Inception

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

What I didn't quite understand when I watched the film (and I've only seen it once so it's possible it was explained and I just somehow missed this) was that totems are supposed to have a property which only the owner of the totem knows — that's how they work, because someone constructing a dream for that person won't know that property unless they have physically handled the totem (presumably ensuring the security of one's own totem is of vital importance for this reason). And yet the spinning top doesn't seem to fit into this. Surely the logical thing to do if you're constructing a dream with a spinning top in it is to have the top... fall like a normal top. Why would someone construct a dream in which it spins forever? Or has Di Caprio's character somehow disciplined his mind such that any time it's in a dream this top will never stop spinning? Because how does that work if it's someone else's dream?

His is unique because it does something in spite of the laws of physics. I've never really seen it brought up, and it does seem somewhat consistent with his own baggage that comes with how long and dedicated he is to this work.

The only purpose of a totem is to indicate that it is someone else's dream world through a false positive. His is extravagant, but functional nonetheless.

[Beastro]

What I like about Inception is that it's a tight story, almost every single plot and character gets used one way or another. And all without a clear villain.
What I don't like is the typical Nolanisms, like the world outside the main characters is quite lazily described. So there's this super duper mind connecting technology, that was used by the military, and now it's available to most high tech criminals and people from third world countries? Won't that tech be very regulated? Won't there be treaties for whoever can use it? And why can corporations put bounties on people and (seemingly) get away with it? And are the special drugs used in the mind invasion tech so simple that they can be made by an old-timer chemist, I know even trying to get the simple drug precursors in real life is a nightmare.

The movie's all in Leo's mind so that can be explained away.

We don't know what "real world" tech is like.

What I didn't quite understand when I watched the film (and I've only seen it once so it's possible it was explained and I just somehow missed this) was that totems are supposed to have a property which only the owner of the totem knows — that's how they work, because someone constructing a dream for that person won't know that property unless they have physically handled the totem (presumably ensuring the security of one's own totem is of vital importance for this reason). And yet the spinning top doesn't seem to fit into this. Surely the logical thing to do if you're constructing a dream with a spinning top in it is to have the top... fall like a normal top. Why would someone construct a dream in which it spins forever? Or has Di Caprio's character somehow disciplined his mind such that any time it's in a dream this top will never stop spinning? Because how does that work if it's someone else's dream?

His is unique because it does something in spite of the laws of physics. I've never really seen it brought up, and it does seem somewhat consistent with his own baggage that comes with how long and dedicated he is to this work.

The only purpose of a totem is to indicate that it is someone else's dream world through a false positive. His is extravagant, but functional nonetheless.

My take is that his wife was right and they were trapped with her being the one actually freed when she jumped off the building. Her echo is right about him creating a world that persecutes him, until he let go of his guilt, which then allowed him to enjoy the illusion of being with his children again.

Lucid dreaming is also kinda grounded considering you're actually kind of awake and have to pilot creative stuff in there without waking yourself up from getting too excited or scared.

Depends upon what you mean by grounded.

I used to heavily lucid dream when younger and it could get odd. Usually I actively interfered only when the dream became boring. Two times I remember were when people were lecturing me.

One was a sheriff going at me chewing me out for something I'd done outside of my childhood home. I got tired of listening to him, materialized a pistol in my hand and shot him in the head to the shock of my mom and aunt who were standing by us. The rest of the dream was them freaking out exclaiming in horror and tears that I'd murdered a man, which I dismissed reassuring them that it was a dream, until I paused with a hint of doubt that made me suddenly wake up.

The second was me messing around at my uncle's house that has become a freakish, Dali-esque, non-Euclidean version of itself out in the middle of endless prairie (His is in the forest at the foot of a mountain). Again, my uncle began lecturing me as I rolled my eyes tell him to stop ruining my dream. Tired of him, I turned around and began leaping huge bounds hundreds of feet into the air to get away, bouncing up into and out of the clouds above until that got tiring and I woke up.

In my experience, the weirdness of dreams is less about fantastical stuff occurring (though that can happen), but more about stuff occurring following a logic that makes no sense once you wake up. You and the people around you will do things that seem to make sense while you're dreaming, but once you wake up you have no idea why you were behaving that way.

In dreams coherence is sacrificed to emphasize meaning and impact. In this regard it is very akin to how odd much religious writing is that seems to abruptly bounce from one thing to another without something grounded there to keep is sensible as we know it.

My take away from dreams is to think over the overall lasting impression they give you and think about that, not the usual "This vase in the corner of this dark hotel room is a symbol for..." stuff. A good example is with an aunt of mine where a run in with her effected my dreams for about eight months afterwards. A dream would be a normal, odd dream, then she'd enter. Everything would go still and quite with me becoming nervous until I made some small sound or movement that would get her turning and running up to me viciously yelling in my face until I woke up.

I don't need any deep symbolism to know what those dreams were about: I was traumatized by how sudden and nasty she turned on me one day over a little comment I'd made touching on a feud she was having with my cousin, her son, at the time.