Inception for dummies

I remember one time I had a dream that I spent 2,000 years in prison. I was on the corner where I caught the bus to school every day, when my older brother did something illegal. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember him seeing some cops walk up to us. He immediately pointed at me and I had no escape. I was thrown behind those iron bars, and when it finally came time for me to be released, they were lightsabers! I woke up feeling the most confused I have ever been in my life, even to this day. It was such a ridiculous idea, yet it all felt so real. It still stands in the top five weirdest things that has happened to me, though it’s honestly falling down the list as time goes on. 

Dreams, folks! That’s what we’re talking about today. You go to sleep, you feel like something really real happened, then you wake up and find out that it didn’t. That’s what the movie Inception is all about, and I want to break it down into plain english for you. Maybe you watched this movie and thought “man, why did my boyfriend make me watch this, and why is he still ranting and raving about it? That was, hands down, the stupidest thing I have ever seen in my entire life!” Well, if you’ll give me a few moments of your time, I can help you get it. And if you do, maybe you’ll go ranting and raving alongside him. Or maybe you won’t, I don’t care. I just want you to understand what it’s all about. Are you ready? Here we go! 

Let’s start with the title: inception. Like just about everything in this movie, it actually means something. Inception means to plant an idea. To make someone think something about life, the universe, or someone else. In this world, the way people go messing around with other people’s ideas is through their dreams. Yep, you read that right: you dream with people. Imagine that! Reread the example I started with. My older brother framed me. Except, I was asleep, on my own, in my room. That wasn’t literally my brother who framed me, it was my own brain. But in this world, that could have been the actual brother of mine, wanting to play a prank on me. Following me so far? 

So, some dude rolls up with a pretty silver briefcase, hooks a bunch of people up and they go fall asleep and dream together. And there’s no one better at doing dream stuff than Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo Dicaprio. That’s where our story starts. So we’ve got Cobb, who goes around playing in people’s dreams. But he doesn’t go around planting ideas in people’s heads all the time. That’s a tricky thing to do. His specialty is stealing ideas. Let’s suppose I knew the secret recipe to make Coke, and you wanted it. Some nuts are too tough to crack, so you can’t just torture me to get it like they did in the old days. No, I’m too good for that. Instead, you’d hire Dom Cobb to get into my dreams while I’m sleeping and find the recipe for Coke hidden in my mind. 

One day, this rich dude named Mr. Saito offers Cobb a new kind of job: share a dream with his business rival and talk him into quitting the business. But not just to make someone else the boss, but to make his company go poof. This would be like you’re playing Monopoly, and you somehow talk the other player into giving you all their properties. The game would basically be yours. 

And Mr. Saito wants to do this now because his rival, Mr. Fischer, is about to die and his son is about to take over. What better time to have a company dissolve than white it’s passing between hands? But Mr. Saito isn’t the expert of dreams, he’s a businessman. He needs the best of the best to make this happen. So he sets up a test for Dom Cobb, one which he passes with flying colors. So he offers Mr. Cobb a deal: get this new boss to break up his company, and Mr. Cobb can go see his family. 

Wait, why can’t he see his family? Keep watching to find out!

When Mr. Cobb hears that he might be able to go home, he’s willing to take the risk on this job. He gets  some friends together and does a lot of preparing to figure out how to make this happen. Turns out, making someone run with an idea is actually really hard. And Fischer Jr is going to have to really want to do this. I mean, who would just randomly give up a good life, owning a company and making millions. You have to really want to do that. 

While the friends are figuring everything out, we learn a bunch of stuff about how this whole thing works. Things like that when you die in a dream, you wake up. You can also wake up when you fall in real life. And little things that are happening to you in real life make those same things happen to you in the dream. If you caught me sleeping and sprayed my face with Sprite, I might have a sweet dream where it was raining outside. 

Cobb and friends quickly realize that this idea will have to go really deep into Fischer Jr’s mind if they want him to take the massive leap of ending his company. And to go deeper into his mind, they need to find him in the dream, and put him into another dream. Crazy, right? So they try that idea, and realize that they need to go even deeper. That’s three levels of dreaming! Sheesh, with all these dream-layers, you’d think someone might start asking if they were really dreaming, or just awake, right? 

Correct! Remember that, because that’s a big deal later. 

