Making the leap of faith in a dream: Philosophical reflections on Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” (2010)

by Les

I hadn’t seen a more mind-blowing movie than Inception (2010) in ages, probably since the first Matrix. Starring Leonardo di Caprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, and Ken Watanabe, it engaged me on several levels: mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. This is not surprising considering the intellectual depth and cleverness of director Christopher Nolan’s works, among which are Memento, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight. I was particularly struck by the uncanny connections between his new movie’s dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream framework, and what I am literally coming to believe, as of late, about “reality.”

In this essay, I focus on three philosophical themes in the movie, which, in a way, constitute the beginning, middle, and end of the story of enlightenment or spiritual awakening:

• The blurring of the dream-reality divide,
• The remembrance of one’s past lives, or “dreams,” and
• Knowing the Self and owning one’s projections.

Following Soren Kierkegaard’s notion of the “movements of faith,” we can say that the transition from one stage to the next requires making a leap of faith. This is an oft-mentioned phrase in the film, in particular by Mal, Cobb’s wife, who appears to him in his dreams and continually exhorts him to “go home.” The quest for enlightenment or spiritual awakening, I believe, is really the cyclical journey home, the place of God-knowing from which we have initially departed.

Before I present my philosophical reflections, here is a brief description (without spoilers) of the plot of the movie, from Warner Bros. Pictures:

Dom Cobb is a skilled thief, the absolute best in the dangerous art of extraction, stealing valuable secrets from deep within the subconscious during the dream state, when the mind is at its most vulnerable. Cobb’s rare ability has made him a coveted player in this treacherous new world of corporate espionage, but it has also made him an international fugitive and cost him everything he has ever loved. Now Cobb is being offered a chance at redemption. One last job could give him his life back but only if he can accomplish the impossible-inception. Instead of the perfect heist, Cobb and his team of specialists have to pull off the reverse: their task is not to steal an idea but to plant one. If they succeed, it could be the perfect crime. But no amount of careful planning or expertise can prepare the team for the dangerous enemy that seems to predict their every move. An enemy that only Cobb could have seen coming. (Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/plotsummary)

ARE WE DREAMING?

As a metaphysical movie, Inception annihilates the divide between reality and appearance, or truth and falsity. What is real is problematized because you may not know whether you are awake or dreaming.

Even for a seasoned dream traveler such as Dom Cobb (di Caprio), there are times when there is no absolute confirmation of the status of the world. He explains to Ariadne (Page), the young woman he recruits as an “architect” for his team, that it is possible to forget one’s real life, to get lost in a dream limbo for decades. For example, Cobb and his wife Mal had conducted an experiment in shared dreaming. Their unconscious had created such fantastic worlds—showcased to beautiful cinematic effect by Nolan—that they forgot about the real world. In effect, they got trapped in the dream.

Precisely to avoid this confusion, Mal had devised a “totem,” a small metal top which would indicate that one is dreaming if it spins continuously. If it winds down after some time, one is supposed to be awake. But Mal, having fallen in love with the dream, hid the totem in the inner recesses of her mind (symbolized by a safe). She willed herself to forget the truth that she had known all along. The couple are only able to get out after Cobb retrieves the totem and convinces Mal that their world is in fact illusory, that she should wake up with him. They do this by lying down on the tracks and letting themselves be hit by a train.

However, when they do wake up, Mal has become convinced that the waking world is the illusion and the dream world the reality. She keeps asking her husband to “go home” with her. Since the time-tested route to waking up, or “kicking” oneself out of the dream, is through killing oneself, Mal begs Cobb to take a leap of faith—in this case, a literal leap from a hotel window.

Since the metaphysical curtain dividing dream and reality has lifted, it is now impossible to verify which is which. Even the totem fails as an epistemological litmus test, inasmuch as one remains in the dream when it is used. The ultimate test, then, could only be the leap of faith, but the consequences are grave if one turns out to be wrong. One could die, literally. The alternative is to be “born again,” or to “become enlightened,” to use another religious manner of speaking.

