from this dream known to us as a reality, meaning: Don't be afraid of it;
2. Even the best among us, experts in 'illusion management' will be trapped by density of illusion. The meaning: Don't resist, you'll lose.
[/quote]

Svjetlonosa, I agree with these points except to me they’re both negative.
1. Its not reality so you can kill your self when it gets bad
2. Happy illusion so who cares if it’s an illusion and not reality

[quote author=gimpy] Instead of letting movies like this lull you into that, or books, look at how these things work at manipulating you and step outside of it...[/quote]

I agree Gimpy; movies, books, and general environment have an influence on the mind/body. Ugh, it’s like having a little msg/gluten because the rest of the family is eating it too. (Me, I rather starve, oh well one more thing for my family to nit pick when I visit.)

[quote author=3d resident]
I once had a dream within a dream within a dream. It was an extremely strange thing, when I finally woke up to this reality and realized what I had experienced. Each successful awakening was like waking up for real and yet it wasn't (which of course I didn't realize until I woke up into this reality). And I have dreams within dreams frequently. In some of my dreams within dreams I awaken and then tell the people in my first-level dream about the dream I had, and how strange it all was. [/quote]

Yes, many times talked to real people in my dreams thinking it was reality, when in Real Life (RL), I restart the conversation of something they said in dream, oh the weird looks I got!

As a child disliked reality dreams, sometimes Déjà vu entire day, everyone does the same thing in RL that they did in dream, had to go trough horrible school test day twice. Back then I couldn’t tell the difference between lucid dreaming and reality.

Has anyone else had to go through the same day in RL exactly as it happened in your dreams? Gaia? Meta? 3d resident? Duh! search box! there is a thread on Déjà vu/Dreams

 

[eleusis]

I felt as if the symbols in this movie were intended to obscure reality through esoteric knowledge and not elevate the audience to a higher level of understanding and being. This movie to me is like an experiment in mind control and manipulation, a place where a flower can't simply be a magnificent objective flower, or a symbol of the blossoming of awareness, but is instead a symbol for the soul and how the PTB can pluck it's petals whenever they so desire. Take the totem of the spinning top for instance, to me that symbolized the pineal gland. A spinning hypnotic pineal gland or third eye. We do know that the pineal gland controls production of melatonin and the cycles of light and dark, sleep and awake and hunger and thirst and effects dreams. It is also said that the pineal gland is the seat of the soul, something which may or may not be true, but if there is some truth to that then in the context of this movie the spinning top is meant as a device for the manipulation of all the above said essential pineal gland functions. Also, the pineal gland collects light and that light becomes information which the body utilizes to harmonize various necessary biological cycles. What about incoming higher frequencies of light and what valuable purpose do they serve within us, and would you want those frequencies cognitively tampered with via the incoming light projected by this movie and its symbols of which most of us don't have the expert knowledge to penetrate? Maybe those higher frequencies of light nourish the soul. Who knows. Oh, and maybe this has something to do with it or not but the lead actor is Leo and isn't that where Cassiopaea is supposed to be transmitting from or will transmit from?

Also, the scenes where two of the lead characters were discussing how to create complicated mazes. Again, a maze can be a tool for uplifting or a device for obfuscation depending on the orientation of the one creating it. Take a look at this maze from Chartres Cathedral.

With its nooks and crannies and folds it mimics the folds of the human brain. At the center of this "brain" or mind is a flower with six petals. Is that representative of the soul? Is it representative of a marriage of the higher intellect and higher emotion? Is it spirit and we are the souls going to greet it? Are we supposed to traverse the path of this maze with a spirit of adventure so that eventually we grow from our lessons and thus become more enlightened and evolved at the center? Of course the path of the maze is fraught with many perilous encounters so should we do as the movie does and create a maze where there are even more layers of lies, dead ends, twists, turns and distortions so that one becomes irrevocably lost, our souls shattered and we are forever the food of higher negative forces? In another scene from the movie, the very first maze which was quickly tossed out looked amazingly like the cross section of a mitochodrion. I don't know what this means and with a movie like this it does have a purpose. I do know, however, that the mitochondrion is the powerhouse of cell energy production.

The overall impression this movie left on my psyche, which is a powerful reminder, is of me before I started practicing the Eiriu Eolas program. I suffered for no reason other than suffering and being afraid and not knowing how to get out of it by further developing my conscience and higher emotion and by playing games because my ego wanted to win and be more powerful and stronger than someone else's ego. Was my continuation of the game in my own life so exciting that I couldn't resist or was it because I was so darn bored and needed something, anything, to do except that is grow up, become more responsible and dispense with the facsimile of living. That was the road to ruin and a great loss to the development and growth of my soul. The movie to me advocates this very soullessness by dazzling us with how easy it is to tamper and toy with reality. To play god. To play a god that has astounding mental powers but who's soul, represented by Di Caprio's wife, is either jumping off ledges or trapped in a basement going out of her mind somewhere. We are left with a soulless reality where there really would be no other reason for living other than playing games with each other. We would indeed be very bored and tired of this environment rather quickly and I imagine it would be a reality where cruelty, torture, lies and pathology would abound.

