So I'll admit it: I jumped on the bandwagon. A little late, as usual, because I hate fads. But it became too prominent to ignore. (Just like how I boycotted Facebook at first and then gave in and fell victim to all its curses.) So I went to see it. Inception.
Your own dreams hijacked by your enemies, who then begin to dream within your dream, then a stranger starts to dream within his dream within your dream, and so on. I admit, it is a concept very few people have enough imagination to think up. And I get why it blew people's minds...because the movie itself blurs the line between reality and imaginary. And you walk out of the movie theater, among the throngs of people, feeling like the top that is still spinning as the movie ends, unable to pick your head up out of the quicksand that makes you so aware of your own existence. Here I am, walking, but how do I know this is real? What would happen if I acted like I would in a dream? Why am I me, and how do these other people possibly relate to who I am? And then your head is spinning so much with self-awareness that you think your "mind is blown" by the genius of the movie.
But the makers of Inception were not the first to think this idea up. It is hardly novel. Edgar Allen Poe said it poetically: "all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." For centuries humans have wondered whether this life was really it, or whether there was a greater, more real reality waiting for us after death. (So we may need all our gold and worldly possessions on the other side, please build me a pyramid and fill it with these things.) Buddhists believe in reincarnation then nirvana, Christians in an afterlife that is everlasting. It all emphasizes something after this.
If this is just a dream, then we are all waiting to die and wake up to actual reality. How terrible and wonderful would it be to have a world that was more alive than this one? Greater pain, stronger memories, sharper senses, time moving in slow motion so you could feel every second...count each rain drop as it hit the skin of your scalp. Love and hate could easily possess people into frenzies in this other world, and everyone would be more tied to their kin. Humans would be able to outline other people's thoughts with a sense they didn't know they had.
I am pondering life and death, so maybe my mind is "blown". But many other things could easily have done this. Religion, Literature, Discussion, Experience. Why does it have to be a movie, perhaps the least intense version of lesson-learning reality, that makes us all realize the possibility of impossibility? Why can't we all close our eyes, journey into our dreams, and map out our own reality?
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