Episode 003: I Have Dreamed a Dream… Within a Dream? Inception (2010) with Jason Spiegelman

Join Alex and Jason Spiegelman on discussion of the psychological concepts in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and several other actors he hires again for the Dark Knight Rises.

Please leave your feedback on this post, the main site (cinemapsychpod.swanpsych.com), on Facebook (@CinPsyPod), or Twitter (@CinPsyPod). We’d love to hear from you!

Legal stuff:
1. All film clips are used under Section 107 of Title 17 U.S.C. (fair use; no copyright infringement is intended).
2. Intro and outro music by Sro (“Self-Driving”). Used under license CC BY-SA 4.0.

Episode Transcription

<Electronic intro music>

ALEX SWAN: Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of the CinemaPsych Podcast! You know, the podcast where psychology meets film. I am your host, Dr. Alex Swan, and, you know what, I got to tell you guys, I am having so much fun recording this podcast. Doing all of the post-production, talking to all the wonderful people that I’ve talked to already and plan to talk to. This episode is no different, but I do want to be a little bit frank, because it has been a learning experience. I’ve been trying to put-put things together as best I can… Of course, there’s always going to be hiccups along the way–first three episodes, I’m hoping were those hiccups and I’ve figured stuff out. I want to first apologize and also thank the people–apologize to and thank the people–that listened to the first-the first couple of main format episodes, and-and-and then also my intro episode. It’s really humbling the amount of views and downloads and things… Of course, those of you I cajoled into listening, well, thank you as well. Anyways, I want to apologize and thank the people that listen to those episodes and-and dealt with some of the audio issues that we-went on in those episodes. The-the popcorn crackling… I think I figured out what the issue was… a combination computer resources and trying to modulate my voice as I’m recording–I think-I think it just wasn’t working… so you know, what you’re listening to now is post-production “making my voice sound good” as opposed to while being recorded. So I’m hoping that’s going to be the case. In addition to those changes, I have decided to keep looking for the services for remote interviews. This podcast is pretty much made possible by all of the remote recording services that exist. Without those remote recording programs and services, you know I-I-this podcast wouldn’t probably would be a lot different, it’d probably be just me talking about films… and even I’d be potentially bored with that. That’s why I only did it for that one episode. But I think I may have found a good service that is potentially going to be the service from now on-from now on. It’s been a bit of a slog trying to figure out what services I could use for, you know, minimal cost or for free. So I’m hoping that moving forward in episodes from now on are going to be sounding better because I-I, you know, podcasts are all about the audio and if the audio doesn’t sound good then the listeners aren’t going to listen anymore because they’re just going be like, “Ugh, just another CinemaPsych Podcast… just another crackle crackle crackle in my ear…” I don’t want that and so I’m trying my best to make sure that that’s not experience I leave everyone with.

ALEX: Alrighty… now that I got that said–I mean I’ve been-I’ve been trying to get that handled and I did want to say something in this episode–I know these episodes aren’t serialized, but I did want to say something to you. Also now that I’ve got that out of the way, I would love to say, if you like what you just heard <laughter> if you like what you just heard, maybe give us a follow on social media! Facebook “CinPsyPod” and Twitter “CinPsyPod”. Both of those “Cin”s with a C not an S. So C-I-N-P-S-Y-P-O-D for both Facebook and Twitter. Give us a like and a follow on those and you’ll know exactly when episodes go live. The episodes link to the main website: cinemapsychpod.swanpsych.com, where the show notes and the transcription are available, including for the show. You can find them there… you can listen to them directly there, you can subscribe to the podcast through your favorite podcast feeder, you know, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, all them big ones. We got it all! Looking forward to it!

