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Inception and Phiosophy

Megan Covington

Sec. 13 part 2

         One question that the viewers watching the movie, and also the people in the movie always asked was, how did they know if they were dreaming or not? How they declared that was with something called a totem. What that is, is a simple object that each person has that they can use to determine if they are dreaming or not. For example, in the movie, Cobb had a spinning top that he kept with him at all times. If he spun that top and it just kept going and going, then he knew that he was in a dream. But if he spun the top and it fell shortly after, then he knew that it was reality. This is a good concept to have because it was very easy to get confused as to what was real and what was a dream after they had been doing this for a certain amount of time. It was confusing for me at times when I was watching the movie to decifer what was a dream and what was real life.

   

       Something in the movie that was interesting to me was what they described as limbo. Usually when a person dies in a dream, it causes them to just wake up from that dream. But when a person is heavily sedated and they are in a dream inside of a dream, and they die they go into a place called limbo. Limbo is kind of hard to describe to me, but what I believed it to be is a place that the person that enters Limbo makes up. There are no other people in limbo except for the people that enter it. When you are in limbo, it is very easy to forget that there is another reality. With that being said, a person can be in limbo for a very long time. A person can grow old in there and think that there life is fixing to end, but when they die they wake up in actual reality again. But while they are down there, that becomes their reality. When a person does wake up from limbo, sometimes it can be hard to realize that it is real life, since they were in a dream for so long. For example, Cobb and his wife grew old together in limbo. They were probably down there for 50 or more years. When they woke back up in real life, his wife could not accept the fact that it was real life. She thought that she was still in a dream, so in order for her to wake up she had to kill herself. When she did that she actually died. It is very sad that the people in this movie live their life like that. Going through each day trying to figure out if they are in a dream or if it is actually real life that they are seeing. But all this is their philosophy on life. Living in a dream has become better than actual reality to them, and after going through with inception, they could never forget. They needed more to life than actual reality.

 

        One philosopher that I could kind of relate this story to is Plato, and his cave theory. His theory was that we are all in the dark in a cave and can only see what is in the shadows. He believed that we have no idea what real life is like outside of the cave, unless someone goes out and explores it. When that person comes back in the cave to explain to the rest of the people, they have no other choice than to believe that person because they have no clue. It is a very interesting theory that I believe to be true. I believe inception relates to this theory because these people that are performing inception are going way outside of the box. They are doing something that everyone else in the world would persume to be impossibe. When they bring outsiders into their world and tell them about what they are doing, they believe them because it is so out of the ordinary and they have no other choice, when they bring them under and actually show them their world and their hobby. Everyone else in the world is blind to the theory of inception because they have not experienced it, and their minds are not fit to to comprehend that it is even possible.