 

[eleusis]

Oops, sorry. There was supposed to be a picture of the Chartres Cathedral maze in there but I must have done something wrong. I have to get running into the city so I'll figure it out later or if one likes they can google it. Sorry, for the lack of external consideration.

 

[eleusis]

This should be the attachment of the Chartres Cathedral maze which was supposed to be in my post on Inception. I've posted several photos on the EE forum so I don't know why I seem to be fumbling so much here. I'm keeping my fingers crossed to see if this works. Nerves. :)

 

[seek10]

To day I saw this movie. Leaving aside this is real dream depiction or not, I find the movie interesting. The movie reminded me of castenada's art of dreaming , where he talked about dreams with in dreams. Looks like they combined the concepts from group controlled lucid dreaming with drugs and hollywood. It also seems to have borrowed the concept of reality as a dream from some eastern texts and it also reminded me of C's comments related to parallel worlds or one can create and dwell for ever etc. Felt, it is not a bad movie.

 

[H-KQGE]

Where to begin? I saw this in the cinema with a relative. I don't know why i even expected this to be good but it wasn't. Every time i hear it mentioned my eyebrow "does a spock." When people start mentioning it along with the matrix i have to take a deep breath & sigh. But when people start saying that it was BETTER than the matrix i start to growl.
This is shot in a typically bombastic summer hollywood blockbuster way with the constant gunfights, explosions & car crashes. So they have a military dream-device(stolen) & it requires some opium-like drug-taking activity to facilitate the entrance into their dream-world? Hmm.....
De caprio recruits specialists for the "one last job", ok then. Some new bright young thing straight from school & supposedly better than him at creating mazes? That's fine. Upon the first walk-through(which turns out to be a dream) he asks juno( "the architect") about the feel of the dream, cue exploding boxes etc.

They then proceed to walk around & she starts to fold one end of the street with the other. "Okay" i thought,"she could be interesting". Nope! First i clearly saw where the CGI began & ended(as i've done for virtually every film i've seen) & i mean the walking up the folded street part, (awful)then they began fraffing about with a bridge & some mirror-like glass. Honestly does anyone realize that the street folding cost about $100million?!! The 21st century arrives & the CGI hasn't moved on since the matrix-which was a revolution in digital CGI film-making.
But the worst part is that juno doesn't do anything other than violate cobb's dreamtime with his dead wife & then proceeds to nag him for the rest of the film! Eh? Wasn't she meant to be building/designing puzzles? She just ran from gunshots & kept bloody nagging! The hotel was allright i suppose(2nd dream) but the 3rd dream(snow nonsense at the end if your eyes weren't heavy or your ear drums were still intact)was pure indulgence on Christopher nolan's part. He even admitted it in an interview before it came out.(apparently he loves james bond snowy shootouts)Never mind the mind-marauding, corporate espionage angle, the coma-inducing 1 minute-in-the-dream-is-equivalent-to-10hrs-outside thing made me want to get up & go for a run around the theatre so as not to fall into my own triple level dream...& stay there.

Ultimately when people were oohing & aahing & asking each other if it was "reality or a dream" they were watching, or getting confused as to what level of dream it was(like my relative that accompanied me) i just rolled my eyes & shook my head. "It's like the matrix, but better" they said." "It treats the audience with respect & doesn't spoon feed the answers". WHAT?
The good points were the wife angle(genuinely sad),& hans Zimmermann's score- harrumph!

 

[Divide by Zero]

I'm listening to the soundtrack now (Hans Zimmer is indeed great!) and decided to look more into the ending and significance of some things.

I found an interesting page that explains a lot of things (spoilers!) which will make you think about what is real!

http://jonnegroni.com/2013/04/25/what-you-missed-about-inception/

 

[H-KQGE]

Thanks for the post DBZ. I found that interesting & replies to it too. Sort of like the article AI posted on the previous page. Personally I don't care if it was a dream or not. If esoteric/metaphysical/allegorical influences are going to be as obvious as this film (and not give credit to the plethora of other people who broke down the meanings of all these influences) then I want it to be far better than just something "pretty" to look at. I can only go by what I remember of this film & I still think that it's a good one. Nolan does tend to leave plot holes in his work & audiences tend to revere him by projecting all sorts of ideas & meaning that may or may not exist. The first thing about films is that you have to remember that it's primarily a visual narrative. When delving into this kind of topic then you need to be almost "perfect" IMO & unlike the Wachowski's, I don't think Christopher Nolan "gets it." I didn't like people making out that it was better than the matrix (which most people are still utterly baffled by) which it isn't. Quite frankly, I think this film helps people like us forumites open up & discuss, share & assess things. Some people may be influenced to look, think, & act different but evidently, not many as it seems.

 

[SOTTREADER]

For anyone looking for some reprieve from the current madness

The analysis looks at various metaphysical concepts within inception including what reality is, how we perceive it and ultimately when we become at peace with it.

In the end, the narrator states that reality becomes accepted when it is a shared experience.