ALEX: So without further ado–you know, I said I was going to stop saying that but you know what I just said it–without further ado–I said it again!–we are going to get this show started and you might notice something different about the audio bumper today… I’ll let the bumper speak for itself… My guest host today is the one, the only, Jason Spiegelman. Jason is an associate professor of psychology at the Community College of Baltimore County, where he has been since 2003. He also taught at Towson University, the University of Maryland, and Stevenson University, and currently teaches as an adjunct at Harford Community College. Jason is the chair of the teaching division for the Eastern Psychological Association’s annual conference and is on the board of directors of the Association of Faculties for the Advancement of Community College Teaching, and is a regular presenter at regional and national teaching of psychology conferences. Jason lives in Pikesville, Maryland with his wife, Mitzi, and their three sons, Matthew, Eli, and Jonah. Jason go ahead and say hi to everyone!

JASON SPIELGELMAN: Hello everyone! Thank you very much for having me. I’m very excited to be a part of the podcast.

ALEX: Jason I am glad that are with us today to talk about the film that you brought with you, but before we get into that, I do want to ask you the questions that I’ve asked  pretty much everyone we’ve had on the program. First things first: why do you love film?

JASON: What I really enjoy about film is probably not so much different than anybody else… The ability to really look at circumstances outside of reality and to be able to ponder situations that you’re not going to come across and everyday life. And in the classroom, what that allows me to do is give students sort of an analog to life, where they can look at the experiences that we’re talking about, the theories of-of psychology, and look for applications in a way that I don’t really feel comfortable as their teacher sending them out into the world to actually, you know, observe other people. So film provides that opportunity in my private life, as well as in my professional life.

ALEX: Excellent. That kinda goes into my next question I have is, you know, why do you combine film and psych in your teaching, you kind of asked that–so, in addition to that question then, if you could tell us how you incorporate film in your classes? Not just the why, which I think just answered, but the how?

JASON: Sure. Well there’s a number of different ways I do it. I-I’m a big fan of YouTube, of course, everybody is a big fan of YouTube who teaches, and so, I sort of keep a mental catalog of you know different movie scenes, or-or television scenes, or whatever that I think are going to really neatly demonstrate concepts. And you know, I can pull them up before the class starts and have them cued up and ready to go. But the other way that I used the-is for introduction to psychology, which is sort of my bread-and-butter course, the one that I teach the most. I typically will assign students a movie from the past 20-25 years–sometimes maybe a little more but I try to keep it that current–and then I asked them to watch that movie through the eyes of a psychologist and to not focus on the entertainment value but rather to do sort of a psychological deconstruction of the movie. And to show me how they can see the theories actually at play. And so they’re encouraged to look for three or four strong scenes in the movie that demonstrate psychology theories, and then write about that. And again this is the analog to send them out into the real world and tell me how psychology was applied in their everyday lives. I let them get lost in the movie and do it there instead.

ALEX: Yeah, I think that’s a fairly typical way to add film–to anyone who might be think about adding film to their psych class, listening to this podcast, and like “Oh, I’m not entirely sure what I want to do with the film–do I want to show it in class, do I not want to show it in class, like how do I-how do I incorporate this?” So that’s good. My next question for you is what do you want your students, and potentially other film enthusiasts, to know about film  and psych?

JASON: I-I think it’s really simple. There is not a movie that has been made yet that cannot be absolutely torn apart for its psychology. It is pretty much everywhere. Now won’t go too far in to say in every scene and every character, but if one were to make that assertion I don’t think that I would take them down for it. I-it really gives you an opportunity to look at film through just a totally different lens, and the interesting thing is to see students apply theories in ways that I would not have thought about. And that’s probably my favorite part of reading these papers that, so often students will come up and they’ll say “I applied this theory this kind of way.” And I’ll be reading that and I’ll kind of talk to myself using four letter language and I’ll say, “I can’t believe I never thought of that! That is absolutely brilliant!” And so i-it provides such a kind of robust opportunity for students to think creatively within the auspices of the course material that it’s-it’s such a great medium that-that’s why it works so effectively. One other thing that I would probably mention is that the worse the movie you assign the better the papers are going to get. And I often put a couple movies on my list for students that are absolutely horrible movies that probably should never have been made and when I assign that movie I’ll tell them, “I’m really sorry to assign you this but trust me you’re going to write a great paper, cuz this is an awful movie and you’re not going to get lost in the entertainment value cuz there isn’t any.” And sure enough every time I sign those really bad movies, I get the best papers from them.

