The Movie Inception: How Trauma Sneaks Into Our Brains

The film Inception is an American science fiction film from 2010. It was written, produced and directed by Christopher Nolan, a British filmmaker known for the psychological themes in his films. The beginning brings us into the world of the dream, the subconscious, and the way trauma is projected into it. The film was successful at the box office, and had people all over the world discussing the end.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a dream specialist who knows how to extract thoughts from people while dreaming. It’s not exactly like going into your dream, though. Instead, what he does creates a shared dream, and executes a plan during that dream. There is a whole team involved: a dreamer, an architect – who designs the dream – and the person whose subconscious they are trying to extract information from.

There are also others who appear in the dream. But they are nothing more than subconscious projections from the person who has the thoughts they are trying to access. These projections try to defend themselves against the changes they see, and sometimes they become violent. This happens especially with people who have trained themselves so as not to let others get into their minds. Christopher Nolan did not draw his inspiration from any particular theory, and there is no line of research he follows. Instead, he drew inspiration from several theories and created his own dream logic.

Implementation of ideas

On top of getting information from someone’s subconscious, Dom Cobb also knows how to implant an idea into it. This is what they call “inception” in the movie. This practice is much more risky, and its consequences include things like madness or an obsession with the person in question. The problem is that in order to do it right, they have to go through three different levels of the dream. This person must believe that the idea came from them – they must never suspect that someone implanted it.

The film shows us how these all dreams are false, they are all pre-created. The film Inception does not dive into the nature of dreams per se, because dreams exist for a specific purpose. This time, Dom Cobb and his staff must implant an idea in the mind of the heir to a corporate empire, to help the competitor gain an advantage. The film Inception is definitely a thriller, and takes us into the world of dreams with an action-packed plot.

The structure of the dreams in the movie Inception

The movie Inception takes you through several induced dreams that Cobb and his team go into to get something. There are three ways to get out of dreams: when they end, which means you wake up; die in the dream, but not in reality, which will also awaken you; and finally kicked, which is basically the moment where you feel like you are falling and you wake up. In the beginning, the kicks are always in sync, and the same song is always played: ” No, je ne regrette rien “.

There are several dream levels in the film, all wrapped up in each other. To get to the original, you have to go through three different dream areas, reach the person’s subconscious, and implant the idea. To reach these levels, they need a strong sedative that will put the person to a deep sleep. The main problem is that when they sleep so deeply, death will not wake them. In this case, they go to a dream place known as limbo instead.

Limbo and time

Time goes by very slowly in limbo. In fact, it is so slow that it feels infinite, infinite to the person in it. Time in our dreams is not the same as when we are awake. 10 minutes in reality can feel like hours in a dream. When you dream, you experience everything as if it were real. In this movie you see that pain lives in our minds and that everything we feel in dreams seems real. If you are injured in a dream, the pain will be real in the dream. If you are in an infinite limbo, you will really feel like you have been there forever.

They are meant to avoid dying in the dream because even if it is not a real death, they move on to a new dream level where they think they have lived a whole life. The structure of the dreams in the movie Inception is like a Russian doll. So the deeper the dream level you are in, the longer it will feel. In real time, they sleep for 10 hours. They spend a week in the first dream level. In the second, they spend six months. Finally, in the third level, they spend ten years. The idea behind this structure has some echoes of Lacan and Sausurre. They are both authors who present linguistic theories that say dreams are like subordinate clauses. In other words, they are inside each other.

Snurrebassen

To stop them from going crazy and make sure they always know if they are dreaming or not, Cobb and his team have a spinning bass. It is a personal, non-transferable object that they know every detail of: weight, texture, color… They use this spinning bass to determine if they are dreaming, because they can undergo changes during the dream. For example, the weight may change, or the way it falls to the ground, etc. It is important that only one person knows its characteristics, so that no one can tamper with their mind in the dream. And of course, to always have a way to check if they are awake or not.

Projection of trauma in the film Inception

The word trauma comes from Greek, and means wound. This is why we talk about trauma as emotional wounds that have left a mark on someone. On top of that, Traum is the German word for dream. Freud was one of the first to examine how trauma manifested in our subconscious. According to him, we gain access to our subconscious through dreams where our traumas are disguised or blocked.

If we take that idea further, these traumas would have a kind of symbolic representation in our dreams. In other words, you have to interpret them through their disguise. In Nolan’s film, such symbols do not exist. The unconscious defends itself from possible intruders, but it is not a place full of “disguised” traumas. Here it is a place where people protect their ideas and the projections attack invaders. To talk more about the movie, we need to give some spoilers, so you should probably stop reading now if you have not seen it.

These projections tend to be people they know. In Cobb’s case, his late wife constantly appears in his dreams and sabotages his plans. This projection is not only his image of his wife, it is also a reflection of himself. Cobb has conflicting feelings about her death. He feels guilty, sad, frustrated. He may be able to hide it in reality, but not in his unconscious. So it is no surprise that his wife appears even in these pre-created dreams.

Jung and dreams

At this point, Nolan moves more into the Jungian side of things. All these projections from the unconscious come from Cobb’s ego, from himself. He not only sees his wife, he also sees all his guilt regarding her death. Jungian ideas also play a role with the labyrinths in the film, because part of Jung’s theory was that the structure of a dream is similar to the structure of a labyrinth.

Dreams were once seen as a mysterious part of life. Later, people found rational explanations that have led to many different theories. In the film Inception , Nolan takes bits from them all, and expresses his own vision of what dreams are.