First of all, Inception is exceptional. Go see that bad boy if you haven’t yet. You will love it, and if you don’t just pretend I never recommended it to you.
As I exited the theater this weekend, the thought that ran through my head was the quote from John Goodman’s character in the film Barton Fink. “I’ll show you the life of the mind!”
As a person, I’ve always been a bit afraid of the idea that your mind can essentially fool you and/or itself into believing you’re experiencing something that you are not. The idea, as presented in Inception, that their can be layers of unreality to navigate through as you try to exit your own imagination, is even more frightening. Anyone who’s ever had a dream with a false awakening, or multiple false awakenings, can understand how potentially unsettling that is.
In The Matrix, Morpheus presented the question of how a would a dreamer be able to distinguish from reality and imagination if they could never wake up? The greater implication then is, if they can’t distinguish between the two, is their “reality” is any less valid than someone else’s? I tend to fall into the “indeed it is less valid” camp, but it’s an interesting question, no? Of course, the movie then abandoned that idea for some nifty action, and then the series abandoned every other concept it could have explored in favor of a cumbersome techno-mythology that it couldn’t remotely sustain. Inception explores this a bit better, I think, but being a summer blockbuster it obviously can’t spend the entirety of its runtime delving into psychoanalysis. There have to be gunfights and ‘splosions and awesome bizzaro-gravity hand-to-hand combat and whatnot.
As a writer, I tend to see these sorts of things and think either of how I would work with the theme, or what ideas I might have stored away that explore similar territory. I once had an idea about a new form of “capital punishment” meant to address prison overpopulation where any person found guilty of murder is immediately sentenced to several hundred or even thousands of years in hell by way of a technologically induced dream and emotional tampering creating a nightmarish afterlife and thrusting guilt upon you. But, due to “dreamtime” being greatly accelerated (as explored in Inception) compared to “real time” the actual stint in prison is more like 1-2 years. The guilty are then released with the experience of having lived multiple lifetimes in excruciating torment imprinted in their subconscious. How would that effect them? How “real” would it still feel, even unremembered? Would it program their minds to be repulsed by the idea of any action that could send them back to prison? What is the short-term and long-term impact of living “the life of the mind”?
These aren’t themes that are new to fiction, obviously. More sci-fi authors than I can begin to name have covered this terrain again and again. But it’s pretty rare for a summer blockbuster to delve into waters deep enough to potentially challenge some casual moviegoers. For some audience members, this will be their introduction to the concept of falling asleep and entering an entirely different existence.