ALEX: Oh, I need to figure out how to work The Room in to one of my classes because that is an awful movie, and is probably the most awful movie–

JASON: Now I’m going to–

ALEX: –that would be so fun…

JASON: I’m going to challenge you, OK? If you really want the worst movie to assign, just look no further than Nicolas Cage in Ghost Rider because they just don’t get worse than that movie. And it’s such a great–again I’m going to use that word–it’s such a great medium for the student to stop worrying about being entertained of just think about the psychology. And I assigned it then, like I said–

ALEX: –not entertained, that’s the problem.

JASON: Well, that’s, no that’s the benefit for them at least in that moment, so they could be–they sometimes it really interesting papers from a horrible movie like that.

ALEX: Yeah, I can imagine. Speaking of, any good stories about film, psych, etc from one of your classes?

JASON: This probably goes back at least a decade–at least 10 years ago, at a school that I don’t teach currently. I always tell the students that they have the freedom in my class within this assignment to write the paper anyway they want. They can be creative. In fact, I encourage them to be creative because I want them to have fun with it. And they can write the film–excuse me–they can write the paper from the perspective of a psychotherapist who seeing one of the clients. They could be a lawyer who is prosecuting one of the characters. They could-they could really do anything they want with it. And they get extra points for being creative. I had one student years ago who was who was assigned to the movie My Blue Heaven with Rick Moranis and Steve Martin. This student was an amateur recording expert in his spare time. He had studio setup in his basement with some, I guess, pretty expensive equipment and he was also a wannabe rap star. So he wrote his paper as a rap song and instead of just writing the rap and submitting it–and let me tell you this was some gruesome awful rap, OK–but instead of just writing it and submitting it, he then went down into his studio and he laid down a three or four track recording of his rap with background percussion and sound effects and instrumentation, and he burned it onto a CD and turned that in a long with a printed copy of the rap. And you know, the quality of us analysis was probably a C at best. I’m going to tell you that student got an A. Because that was above and beyond effort and creativity that I-I could not get my mind wrapped around.

ALEX: Now do you still have the song?

JASON: To my great shame I did not keep it, but boy do I wish I had, because I would love to have–

ALEX: Shame!

JASON: –I-I know, I would love to have that when I retire someday but I don’t.

ALEX: That’s something you would-you could play at your retirement, you know?

JASON: Oh yes, absolutely.

ALEX: You lost out on that chance. SO did he give it to you on a CD?

JASON: Yep it’s–I’m that old–he actually burn it onto a CD and submitted the CD along with like I said a printed the hard copy of the rap that he printed on his on his computer.

ALEX: No wonder you lost it, cuz it was on a CD.

JASON: That’s exactly right. These days he would have-he would have submitted it to my Google Drive and it would be there forever.

ALEX: Exactly. Exactly.

<Deep bass drop sound effect>

ALEX: All right, Jason what film do you have for us today? And before you say it, before you say it… if any eagle-eared–I don’t know if that’s a good one, eagled-owl, owl-eared–

JASON: Start again.

ALEX: –listeners out there could tell, I used a different bumper sound effect. And it tells us–it should tell you which film is next. Jason, take it away.

JASON: So I really wanted to come up with a film that challenges the viewer. One that doesn’t make it easy to access the material in just one viewing or two viewings. And one is relevant to psychology, is pretty clear. I like films that make you work for it. I don’t like a film that just-just hands it to you on a platter. So based on those criteria, the film that I’ve chosen for us to discuss is Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan.

