Inception Essay

1034 Words5 Pages
It’s All A Dream Almost every frame of Inception is a dream. The film makes this clear and it never holds back the truth from the audience. I believe that Inception is a dream to the point where even the dream-sharing elements are a dream. So, therefore, maybe in “reality,” Cobb is not an extractor at all. He really cannot go into other people’s dreams. He really isn’t even on the run from the Corporations. At one point, Mal asks him how real he thinks his world is. He tells himself that it is all just a projection of his own subconscious. So does that mean all the faceless corporate men that are chasing him across the globe are also part of his dream as well? Mal asks him about a scene that we all know is a dream, but Inception lets us in on this elsewhere. Cobb is implored to return to reality, to “wake up.” During the chase in Mombasa, Cobb tries to escape down an alleyway and the two buildings between which he is running begin closing in on him. This is a classic anxiety dream moment, similar to when you fall in your dream, a kick, and it jolts your body waking you up. So when he finally pulls himself free from the dream, he finds a man waiting for him, which is against all logic, except dream logic. Much is made in the film about the totems, items unique to dreamers that can be used to tell when someone is actually awake or asleep. For Cobb, his totem is a top, in which spins endlessly when he is asleep, and the fact that the top stops spinning at many points in the film is claimed by some to be evidence that Cobb is awake during those scenes. Although, the top here might just, in the end, be a sign of doubt. That he has done all he could do but still always will have regrets, or some other deep metaphoric meaning that you may imagine. The problem here is that the top was not always Cobb’s totem. He got it from his wife who killed herself because she
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