Cobb’s predicament is uncannily similar to that described by the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu, in a section of his writings about dreams:

Those who dream of a banquet may wake to lamentation and sorrow. Those who dream of lamentation and sorrow may wake to join a hunt. While they dream, they do not know that they dream. Some will even experience a dream within a dream; and only when they awake do they realize they dreamed of a dream. By and by comes the great awakening, and then we may find out that this life is really an extended dream. Fools think they are awake now, and flatter themselves they know if they are really princes or peasants. Confucius and you are both dreams; and I who say you are dreams—I am but a dream myself. This is a paradox. Tomorrow a wise man may come forward to explain it; but that tomorrow will not be until ten thousand generations have gone by.

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awaked, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a barrier. The transition is called metempsychosis [the transmigration of the soul]. (Emphases mine. Source: Humanistic Texts.)

Mal and Cobb, after having spent 50 years in dream time, by his accounting, are like Chuang Tzu: unsure now about which is the dream, about which world exactly they should wake up from. Inception’s mind-blogging ending is a brilliant illustration of this ancient metaphysical dilemma. It is one of the best endings I’ve ever had the pleasure to watch, leaving me thinking about this film for a long time afterward.

PAST AND FUTURE LIVES

Another theme of the movie is the ancient spiritual notion of the journey of souls. The metaphor of the dream within a dream suggests that we have lived before. After this life, or this “dream,” there will be others. The dreaming cycles will stop when we will finally have learned our lessons, which can mean retrieving painful truths we had hidden from ourselves, paying all our karmic debts, or saving others or being saved by them.

Cobb has the ability to go deep into a person’s mind, through his or her dreams, thereby implanting or extracting ideas. However, he is a fugitive, in effect an exile from the United States, where he is accused of having killed his wife. He undertakes to perform a service for a powerful businessman named Saito (Watanabe), who, in exchange, promises to help him “go home.” (Note that the salvation offered by Saito is different, in fact radically opposite to, the sense of “going home” offered by Mal’s apparition, who continues to haunt Cobb in his dreams. I believe the movie is silent about which path is real.)

The task Cobb has to do for Saito is to get into the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), Saito’s business rival, and thereby convince him to break up his father’s empire. This process of implanting an idea into a person’s unconscious, and convincing him or her that it is in fact his or her idea, is called inception. For the process to succeed, the idea has to be buried deep enough into the dreamer’s psyche. To achieve this, Cobb’s team induces at least three levels of dreaming in the subject. It is at the deepest level of the unconscious—the dream within the dream within the dream—that they must give him the message.

The challenge is that as the deeper the dream invaders go into the subject’s nestled dreams, the more awakenings are required in order for them to wake up for real.

The dream

The dream within the dream

The dream within the dream within the dream

To make things more complicated, the subject’s unconscious naturally rejects invasion, so in the dream, it will devise ways to kill the “guests.” Normally, in a first-order dream, dying entails waking up in the real world. However, beyond the first-order dream, getting killed means getting trapped in a kind of soul limbo: a state of never waking up, spending a mini-eternity in dream time. In other words, if you die in a nestled dream, you may get lost in a timeless psychic realm.

It seems that there are two ways to get out of this limbo. One is to remember your origins, i.e. how the dream began, and thereby recognize that you have been asleep all along. Then you will have to induce a kick, which, in a rather macabre way, may entail suicide. Among the members of his team, Cobb seems to be the only one who can perform a self-induced kick.

The other way you can get out of the limbo is if someone self-aware or enlightened comes to “save” you, thereby killing you in order to wake you up. As an enlightened being, Cobb plays the role of messiah for one of the other characters.

Cobb enters Saito's dream

This concept of nestled realities—Nolan’s metaphysical Russian dolls—may be understood as a metaphor for the cycle of rebirth. It is a repetitive realm of suffering, getting out of which takes many lifetimes of dedicated spiritual work. For the world as we have come to know it is not real.

