The movie, Inception (2010), is a brilliant master piece. I am yet to watch a movie like it. I must commend the writer and director for bringing to life such good work. I mean all the actors did a great job, holding the viewer’s attention from the beginning to the end. I even watched the movie a couple more times. As a person who is intrigued about the mind and how the subconscious works, I found myself in the classroom. I mean I legit got out a writing pad and scribbled down lessons I learned from the movie. Before I go into the lessons I learned from this master piece, I will briefly give the plot of the movie, the central idea and the importance of each character in the movie.
You guys remember the beautiful young man from Titanic right, Leonardo DiCaprio is the star of the Movie, who acts as Dom Cobb. Dominick and Arthur are associates; they specialize in corporate espionage using military techniques to extract classified information from their subjects by sharing dreams with the subject. At the beginning, we see that they successfully extracted information from a Japanese businessman, Siato, using a technique of a dream within a dream. How did they do this? You might want to ask. They usually go on their missions with an architect; one who designs the dreams where their subject enters once they fall asleep. Both Dom and Arthur, their subject and the architect are in the dream. Someone else, it could be anybody really, would control the machine that connects all their subconscious and times their activities within the dream (they wake up this way or die in the dream to be awaken). I hope you’re still following at this point because I am about to go a little deeper into the story.
Now, Dom and Arthur successfully stole the information from this Japanese businessman, yet Saito figures out what happened. He was robbed of his most precious secret from a safe in his dream. He decides to employ both Dom and Arthur to help plant an idea in the mind of his greatest competition to make his business crumble while his rises to the top. Dom agrees to it only because it was his only option in getting back home to his kids, who he ordinarily won’t be able to see for the murder charges on him for his wife’s death. Well he was indirectly guilty of her death because he had successfully planted an idea in his wife’s mind to make her think that her dream world was the real world while the real world was the dream world to her. She killed herself to get to the dream world which she thought was real.
Dom and Arthur with the assistance of a graduate Architect, who is really good at what she does, and a couple others, successfully create
a dream within a dream within a dream (i.e 3 stages of dreams) to plant an idea in the mind of their subject, Robert Fischer. During the event of things, they are faced with the challenges of having to combat the subconscious (which acts as antibodies would to external bodies) of their subject. They also had to make sure that their subject isn’t aware that he is dreaming because it will only sabotage their plans as it almost did for their previous subject. They are also faced with the issues of Dom’s subconscious i.e his wife and kids always getting in the way of their mission. Their biggest problem was having to face the risk that none of them, if not all of them, will die in the dream of their subject making them go into a state of limbo (extinction) until someone else reaches out to save them; the reality of Saito. Eventually, Dom had to kill his wife’s projection, which he knew wasn’t her of course but it was just really hard for him to do, for the mission to be successful.
At the end we see that the team is able to get to the last stage of the last dream, which is getting the idea planted in Fischer’s subconscious which is meant to change everything about his reality. However, the writer doesn’t give us clarity on how the story ends. All we know is that all is well on the plane like nothing ever happened. Cobb lands at the airport in his home town and he is successfully cleared as if he had no record of crime. His Father welcomes him back and gets him home to his children. He sees his kids and just as he checks his totem (a personal object that he uses to check if he was still in the dream state) he runs to his children spinning them around. His kids wear the same set of clothes they wore when he left them to flee from his home town years ago. They were about the same age and same size as he left them and just when the viewer was made to believe that Dom is really home, we see the totem spinning without stopping which signifies that Dom really is still in the Dream state. Some may argue he was not.
It’s a pretty long story right? Well it’s really an interesting one although a bit complicated. You need to concentrate to understanding the idea behind the story.
What lessons did I learn from the movie: Inception?
1. Ideas are seeds that are planted into the mind of a person which shapes the person’s reality.
2. Often times than not, we let people into our minds and our dreams and they influence our every being, they dictate what we should do and not do. Thus, they bend our reality to their fantasy.
3. We may not have created ourselves but we have been given the power to control ourselves. If you refuse to accept this, others will do it for you.
4. We are the architects of our lives and our fate. Things turn out to be the way they are because we choose for it to be that way. Dom Cobb refused to be put away in jail so he devised a plan and got a team of people to work with in executing that plan.
5. The memories we keep safe in our hearts and mind follow us wherever we go. If we choose to hold on to negative memories like the thought of losing a loved one, or anything else, it affects our thinking. Learn the art of letting go because letting go solves a lot of emotional problems.
6. Having an obsession could be really interesting sometimes. It could also kill a person. In the movie, both Dom and his wife, Mal, were obsessed with the idea of being together forever and growing old together without thinking of their children. The thought of loving each other to stupor was good but the obsession got Dom started with the idea of creating a dream state where both of them can live in a dream of another dream in another dream i.e 3 stages of dream and because of this they were able to live 50 years together in their dream. It still didn’t help because Dom locked away, Mal’s totem which would normally allow her to know what really a dream was and what was not. His obsession killed her.
7.Planning is the key to every successful project, not just mere planning but detailed and rigorous planning. They studied their subject so much and prepared for the worst thing that could happen when entering his mind. Each team mate also paid attention to his or her area of specialty in the movie.
8. Finally, I personally love how smart the Japanese business man was. Immediately he got to know that a piece of information was stolen from his mind through his dreams, he used it to his advantage. He was too smart for them to swindle him though they already got away with the information. He offered them a better deal and took a great risk (one no-one had dared to try and in fact one Dom tried but failed at). Use your failures as a stepping stone to a greater success. Use your weakness as a lesson to try greater risks.
So that's it guys. I hope you enjoyed my summary of the movie and the lessons I got from it. There’s a whole lot of others but I will save those for another post on the topics related to ‘ideas’ or ‘the Mind’. I want you to not just read these lessons but to also compare them with your personal lives and live by them. Trust me that you will get a tremendous response to it. It might not come quickly but it will definitely come because your subconscious has taken record of it. Thanks for reading!
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