Inception: Fact or Fiction?

When I first saw the movie Inception, it blew my mind away. It had a fantastical, seemingly out-of-this-world premise — the idea that someone could penetrate another's subconscious to extract information or plant an idea. Once I watched it, it was the only thing I talked about for at least the next week, and being the science junkie that I am, I was intrigued to find out more about the possibilities that can be accomplished by dreaming.

Parts of the movie — basically a heist film in which a team of operatives must plant an idea in a businessman's mind — are obvious Hollywood fiction. People enter and control others' dreams, drugs induce REM sleep, people become addicted to dreams and can't separate them from reality. But other parts are more real than you might think. In a radio podcast by The Takeaway, movie critic, Rafer Guzman, and dream scientist, Robert Hoss, try to shed some light on this subject. They explain that influencing another person’s dream actually is somewhat possible, although not in the sense shown in the movie.  Psychological studies carried out by Ullman and Krippner in the ’60s, showed that a person in a distant room could telepathically attempt to influence a subject to dream about a specific target (art print). The results of the experiment were surprisingly statistically significant. But it was conducted in a controlled scientific setting where participants had mutually agreed to attempt to do this rather than just invading someone else’s dream as shown in Inception.

The second, perhaps more interesting concept, is what psychologists call “lucid dreaming” — the ability to become conscious mid-dream and thus, control your dream world. This is a kind of virtual reality where you are present in real life but there is also a second layer of reality in which you are dreaming, although the movie also has levels 3,4,5 (and 6 if you consider yourself sitting in the theater).

Scientific studies, some more reliable than others have indeed suggested that you can control the narrative of your dream once you become aware of your dream state. Some people are even able to share dreams, or engage in the same subconscious experience! But that is a topic to be explored in a whole other blog post.

Another thing that director Christopher Nolan nailed in Inception was the disappearance of "position sense" in dreams. This is a well known characteristic of REM sleep, and allows us to go anywhere in space and time — one reason 99 percent of people fly in their dreams. It is for the same reason that it is not uncommon for people to dream themselves inside another dream. 

So did DiCaprio’s character finally come out of the dream in the end of the movie? Or was he still dreaming? Confused? Check out 6 possible explanations here.