Analysis of Movie “Inception” essay

Since the early days of existence mankind has been searching for a key to dreams. They have always been believed to have some special meaning, and already in such ancient literary sources as Bible much action takes place not in reality, but in dreams. Sigmund Freud has revealed a revolutionary theory when he offered his provoking study known as The Interpretation of Dreams, but much is still beyond understanding of a human being. Nothing is impossible in our dreams, they take pieces of our reality and combine them in strange ways, providing us with fantasies and predictions, unknown feelings or forgotten memories. Christopher Nolan makes a fantastic assumption that people can intrude into each other’s dreams, architect the world of dream and even incept ideas when a person is dreaming. Like a dream itself, Nolan’s Inception is full of metaphors. The film begins with the waters of an ocean filling up the scene. In oneiromancy, water is the broadest symbol of life, and at the same time it comes to mind that any dream is accepted as real life for us until we wake up. In this way, the whole film becomes a large metaphor for life itself, where we are not always masters of our lives and where, in fact, nothing is impossible if you have enough imagination (to which Eames, Cobb’s associate refers constantly). It is an interesting detail that to wake up from a conscious dream a person should be killed there. Maybe, our life is a dream, and death is awakening, just like the ancient believed as well as Mal, Cobb’s wife. And it seems to be not casual that when a person suddenly realizes he or she is dreaming, the world around begins to crash. That is why we are not provided with truth till we live a life. Otherwise, we could destroy it simply with an impulse in our heads, and we would have nothing to live for.

Moreover, transition from a dream to life, from life to death is never instant. In the beginning of the film, Cobb’s partners cannot wake him up and decide to drop him into the bath. And before he gets into reality, the space of the house where he finds himself in a dream begins to fill up with water through the windows. It is not just an extremely beautiful scene and not just following the true life experiences and laws of dreaming. This penetration of reality into a dream is a symbol of inevitable interaction of reality and dreaming, of dreaming and dying, of dying and living. In the film, the chemist brings Cobb to people who sleep only under the effect of tincture. But they come not to sleep, “they come to get woken up.” Really, some people lose ability to distinguish between reality and dreaming, and the latter never stops for them. It goes without saying that it is extremely difficult to refuse the world of dream if it much better that reality, but Cobb overcomes the unbearable temptation and chooses the right values, the real values. He returns to reality. A kind of reality that is real for him from that on, doubtful reality where the spinning top never stops to spin, just like the earth never stops to turn around the sun at least by force of our imagination…