ALEX: BWOM! That’s my sound effect, that’s not a bumper. So, yes, Inception with several famous people who would appear two years later in The Dark Knight Rises, we will get into that in a little while, but before we get into any content, I want to give a broad spoiler warning to anyone listening who, just in case hasn’t seen the movie. Pause the podcast episode. Pause it–just pause it, go watch Inception and then come on back, OK. I guarantee, you will thank us. All right, so let’s jump into the psych aspects shall we, Jason? I think the first one that we should jump into is the psych concept that is smacking you directly in the face as you watch the film, which is dreams. That’s what the movie is about… is dreams. And, we know a lot about dreams, in that we don’t know a lot about dreams. We know what we don’t know about dreams, I think, is a good way to put it. The way that dreams are presented in the movie are quite a bit different from what we know about actual dreams. So what do we dream about most of the time, Jason?

JASON: Well, the research tells us there are some very common themes for both men and women. The most common dream theme is the idea of being chased or being pursued. After that we have some common dreams about flying. Dreams sometimes about aggressive behavior. Certainly dreams about sexual circumstances. But also an awful lot of mundane dreams. You know, going to shop at the grocery store and deciding which bleach to buy. Many of our dreams have, you know, a whole lot of nothing in them and that is fascinating when you think about all the mythology out there about dreams. Everybody thinks that we always dream about sex every night, every time. We always dream about shooting somebody in the face with a bazooka. And as it turns out, that’s really not the case. More often than people would think.

ALEX: Yeah. Fantastical dreams as represented in the film, are more rare than what people think, and would think if they were to read, like you said, all of the mythology, right? So it’s-it’s kind of like they’re playing up the idea of the mundacity of dreams to be something that they’re not. Of course, it’s film, they have to make it enjoyable. Because if it was going to your office job and having a dream about you not being an office. Well, that sounds awful. I would not watch that movie.

JASON: I don’t think-I don’t think I’d buy a ticket to watch a dream about sharpening pencils, you know maybe, but probably not.

ALEX: So that’s one aspect of the film, right off the bat, that we can dispell, the idea that the dreams that are represented in the-in the-in the film, are a bit more fantastical than one might actually experience. But there are a couple of features of the-of the film that I do want to highlight. And the first one is lucid dreaming. So the idea with lucid dreaming is that, with some practice, you can remember your dreams a little bit better and have a little bit more control within them. But it’s not as-it’s not as though you can do everything from start to finish. It’s more or less, “I’m going to have a better sense of the dream from, you know, this part of the night versus this part of the night.” And “I-I know I’m dreaming at this point.” I think is what we know about lucid dreaming. Would you agree with that assessment, Jason?

JASON: Yeah, and when my students ask me about lucid dreaming they will typically want to know exactly what it means because some of them have some experience with it. And what I tell them is lucid dreaming really comes in two levels, at least as I understand it. The first level is in the dream; you become aware that you are dreaming. And so at that moment you can distinguish that it’s not real. But the second level, and probably the more advanced level of lucid dreaming, is once you become aware of it and then you can control the story to some extent ranging from minimal control to absolute control over the actual story of your dreams. And speaking personally, I’ve had lucid dreams where I became aware that it wasn’t real. I’ve never been able to control my dream stories. Some of my students have told me that they can, and they can do it on a regular basis. So I think that–when I think lucid dreaming, I think those two sort of levels: being aware of a dream and then being able to control within the dream.

