I am certain many viewers are walking out of Inception with great delight at the concept. Its creative expression is brilliant. As someone who has been teaching Extraordinary Dreams such as lucid dreaming, dreams within dreams, mutual dreaming, for a very long time, I left the movie with some questions.

Although the movie draws attention to extraordinary experiences in dreams, I wonder about the message this film is conveying. Of course the movie is Science Fiction, but beyond every novel or any science fiction there are scientific and narrative truth. In a recent interview, Chris Nolan stated that he did not do much research into dreaming and that the script is based primarily on his own experiences. His personal experience has provided him with enough qualitative material to convey states of consciousness that some people access easily and others manage to attain through effort and incubating invocation. Whether the knowledge gained from within or outside, the incorporation of the personal experience with dreams and literature in the movie was brilliant, visuals are stunning, but yet the thriller content of chasing and killing were far from being original or interesting. Haven’t we all had those “recurring dreams”? Can we be thrilled with something else?

Maybe I am numbed by the state of the world conflict, but somehow taking a subject so incredible and inoculating it with another chasing theme, is not an exciting dream to me. Yes, the incorporation was fabulous, but such nightmares are no longer subconscious material. I was hoping that as the characters went, as they called it “deeper”, their subconscious would illuminate something different than what we already know. Perhaps a profound solution of how to go beyond our psychic warfare?

The thrill for me as an audience was the anticipation of waiting to see if they arrive at a place within consciousness where the seed of wisdom lies beyond the reptilian brain of fight or flight. I suppose that was my dream that they would reach a transformative state that not only elevated the characters to greater lucidity but also awakened the audience to new levels of consciousness. Violence is no longer deep in the subconscious. Violence is what we deal with on a daily basis. We should not forget if at this moment violence is not in our backyard, it is in someone else's. It is not in the world of imagination, it is here. We just have to tune into world news on a daily basis.

In the movie, the last level they reached within the main character’s subconscious was powerful psychological work and offered the kind of choice making that lucid dreaming practices have been promoting for years. It was hopeful to see emotional resolutions. But it illustrated that such practices can cause delusions and thus not distinguishing waking from reality. This is a wonderful example of how great phenomena such as lucid dreaming can be taken out of context?

What I appreciated about the movie was the incredible creativity in visual animations clever plot of dreams within dreams, perceptual play and the fact that, as an audience, we were captured in the layers of the repetitive dream within dreams to the extent of forgetting where the waking reality was or was it any waking reality? The mastery of the Buddhist teaching that all is an illusion and questioning dreaming and waking was well composed. The main actor (DiCaprio) performed beautifully like many of our dream characters do. We are often caught in those dreams and we believe in them. The actress (Ellen Page) was truly the lucid one who practiced non-attachment to the emotional illusions and made the choices that kept the nightmare from turning into further tragedy.

Of course all of us in the field of dream studies will likely watch this movie over and over again. This movie is a great concept for discussion about dreams, extraordinary experiences in dreams and waking reality. But can we take a larger vision of using consciousness to move beyond conflict, greed and violence? Perhaps as humans, we have no example of “what it is like” to be in such a state of consciousness. Is that why we keep repeating our old dreams?

Since Nolan is deeply interested in dreams, I hope that, in his next film, he continues to face the psychological shadow and moves even deeper into the spaces of the Mind where he can allow the natural wisdom phenomena to reveal itself. Perhaps then we will see not only the resolution of the inner conflicts but display of a workable solution for a desperate world in need of harmony.

Fariba Bogzaran 7/30/2010