Alright, so they need to go deep into these dreams, which means it would be kind of bad if they woke up halfway through. So they hire a chemist. What’s a chemist do? Well, let’s put it this way. Have you ever taken melatonin, or some other drug that helps you sleep? Do you remember how you slept that night? I bet you slept good, right? Drugs will do that to you. They help you stay asleep, in case you’re a light sleeper or something. That’s what a chemist does: he makes melatonins. Except, most people don’t need to sleep this deep, so he needs to make a special brew. He needs to make special-super-ultra melatonin. 

But how are they actually going to make Fischer Jr break up his empire? The weak link in this chain is his relationship with his dad. Fischer Jr and Fischer Senior aren’t exactly the best of pals, and Cobb knows that the best way to make an idea really stick is to make it a happy one. How are they going to do that? Well, they have to make it up as they go, because Fischer Senior just died and Junior is going to fly with the body to the funeral. 

Now, these Fischers are fancy-pantses that fly first class, so Cobb and friends are going to get on the flight and dream with Fischer all the way home. It’s a ten-hour flight, which is plenty of time to get the job done. So they all get on the plane and all go into a dream together. So they wake up in a city and it’s raining. The friends steal a taxi, knowing that Fischer will be looking for one. Sure enough, he flags down their taxi and gets in, only to find out he’s being kidnapped. 

But just as they get ready to take off, they suddenly get hit by a freight train. Yep, a big ol’ train pops up out of nowhere and slams into the side of the taxi. Everyone is confused, but there’s no time to sit around and figure things out, because there are bad guys shooting at them too! It’s weird. But if there’s one thing you have to learn about sci-fi movies, it’s that weird doesn’t mean you should panic. Things are meant to feel weird for a bit so that you can want to know why they’re weird. 

So within five minutes, Cobb’s team hides in a warehouse. That’s where we get our answers. In this world, people who steal ideas from dreams aren’t rare. Some people get paid to steal dreams, and other people get paid to teach people how to keep themselves safe from thieves. Turns out, Fischer hired such a person to teach him dream self-defense, and that’s what those bad guys who are shooting at them are: Fischer getting intruders out of his dreams. 

But we also learn something really crazy: melatonin-man made his drug so strong that you don’t wake up if you die. Instead, your mind floats around in empty space called limbo. The only thing that could be in limbo is stuff built by someone who had been there before. Unfortunately, one such person exists in this group: Mr. Cobb. We learn this because Mr. Saito pulls up his jacket to reveal that he got shot during the shootout. He’s slowly bleeding out, so they have to act even faster before he dies. The only other way to wake up is to make themselves fall, which they planned for a specific time and place once the job is done. So they have no choice but to keep going, just…a little bit faster. 

Up to this point, Cobb has been seeing stuff. Weird stuff like two kids randomly running around, window curtains, and this weird lady who we find out is his wife. But it’s now that we find out that she jumped from a building because she thought she was dreaming. But she wanted her husband, Cobb, to jump too, so she went around telling people that she was scared for her life. Basically, if he doesn’t jump, everyone thinks he killed her, so he goes to jail. That’s why he couldn’t go home before and why this job is so important to him. Part of his deal with Saito is that his criminal record would be wiped clean. He would no longer be seen as a murderer. Basically, he was being offered an opportunity to start over. 

Why do we learn this now? Because one of his friends knows that something’s up. And remember, they’re sharing dreams. That means that you don’t just go into one person’s head, you go into everyone’s heads. Everyone gets connected when you dream together, so the further they go into Fischer to make him break his family business, the further they go into Cobb and his closet full of monsters. 

So they stick to the plan and bring in Fischer’s godfather and only friend. Except, they don’t bring in the real godfather, but one of the team members who can make himself look like other people (that’s tom hardy’s character.) He tries to give Fischer the idea that his dad actually really loved him, which Fischer says is bogey. Godfather leaves the conversation there and they’re both thrown into a van and put to sleep. 

Layer two.

Now, because godfather wasn’t there being kidnapped with Fischer, Fischer starts to get suspicious. On this next level, Cobb convinces Fischer that godfather was actually after his company, and was actually the one behind his kidnapping. Fischer becomes convinced that godfather actually was hell-bent on keeping Fischer from seeing his dad’s will. Supposedly, that will had something that would change the life of Fischer forever, and change where his new company would go. 

Man, that sounds ominous, doesn’t it? Well, our team of inception-friends sure thought so. So Cobb convinces Fischer to go into godfather’s dream and find out what was in that will. But right as they put godfather to sleep, Cobb tells everyone that they’re actually going into Fischer’s mind. Remember, the actual godfather was never there. On the last layer, it was the shapeshifter. Now it’s actually who Fischer thinks his godfather is. It’s like my older brother from my story. It’s just Fischer talking to Fischer, basically. 