ALEX: The other aspect of the dreaming portrayed in the film, is that they do dreams within dreams. So the dreamer then goes to sleep to dream, and these are levels of a dream and there’s l-logic within the film, des-described by the characters that it’s very difficult to dream within a dream within a dream. I’m going down all those levels–if you–you can get lost, so to speak, and they had to use heavy sedation in order to do that kind of thing, so if they die, then they wouldn’t just wake up as is just a regular dream, going from dream back to reality. And I think, going back to our earlier point, with really the mundacity of dreams, it’s extremely rare for dreams to be the-the complexity that is expressed in the movie–that’s portrayed in the movie. And then one last bit, about the dreaming in the movie. And I’m going to play a clip after I describe it. Is, when the two characters, Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and Ariadne, played by Ellen Page, is explaining how the dream logic works in the film and you get a sense that they are sharing a dream. And at the end of this clip, you’ll hear, Arthur, played by Joseph Gordon Levitt, say-talk about dream sharing and it was developed by the military for soldiers to fight each other without, like, actually harming each other. You know, murder and shoot and stab their fellow soldiers and just wake up when they died. Kind of like a video game almost. And I looked this up, because I was like, well, OK, he said the military, so I’m going to go look it up, anyways, because I  think it’s important to know if this is actually real. And I didn’t find any evidence about the military trying to do anything like this, so that was probably made up for the film. You know, screenwriters, having that liberty, but as far as dream sharing goes, I couldn’t find any actual empirical evidence that it exists. Only anecdotal evidence that it exists. And this anecdotal evidence is on par with the anecdotal reports associated with hypnosis, so it’s very difficult to trust these reports. So I’m going to give my verdict and say that dream sharing: not a thing. Made up for the film. So let me go ahead and play that clip for you all. And then we’ll come back to it.

<up tempo music>

COBB: They say we only use a fraction our brain’s true potential… but that’s when we’re awake. When we’re asleep, the mind can do almost anything.

ARIADNE: Such as?

COBB: Well imagine you’re designing building, alright? You consciously create each aspect. But sometimes, it’s almost creating itself, if you know what I mean–

ARIADNE: Yeah, like I’m discovering it.

COBB: Genuine inspiration, right? Now, in a dream our mind continuously does this… We create and perceive our world simultaneously. And our mind does this so well that we don’t even know what’s happening. That allows us to get right in the middle of it that process.

ARIADNE: How?

COBB: By taking over the creating part. Now this is where I need you. You create the world of the dream. We bring the subject into that dream, and they fill it with their subconscious.

ARIADNE: How Could I ever acquire enough detail to make them think that it is reality?

COBB: Well dreams, they feel real while we’re in them, right? It’s only when we wake up that we realize how things are actually strange. Let me ask you a question, you, you never really remember the beginning of a dream do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what’s going on?

ARIADNE: I guess, yeah.

COBB: So how did we end up here?

ARIADNE: Well we just came from the a…

COBB: Think about it Ariadne, how did you get here? Where are you right now?

ARIADNE: We’re dreaming?

COBB: You’re actually in the middle of the workshop right now, sleeping. This is your first lesson in shared dreaming. Stay calm.

<loud rumbling and explosions>

ARIADNE: (shouting over noise) If it’s just a dream, why are you–

<faint playing of “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” by Edith Piaf>

COBB: Because it’s never just a dream, is it? And a face full of glass hurts like hell, doesn’t it? It feels real.

ARTHUR: That’s why the military developed dream sharing. It was a training program where soldiers could shoot, stab, and strangle each other, then wake up.

ARIADNE: How did architects become involved?

COBB: Someone had to design the dreams, right?  Why don’t you give us another five minutes–

ARIADNE: Five minutes?! What? We were talking for like at least an hour. 

COBB: When you dream, your mind functions more quickly, therefore, time seems to feel more slow.

ARTHUR: Five minutes in the real world gives you an hour in the dream.

COBB: Why don’t you see what you can get up to in five minutes.

ALEX: I also want to mention now we’ve come back from the clip that Cobb mentions the “10 percent of the brain” myth. Did you catch that, Jason? Makes my brain–all 100% of it–hurt.

JASON: Well, it’s OK, 100% of it’s hurting but you only use 10%, so that 90% of that is just a waste, I guess.

ALEX: Damnit.

JASON: At least it’s not the movie Lucy, which took the 10% myth and just ran with it.

ALEX: Oh my goodness. Don’t get me started on that one. We’re not here to talk about Lucy. So you had, a-a general point, Jason, about how this relates to filmmaking. You want to expl-explain that to the listeners?

