# What domains of Psychology have been convered in the movie "Inception" ?



## apanimesh061 (Jul 13, 2012)

I have seen Inception (2010) many times. The scenes have always been intriguing. The concept of "Dream with in a dream", Dream sciences etc are part of what subject. Even that concept of "Limbo" is very interesting. 

Does anyone know anything about those topics or where I could know more about them ?

Thanks! :happy:


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## I Kant (Jan 19, 2013)

Sophists comparing the concept of externally placed thought influencing the mind to the uncertainty of perception of reality via empirical means.

Thematically a deliberately confusing juxtaposition that dances around the real issues.


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## ManWithoutHats (Jun 2, 2012)

Inception was inspired by 'lucid dreaming'. Lucid dreaming is a well documented phenomenon where one becomes aware of the fact that (s)he is dreaming and, in some cases, is able to control the events of the dream. Though most people experience a lucid dream to some degree at least once in their life naturally (for most people, realizing one is dreaming tends to wake them up), a couple of methods have been developed to induce a lucid dream, or to train oneself so that they occur more frequently. Some have gone as far as to suggest that this has therapeutic potential (ie someone suffering from social anxiety might confront their fear in a dream and desensitize them self to it). I could write for hours on this and share my experiences, but there's already so much information on the web about it that I'll likely just be saying what you'll probably read in 5 minutes of research. For a starting point, here's the wiki: Lucid dream - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
and a forum dedicated to this kind of stuff: Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views

As far as the specific concepts the movie presents, I don't believe their is much of a scientific, psychological or philosophical basis for any of it. The concept of limbo (as it relates to dreams) has no basis in reality. At least at this point, sharing a dream with another dreamer is pure science fiction. Dreams within dreams are real and not particularly rare though; I've experienced them myself, though I don't think they're nearly as intriguing as they sound. To me, it seems pretty obvious that waking up into another dream is simply a continuation of dreaming– it doesn't mean that you went to sleep in your dream and were dreaming inside another dream, but rather that you are now dreaming that you are waking up from a dream which (unbeknownst to you) has not actually ended. Interestingly enough, so called 'false awakenings' are especially frequent for people dreaming lucidly or who frequently do/try to. This is partly related, I would assume, to the way dreams tend to develop relative to what you're thinking about, so, not too surprisingly, often times one realizes they're dreaming, gets excited, becomes fixated on how they don't want to wake up and, sure enough, dreams that they're waking up. "Ah, too bad!" they think as they sulk about how they missed their opportunity to be conscious during a dream, in their dream. Then they forget about it because their living room is flooding with milk and the stairs to work are backwards.

Anyway, I can't really think of what else that movie explores, specifically. Of course the concept of inception is fiction and, to the best of my knowledge, so is designing someone else's dream. It is true that a dreamer can control and more or less design their own dream by controlling their thoughts though, which is often what lucid dreaming people try to do. Their have been studies recently about how our perception of time differs between dreaming and waking life and, as I remember, it is about the same. So getting lost in a dream for a lifetime is impossible (thankfully); the REM cycle tends to last less than half an hour. Of course, some the observations that movie makes about dreams are true: you always find yourself in the middle of something with no thought to where you came from, and even the most grotesque absurdities of the surreal rarely seem uncanny.

If you're interested in the psycho-analytic aspects of dreaming, Carl Jung is endlessly interesting. 
Dream Moods: Dream Theories: Carl Jung
Myths-Dreams-Symbols - The Importance of Dreams
I actually didn't read these, but they look fascinating enough.

Dreams have been a subject of philosophical inquiry for centuries though. To some, the fact that we fail to realize our dreams are not reality while they are occurring is troubling as it offers the possibility that what we experience as reality may be akin to a dream, relative to actual reality. Descartes was famously troubled by this idea, and it was recently popularized in The Matrix. It wasn't until the 20th century though that philosophers, psychologists and artists began to explore the meaning, purpose and significance of dreams seriously.

By the way, if your interested in more movies related to dreaming and the surreal, you might check out David Lynch's films. Mullholand Dr. in particular, you might enjoy. In fact, there's a great deal of art, film or otherwise, that explores the surreal.
Surrealism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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## LiquidLight (Oct 14, 2011)

Yea the difference between Jung (or psychoanalysts in general) and inception is that, to the psychoanalyst the content of dreams were symbolic, whereas in Inception they are taken as quasi-literal. This is partially because the movie would be incomprehensible if all of the manifestations in the dream were symbols, the characters have to remain who they are narratively. So for example, what you would really expect isn't so much that Cillian Murphy would find his father in that room, but rather he would find something that represents his father. Nolan explores this largely (and somewhat inconsistently) with production design (the fortress, etc), but again because it is a movie and not a dream and therefore has to make some narrative sense, especially given the multiple timelines of the movie, you have to know when to pull back. 