The Hindus believe that our “reality” is an illusion, or “Maya.” More specifically, it is the dream of a god. The universe comes into being when the great preserver god Vishnu falls asleep. Brahma emerges from his navel, floating on a lotus flower, and begins the work of creation. After a number of aeons, Vishnu awakens, Brahma is sucked back into his navel, and the universe is destroyed. (Click here for my philosophical reflections on this story, written in 2005.)

Thus, life as we know it is but a dream, generated because our god-self has fallen asleep. We have forgotten our origins. We have come to believe that this dream is real. In this spiritual limbo, we will continue to be born into a life of suffering over and over.

The cycle of rebirth, or the Wheel of Life, is also called samsara or samskara, a Sanskrit word which literally means grooves, or well-trekked paths. One might say that these grooves are analogous to the complex and illusory labyrinths designed by Ariadne, the purpose of which is to ensure that the subject stays indefinitely in the dream. (It’s worth noting that in Greek mythology, a woman named Ariadne represents salvation rather than entrapment. It is she who gives Theseus the thread that allows him to get out of the labyrinth he is imprisoned in. True to this savior role, in Inception, Ariadne also shows Cobb the way out of his unconscious impasse having to do with the aptly-named “Mal,” which in Latin means bad.)

The Wheel of Life

Detail from M.C. Escher's 1960 lithograph "Ascending and Descending," which adapts an impossible object called the "Penrose stairs," after its creators Lionel and Roger Penrose. The Penrose stairs also appear in "Inception" as part of a dream designed by Ariadne.

Samsara is like a labyrinth or a purgatory—a way station for souls who have yet to be enlightened. Literally, however, it is less a place than a set of mental habits. As Deepak Chopra explains in The Book of Secrets,

Buddhist psychology makes sophisticated use of the concept by speaking of samskaras as imprints in the mind that have a life of their own. Your personal samskaras, built up from memories of the past, force you to react in the same limited way over and over, robbing you of free choice (i.e., choosing as if for the first time).

Thus, it seems that this life—and our previous and possibly future others—are learning opportunities. Our need to master certain lessons measures our length of stay in a particular configuration, or a version of a dream limbo. Buddhists believe that the way out is to make different choices, i.e. to shift the energy from the performance of bad actions (unskillful karma) toward good actions (skillful karma). It is to challenge the former habits, thoughts, and ways of being that have landed us in our place of suffering.

This liberation from samsara is the goal of spiritual awakening, which is called nirvana. It is the ultimate experience of reality. It is the state of no longer being born, of permanently being awake, of never dreaming again.

KNOW THYSELF (AND THY PROJECTIONS)

Cobb’s journey is really inward, toward deeper and deeper levels of self-knowing. The psychologists Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Gustav Jung posited the existence of the unconscious. In Freud’s famous metaphor, the psyche is like an iceberg; the conscious part is only the tip of it. The rest is the mysterious and unexplored unconscious: the repository of repressed dreams, denied desires, and traumatic memories.

Cobb’s psyche, when Ariadne visits it through a session of shared dreaming, has many levels. They travel to each one using an elevator, each floor representing an aspect of Cobb’s life. One floor is set in his home, wherein his two small children, always turned away, are playing in the backyard, awash in afternoon sunlight. There is another floor which is represented by a bright beach. Cobb refers to it as the “shore of dreams,” where his wife and children are playing on the sand.

While in the elevator, Ariadne becomes curious about the basement, which her companion refuses to show her. But while they are at the floor representing his house and he is busy looking at the children, she runs back to the elevator and presses the basement button. The elevator descends before Cobb could catch up with her.

At the basement level, the metal bars open, revealing a thrashed hotel room. Cobb’s wife is sitting on the sofa. Before Ariadne could find answers about Cobb’s past, the elevator doors open and he comes charging into the room. The couple have a dramatic altercation; Mal accuses her husband of breaking his promise to her, and of bringing a strange person into their private space. Cobb drags Ariadne to the elevator as Mal pursues them. He manages to close the metal bars on his wife, who looks up at them murderously as the elevator ascends.