JASON: Sure, but I also want to point out at the beginning here: a lot of these things we were talking about today, I don’t want to represent them as my own analyses. Some of them, you know, where my own brain children, but I did a lot of reading about what other people had to say about the movie, so I just want to put out there that these are analyses that many have come up with and various sources for these particular points. And many, including the director, Christopher Nolan. I’ve suggested that the movie itself is just an analog for actual-actual dreams, but the-the-the-the dreams in the movie represent the experience of going to a movie. So in the movie, they go to have their dreams and then we all go see the movie to see this happen. What’s the point here? You go to a movie theater and the moment the lights go down and the movie begins, we suspend reality. We accept what’s happening with very little question and we become led by the director and the actors. We start in the middle of some story. We do not think to question how we got there. And only later, when we think about the movie, and perhaps watch it again, might we start to question the things that we saw. And that’s exactly what Dom tells us–Leonardo DiCaprio’s character–tells us a dream is like. It’s only when we wake up that we realized something in the dream was incorrect. And in the clip that we just listened to, he tells us how we can never really remember how the beginning of the dream started, we just end up somewhere in it and we just accept that as-as reality. And this is not uncommon–movies-movies do this in any number of ways and the example that I tend to use is: “isn’t it interesting that every movie about aliens, for example, they always speak English?” One of-one of my favorite examples, it doesn’t require about people not of this Earth, was a movie with Harrison Ford years ago called the Widowmaker or something like that and he played a Russian submarine commander. It was really interesting to me how everybody aboard this Russian nuclear submarine spoke perfect English. It is a movie– 

ALEX: OK, OK, alright alright. I have a better one for you–

JASON: Here we go.

ALEX: Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October.

JASON: Of course! Why does he speak perfect Eng-perfect English, right? But-But–

ALEX: With a Scottish accent!

JASON: With a Scottish accent. Yeah, so-so the point is, why-why don’t we question that and we don’t question that because we-we make the decision not to when we go to the movie. We just accept the fact that there’s going to be an alternate reality and we’re a part of it. And the dream is exactly the same way. So I think Nolan’s purpose, at least part of his purpose, in making this movie is to show us that dreams and movies are are very much analogous to each other.

ALEX: Yeah, that is, I think, one of the best points that you brought to our note-sharing- our note-sharing session here, because–and-and I wanted you to mention it right up at the top because I think it influences the rest of the analysis in the-in-in the film with respect the other psych concepts that we are going to explore. OK, so as we move down into the dream within a dream, Jason, you had some interesting wordplay. Do you want to describe the words used purposefully in the film?

JASON: Absolutely. As I always tell my students, I’m a big fan of words. if I was not in the field that I’m in, I probably would have been a linguist of some sort. And so I use that in any number of ways my classroom, most notably when we come across unfamiliar terminology that the students just don’t know. I always tell them if there’s a word that you don’t understand, let’s break that word down and see what it means. This afternoon I was teaching about binocular depth cues and I said to the student, take the word a part: bi means two, ocular means eye and there you go. So there’s several things that I think are interesting in this regard. The first is just the name of the movie. The use of the term “inception” is interesting to me, because it is so close to its sister term “conception.” Why does this matter? Well, the word “conception,” the prefix is “con” and that translates as with, and the term “conception” typically refers to creating something with someone else, most commonly used around a pregnancy. “Inception” on the other hand, has a different prefix. It does not have that shared component to it, but its relationship to “conception” is pretty clear. In both, there is a proverbial seed that is being planted and even Cobb notes in the movie that the seed they plant in a person’s mind will grow to consume them. I think I got those words pretty close to Cobb says and in the movie, they are inserting a thought into somebody’s dreams. Well, when we speak about somebody becoming pregnant we sometimes talk about planting a seed that grows into life and there’s a process taking place there. But with Dom and his team do occurs without consent, in a very intrusive, and if you think about it, a-a rather disturbing manner. And that was one thing, I think, linguistically was very interesting to me.