As far as the dialogue of the movie, I would argue Nolan leans more toward Freud than Jung. I don't think Jung would recommend going into a dream to try to change someone, because the unconscious would be incomprehensible. Too vast and it would require understanding what the dream symbol meant first, because an outsider would perceive a dream symbol (lets say the father on his death bed) differently than the dreamer.


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## MrShatter (Sep 28, 2010)

default settings said:


> Sophists comparing the concept of externally placed thought influencing the mind to the uncertainty of perception of reality via empirical means.
> 
> Thematically a deliberately confusing juxtaposition that dances around the real issues.


Wit


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## ManWithoutHats (Jun 2, 2012)

LiquidLight said:


> Yea the difference between Jung (or psychoanalysts in general) and inception is that, to the psychoanalyst the content of dreams were symbolic, whereas in Inception they are taken as quasi-literal. This is partially because the movie would be incomprehensible if all of the manifestations in the dream were symbols, the characters have to remain who they are narratively. So for example, what you would really expect isn't so much that Cillian Murphy would find his father in that room, but rather he would find something that represents his father. Nolan explores this largely (and somewhat inconsistently) with production design (the fortress, etc), but again because it is a movie and not a dream and therefore has to make some narrative sense, especially given the multiple timelines of the movie, you have to know when to pull back.
> 
> As far as the dialogue of the movie, I would argue Nolan leans more toward Freud than Jung. I don't think Jung would recommend going into a dream to try to change someone, because the unconscious would be incomprehensible. Too vast and it would require understanding what the dream symbol meant first, because an outsider would perceive a dream symbol (lets say the father on his death bed) differently than the dreamer.


I hope I don't sound like some overly-zealous fan boy and/or a naive wanna-be-film-buff or any other number of disagreeable things but at the risk of that, I must mention that some directors do attempt to explore the surreal much more, um, surrealistically. I wasn't sure if your appraisal of the narrative and practical difficulties of portraying dreams in an abstract manner referred to Inception specifically or if you where speaking generally, so I just couldn't help jumping in.
David Lynch, who I already mentioned earlier (should have saved that name drop so I wouldn't sound like such a [see sentence #1]), is notable because, while he does sometimes deal explicitly with dreams, the real beauty of his work is the way he blurs the line between the ordinary and the surreal, with the focus on the psychological. His movies tend to land somewhere between a cinematic Rorschach test and an authentic case study of modern neurosis. Anyway, I know there are plenty of other directors who explore psycho-analytic and surrealist themes in highly abstract, innovative manners (going back long before Lynch hit the scene), but I mention Lynch because of my familiarity with him, as well as my ignorance of the others.

I actually just realized earlier, I think, that Stanley Kubrick's films may actually evidence a Jungian influence, though my familiarity with Jung is admittedly lackluster. Then again, almost any movie that holds a slimmer of truth to it is likely to yield to Jungian analysis in some degree: more of a testament to the brilliance of Jung, rather than that of most directors.


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## LiquidLight (Oct 14, 2011)

Well for one a David Lynch movie isn't a Chris Nolan movie. There's just no way even a guy like David Lynch would get 100+ million dollars to make Inception. Remember the studios have some say in the final script as well (and certainly in the editing process), even for the big boys. Lynch's movies are intended for a much different and smaller audience, there's no expectation for a Lynch movie to make the kind of money Inception made, so he gets a lot more artistic license, because no matter Nolan's talent, its still filmmaking for the masses (at the end of the day its a DiCaprio flick or Batman movie). 

