Inception

[Fianna]

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.

[Thebestoftherest]

Chuck won't mind.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

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.

I'm sure Jonathan has grips on psychological dream theory... I kind of take note of the seeming overly innate translation of phantom emotional states extraordinarily phenomenal (no pun intended), but yeah in no way really contingent on animated states.

Like, a particular business in an economy is more likely to follow principles of microeconomics rather than macroeconomics -- though of course if you are a centralized and influential business of some sort that was somehow able to manipulate societal factors, then you might be able to use macroeconomic principles completely in spite of microeconomics.

[Jonathan101]

I have dabbled in dream theory, and in other psychological dark arts.

How weird your dreams are comes down to what kind of personality you have and how active and vivid your imagination is.

If you spend all your time thinking fantastical thoughts, you are more likely to have fantastical dreams.

My own dreams care about logic until they don't, regardless of how crazy or mundane the dream is. The story can change two or three times, as it were.

Nolan does a lot of faux-realism in his movies, so I imagine that "Inception" is just a reflection of his own dreams and the kind of personality he has, mixed with a desire to tell that particular story. But that doesn't change the fact that I think more could have been done with the concept- of course, I have issues with most of his movies, so can't hold it against "Inception" too much, and it is a good movie overall, just not a great one imho.

[Nealithi]

I think when filming a movie about dreams they are limited to what they can pull off on a budget. Yes this one came in on time and under budget. But it was also mostly realistic. My dreams include beaming to starships. Walking into a small one floor house to find a three story warehouse inside with conveyors and cargo lifts. And my short cuts include jumping over rivers instead of walking or driving on the bridges. The fantastic even the horror of things chasing me with intent to consume me and destroy all I care about do not wake me. What will wake me is hitting something my conscious mind can say no to. I graduated from school, so any dream I am in school pushes me out. The same with basic training. I know I am past those things so they break immersion. I just wonder how none of that seems to be addressed.

[Jonathan101]

I still have dreams where I'm back in school from time to time. I think it's because I feel like I never did everything I needed to.

Being in school dreams never wakes me up. I don't think any kind of dream wakes me up. I get fully immersed in them whether they are outlandish or ordinary, even if they are things that I have done before in real life.

Heck, I've even had dreams where I'm waking up to go to work (or to school), which are very annoying when you actually DO wake up and find you are still tired because you've dreamt you didn't get enough sleep.

[Beelzquill]

I remember liking this movie as it came out and then mostly forgetting about it other than the spinning top ending and sped up time in dreams. To be honest, I kinda just didn't care all that much for any of the characters and I can't exactly explain why. It's not that I disliked them or had negative feelings for them, just the absence of positive feelings. As for dreams, I always just have boring ones, I literally had a dream where I just drove to the grocery store and bought some chips. That's it, no dreams of a test I didn't study for or showing up to class naked, fighting optimus prime for the tessaract, nothing. I must have a really lazing subconscious.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I've been able to do a Wonder Woman hover while lifting a car, but aligning my creative side with the side of me that can decipher dreams is very ships in the night most the time.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I think people are kind of harsh on his movies.

[Muzer]

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?