So they go into layer 3 of the dream world. Now they’re on a snowy mountain. The answer to what’s in the will is hidden in a safe in a base on the snowy mountain. So Cobb’s friends have to sneak into the base, open the safe and find out what Fischer wasn’t supposed to see. It’s a tough fight, because Fischer took some really good dream self-defense classes. Eventually Fischer makes it into the base. But just as he’s about to open the vault, out from the ceiling drops…someone. Who?Mrs. Cobb! She shoots Fischer and he dies and the whole mission looks to be lost. But one of the team suggests that she and Cobb go into limbo, find Fischer and get him out. But this is scary because Mrs. Cobb is down there because she and Mr. Cobb have been there before. Turns out, they were down there for a while and built a whole city down there. They lived some 50 years alone in their own little dream world, messing around with the whole dream thing. Now, she wants him to come back and live with her there. 

So they take the risk and go. Sure enough, Mrs. Cobb has Fischer on the balcony, waiting for them. Here we learn that it was Mr. Cobb who reminded his wife that they were dreaming and needed to wake up. He broke into her mind and planted the idea that the world that they were in wasn’t actually real. The problem is that the human brain works in patterns, so she got so used to asking herself if she was dreaming or awake that she just kept assuming that every world was a dream. Every world became a dream world, so every place was just another dream. That’s why she jumped off the building: she was convinced that she needed to wake up from this dream. 

Back in the present, Mr. Cobb cuts his wife a deal: if he stays, she lets Fischer go. She agrees, but Mr. Cobb isn’t really planning to stay for her. He knows she’s not his real wife. Remember, his real wife is dead. This person that has been haunting all his dreams this whole movie is actually how he remembers her. She’s just like my brother in the example I started with. In this moment, he finally learns to let her go. He actually stays because Mr. Saito is dead at this point, and he needs to be saved. So things get crazy and Cobb’s friend winds up shooting wife for him and Cobb goes off to find Saito. 

Fischer wakes up in the snow base and rushes to the vault. He opens it to find his dad trying to mumble the last word that his son heard him say: disappointed. Up to this point, Junior thought that this meant that his dad was disappointed in the man he had become. But on his deathbed, Fischer senior corrects him:

No, son. I’m disappointed that you tried to be me in the first place. 

Junior weeps and shapeshifter blows up the hospital so that they can wake up by falling. They fall from there, fall in the elevator, and fall off the bridge, all at the same time to wake themselves up from all the dreams and wind up back on the plane, just in time to land. 

Meanwhile, Cobb goes to find Mr. Saito, who is super old now. Despite being gone an extra decade or two, they make it back too, and everyone gets off the plane together. Cobb goes through security without any problems and makes it home to his kids. But as he gives his kids that long-awaited “hello,” something interesting happens. 

Throughout the movie, Cobb carries a top. In dream worlds, it never falls down. It’s his way of knowing if he’s dreaming. At the end of the movie, we see him spin his little top. It shakes and shakes, and the movie cuts out before we can know whether or not it falls. So we are left asking the question: is Cobb really just still dreaming? There’s no for-sure answer and fans are left to debate it. 

There are a lot of good ideas to take from this movie. My favorite part about this movie is how Cobb incepted his wife. All of our brains work in patterns. It’s why PTSD is a thing: we assume things are going to work the same way again and again. We hear loud booms and it reminds us of when we heard gunshots during the war. Now, it may just be fireworks, but we are working in that pattern. The trick to growing is to ask ourselves: what patterns are we following? What cycles are we in and where did they start? If we can start to see those patterns, we can see that things are actually different. Then we can start to grow as people. 

This movie reminds me that ideas are powerful. Ideas are what guide all the power that humans can have. It also reminds me of Jesus. He didn’t need to be there for every single moment of people’s lives to make a difference. He just needed to be at the right place at the right time to plant ideas. Then, those ideas would grow and people’s lives would change. Heck, the whole course of history changed. All because one dude knew a lot about planting seeds in the right places. I can only point to this metaphor as a tiny glimpse into the craft that Jesus mastered. I’m not nearly good enough with people to really figure it out more than that. It’s inspiring to see the big picture of what Jesus was good at, though. 

I really hope this helped you start to get this movie. I love movies like this because every detail fits snugly together. Every time I rewatch it, I appreciate a new little piece of the puzzle. Ultimately, I understand more about people, and the world we live in. So let me know if this made sense, and if you’d like me to do another “sci-fi for dummies.”