Secondly as it relates to Jung, as I was saying, the symbolism might've been more abstract than a typical audience could handle. More on the lines of something like _Pan's Labrynth_ or something like that. In a Jungian dream interpretation the elderly father might just as well been represented by a frog for example. There's no way an audience of Nolan movies would've tolerated all this action for Cillian Murphy to end up crying over a frog or something that esoteric. To me that pushes the film into a genre other than Hollywood blockbuster which is, at the end of the day what it is. It's just a little bit more sophisticated. So the imagery has to be much more recognizable. As it is I come across lots of people who dont 'get' _Inception_ and think the movie is dumb - the psychological symbolism and so forth is just lost on them and they don't understand why the van is falling for a third of the movie and so forth). These are ultimately the types of people that big summer films are marketed toward (unfortunately perhaps), which is very different than someone like Lynch where the money people pretty much know its a niche thing. People try to make Nolan into a niche director because the plots have more underlying depth than say _Transformers _(a low bar to clear), but again, at the end of the day, there's shootouts and explosions and visual effects, A-list actors, and a Hans Zimmer score -- it's a Hollywood blockbuster. Plus Nolan is himself an uber-realist in his approach so I don't know that he would've wanted to push the visuals into a more fantasy-like (Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter) direction. That was one of my critiques of the film, that there wasn't enough to delineate the real world from the dream world and the different dream levels from each other, not even in terms of cinematography. If you lose your focus you can get really lost where you're at.


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## ManWithoutHats (Jun 2, 2012)

LiquidLight said:


> Well for one a David Lynch movie isn't a Chris Nolan movie. There's just no way even a guy like David Lynch would get 100+ million dollars to make Inception. Remember the studios have some say in the final script as well (and certainly in the editing process), even for the big boys. Lynch's movies are intended for a much different and smaller audience, there's no expectation for a Lynch movie to make the kind of money Inception made, so he gets a lot more artistic license, because no matter Nolan's talent, its still filmmaking for the masses (at the end of the day its a DiCaprio flick or Batman movie).
> 
> Secondly as it relates to Jung, as I was saying, the symbolism might've been more abstract than a typical audience could handle. More on the lines of something like _Pan's Labrynth_ or something like that. In a Jungian dream interpretation the elderly father might just as well been represented by a frog for example. There's no way an audience of Nolan movies would've tolerated all this action for Cillian Murphy to end up crying over a frog or something that esoteric. To me that pushes the film into a genre other than Hollywood blockbuster which is, at the end of the day what it is. It's just a little bit more sophisticated. So the imagery has to be much more recognizable. As it is I come across lots of people who dont 'get' _Inception_ and think the movie is dumb - the psychological symbolism and so forth is just lost on them and they don't understand why the van is falling for a third of the movie and so forth). These are ultimately the types of people that big summer films are marketed toward (unfortunately perhaps), which is very different than someone like Lynch where the money people pretty much know its a niche thing. People try to make Nolan into a niche director because the plots have more underlying depth than say _Transformers _(a low bar to clear), but again, at the end of the day, there's shootouts and explosions and visual effects, A-list actors, and a Hans Zimmer score -- it's a Hollywood blockbuster. Plus Nolan is himself an uber-realist in his approach so I don't know that he would've wanted to push the visuals into a more fantasy-like (Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter) direction. That was one of my critiques of the film, that there wasn't enough to delineate the real world from the dream world and the different dream levels from each other, not even in terms of cinematography. If you lose your focus you can get really lost where you're at.


All true. Like I said, "I wasn't sure if your appraisal of the narrative and practical difficulties of portraying dreams in an abstract manner referred to Inception specifically or if you where speaking generally." Everything that followed was based on the assumption of the latter which, as I now see, was false. I just got carried away at the thought of you being unaware of filmmakers like Lynch, given your apparent knowledge of and interest in dreams and Jungian psychology. 

I didn't by any means mean to slight Noland or write him off as bad at what he does, and I'm aware of the differences in expectations, audience, budget and so on between the two. Also, his earlier movies were interesting in their own way– especially Memento which I thought was quite excellent, especially compared to everything after, but that's just me.

Anyway, I enjoyed your post– except the thing about Transformers setting a low bar or something? What? We are talking about the movie about cars that are also guns? The one with the attractive woman on screen for a significant portion of the run-time? Jeez, talk about hard to please. 

"_I always say that (Steven) Spielberg is a very lucky human being, because the things he likes, millions and millions of people like. The things I like, maybe thousands and thousands people like. But you have to be in love yourself and see these ideas unfolding. That’s how it goes for me_."-Lynch
​


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## LiquidLight (Oct 14, 2011)

> Anyway, I enjoyed your post– except the thing about Transformers setting a low bar or something? What? We are talking about the movie about cars that are also guns? The one with the attractive woman on screen for a significant portion of the run-time? Jeez, talk about hard to please.


And jive-talking robots that the screenwriters had to issue an apology for. Yea that's the one.


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