As the team’s mission is carried out, the story of Cobb’s relationship with Mal unfolds, revealing the significance of the hotel room and how she died. It turns out that the success of the mission depends on the necessity of Cobb’s final confrontation with the constant ghost of his past.

Thus, resolution has something to do with the retrieval and acknowledgement of a hidden or repressed truth, followed by the work of letting go. Unless this is done, the burden of unconscious negative emotions (e.g. fear, guilt, anger, etc.) will continue to suck your psychic energy, preventing you from functioning and thriving.

In the movie, it is explained that the unconscious comes equipped with certain defense mechanisms. This becomes a problem for Cobb’s team as they carry out their mission. It seems that when the subject’s unconscious senses the presence of other minds—e.g. Cobb and company walking around in the subject’s dream—it would endeavor to “kill” these figures. The other characters in the dream, which are constructed by the subject’s mind, would suddenly become aware of the intruders and begin to attack them. These figures are called projections.

I think it is no accident that the term “projection” is used in the movie to refer to this rabid energy that wants to eject or destroy the other or others. The Freudians describe psychological projection as a defense mechanism of the ego, which naturally avoids the pain of confronting the truth of itself. If there is something about ourselves that we secretly detest, one way to deal with it is to project it on other people. They then become the objects of our irrational hatred. For example, a woman who unknowingly thinks of herself as promiscuous may project this characteristic on other women, thus accusing them of promiscuity.

If somebody sees too deeply into us and mirrors us in a way that we are frightened of or don’t like, the impulse to destroy them takes over. However, if the goal is to free oneself of one’s psychic burdens, the solution is not to attack others. One must dialogue with the ghosts of the self—journey down to the psychic basement, so to speak—find out what they want, and deal with their demands. This is Cobb’s ultimate task. When he invites Ariadne into his mind, she helps him see deeper into himself, but his projections get in the way, trying to eject her.

A prerequisite of spiritual awakening is thus to know thyself, as Socrates’ famous dictum goes. This work is excruciating, but the freedom from our inner demons is worth it. Our relations with others—fraught with pain and torture as they are (“Hell is other people,” Sartre wrote)—actually teach us about ourselves. The movie shows that our reactions to others point us to the way out of suffering.

CONCLUSION

Increasingly these days, I’m starting to think that this life isn’t all there is. It couldn’t be. I’m coming to admit that this limited view of the ego-consciousness is belied even by the terms of reason itself. A linear, scientific view just doesn’t make sense. The moment we admit of infinity, the loop necessarily has to be closed by God, or the other names that enlightenment and perfect love go by. The alternative is suffering, which I submit is experienced variously as a logical contradiction in rational terms, as despair and absurdity in existential terms, and as hell or purgatory in religious terms.

Or at least, that’s my theory.

However, more often than not, we are too attached to the dream. We don’t want to give it up: not right now, probably not ever, if we can help it.  Thus, I interpret the ending of the movie as saying that the human condition is haunted by this attachment to illusion, which is the source of our suffering. The paradox is that although we want to know—in fact, it is our deepest desire—we are too afraid to do so. For as long as we refuse to take the leap, we will never truly know.

In line with this, let me leave you with a beautiful quote from A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson, which is her definitive personal commentary on the famous A Course in Miracles. The latter is a book famously said to have been dictated to Helen Schucman by the Holy Spirit, and written with the help of William Thetford. As I read Williamson’s book, each page rings true. So intuitively true, that I feel my own soul expanding with the recognition of these truths:

The Holy Spirit guides us to a different perception of reality: one that is based on love. His correction of your perception is called the Atonement. He reminds us that in every situation, the love you’ve given is real, and the love you have received is real. Nothing else exists. Anything other than love is an illusion. To escape the illusion and find inner peace, remember that only love in a situation is real. Everything else is a mistake and does not exist. It must be forgotten. We must consciously be willing to let it go. (Emphasis mine.)

© Noelle Leslie dela Cruz. All rights reserved.