ALEX: Yeah, and I think a perfect scene that represents–and-and especially your last point there about the “without consent and intrusive, rather disturbing manner” is the initial scene where Cobb, Arthur, and Ken Watanabe’s character Saito are introduced and Cobb explains what process of extraction is. So I’m going to go ahead and play that clip for you all.

COBB: What is the most resilient parasite?…A bacteria?…A virus?…An intestinal worm?

ARTHUR: Uh….What Mr. Cobb is trying to say–

COBB: An idea…Resilient. Highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold in the brain, it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed, fully understood, that sticks. Right in there somewhere.

SAITO: For someone like you to steal?

ARTHUR: Yes. In the dream state, your conscious defenses are lowered and it makes your thoughts vulnerable to theft. It’s called extraction.

COBB: Mr. Saito, we can train your subconscious to defend itself from even the most skilled extractor.

SAITO: How can you do that?

COBB: Because I am the most skilled extractor. I know how to search your mind and find your secrets, I know the tricks and I can teach them to you so that even when you’re asleep, your defense is never down. Look, if you want my help, you’re gonna have to be completely open with me. I need to know my way around your thoughts better than your wife, better than your therapist, better than anyone. If this is a dream, and you have a safe full of secrets, I need to know what’s in that safe. In order for this all to work, you need to completely let me in.

SAITO: Enjoy your evening, gentlemen, as I consider your proposal.

ALEX: So, one of the things that is discussed in that clip is, talked about in that clip, is what the nature of the film was going to be OK. We–Saito wants to plant an idea inside one of his corporate rivals, OK? Arthur’s like, you know what, this doesn’t work. And this is a great scene–it’s a great later scene, where Arthur, who is basically the straight man of the film… but has a great action scene fighting in zero-g. 

JASON: <inaudible> he does his own stunts, I might add.

ALEX: Yes, he does, he does. And he did them great–it looks fantastic, but there’s a mention of Dan Wegener’s work on the ironic processing effect–he asks Saito, “hey, if I say to you, don’t think of a white elephant, all you’re going to think about is a white elephant.” So that’s ironic processing at its heart. And I think that’s why he’s so against this idea of inception because, you can’t tell somebody to not think about something and watch them not to do it. So this can also come back to a thing that I talk about in-in-memory, in my cognitive psych classes, is that this might reflect source-monitoring errors and we have an idea, “huh, where did I come up with that idea? I must have come up with it on my own. I don’t know if I heard it anywhere. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. But I said the idea, so it’s mine now.” And that’s what, at least Cobb’s team attempts to do, is plant some idea in somebody’s head and they have no idea the source of the information. And so it’s classic source-monitoring errors because they’re using sleep immediate incubator for the idea implanting. And I think that is also part of the intrusive nature of it because, not only are they implanting the idea, as you said, Jason, like a seed that will consume the person, but they’ll have no recollection of where the idea came from.

JASON: Right, and the default for somebody if they don’t know that the idea came from somebody else, would be to just assume that it came from within you, and I think within the film, the plot, that is the point we want to put it in in such a way that they have to believe it came from them. Hence the idea that inception, which of course is a fictitious process, is so darn difficult to do and Arthur says it’s not possible. Of course, DiCaprio tells us it is possible and he has other information that lets him be aware of that.

ALEX: Right, 100% agree. So you had other–so we did title of the film. What about the character names and the wordplay with the characters?

JASON: So there’s an awful lot of wordplay with the characters that-that I-I-I looked into. And some of this came from me and some of it came from other sources, once again. So if we look at the main characters names and only the examine the first letters of their names and we look at the main characters in the following sequence, something interesting happens. So that the main characters and perhaps secondary characters are Dom, or Dominic, Robert, Eames, spelled E-A-M-E-S, Arthur, Mal, Saito, and then we have Peter, Ariadne, and Yusuf. And if we take the first letter of those names in that order we get the words “DREAMS PAY” D-R-E-A-M-S-P-A-Y. And isn’t that exactly what the occupation of this team is, they work with dreams for profit.

ALEX: Dreams pay, baby!

JASON: Dreams pay. So from there we move on to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character whose name, his full name is Dominic Cobb, but they only ever call him Dom or Cobb. In fact, the only ones who call him Dom are his late wife and his father. And his name is Meaningful in two ways first is “Dom,” which translates to the word “home” in several different languages. And it’s the same as the root of the word domestic or the word domicile, and what is Dom doing in the movie? Anything he can to get home. I won’t waste your time with all the backstory, you can watch the movie, but that’s what he d-that’s what he does… that’s his purpose, is to get home. His last name–a little bit more interesting–Cobb, is a nod to Henry Cobb, an American architect who’s known for his design of skyscrapers. And many of the scenes in the movie are dominated by the sort of architecture, most notably when Dom and Mal are in limbo, right? The primary architecture of their existence is these enormous skyscrapers that you can see all around them, any number of times.

ALEX: I did not pick up on this. I-I didn’t actually know who Henry Cobb was, but this is a great find because, yeah, you can see all of the skyscrapers in the limbo, which is pretty damn cool. Nolan snuck that one by me. I guess you gotta know famous architecture or American architects for that. It’s not my-it’s not my area of expertise, in any imagination.

JASON: Mine either, but I’m really good with the Google machine. OK, the next character–

ALEX: Indeed.

JASON: –is-is Yusuf. And Yusef’s character that–this is one that I was familiar with–takes his name from a derivation of the word Joseph, which is very famous Bible story. Anyone’s ever seen Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and of course, Joseph… Joseph’s legend is his ability to interpret dreams. Now in this movie the Yusuf character is less involved in the actual dreamwork and more of the sedation that allows for the dreams, but I do think it’s notable that they’re taking a derivation of a name from a different dream-related story.

ALEX: Yeah, that’s pretty good, I mean, he’s more of a-more of a minor character, anyways, so I-I’m not surprised they explore that more.

JASON: Tom Hardy’s character is named Eames. Again, spelled E-A-M-E-S and with a little derivation, it-it’s just not a coincidence to me that if we take the word “dreams” and strategically and a space, we would have Dr. Eames. Now we’re not given any backstory about this Eames character, but he’s certainly a master expert of the manipulation of dreams–a doctor of sorts, right? So is he doctor Eames, meaning dreams and I think that’s kind of interesting as well.

ALEX: Yeah, he-he’s the one who impersonates Tom Berenger character Robert wait, did I get that one right–

JASON: Peter. 

ALEX: Peter, sorry.

JASON: That’s OK.

ALEX: He impersonates Peter in the dream in order to get buy-in from Robert, who is played by Cillian Murphy.

JASON: I-I just think it’s interesting that they-they have a movie about dreams and one of the characters names was Eames. Personally I think they kind of dropped the ball on that one, it would have been better to go in a different direction but that, you know, he’s the director and I’m no one. OK, now the one that I think is–

ALEX: They had to smack you in the face–they had to smack you in the face on a couple of things.

JASON: Well, they do that. Very briefly, the character Mal, who is Dom’s late wife. It’s interesting because this word Mal–M-A-L, means “bad” in many languages… Spanish as an-as an example, and we’re set to see her as the villain. And we’re set to see her as a villain from a very early scene. You may remember in the very first scene, she betrays Dom and she shoots Arthur in the kneecap, which by the way was a really cool scene, and throughout the movie she is a projection of his subconscious the tend to screw everything up so we are-we are led down the road of hating her, right? She is a bad person. But why is that? Isn’t she in fact the biggest victim in the movie?

ALEX: Yes, I am with you on the biggest victim. So the way that I read this was–and while I was watching the film last week, was when we first learn about Mal and what she and-and Dom do in limbo, they spend quite a many decade just playing around in this deepest cavern of dreamspace. The very little time has passed in the real world. And when Dom first tells the story of what led to Mal’s death, he explains that she planted an idea in her own mind that the real world wasn’t real and she locked it away. But then later in the film, like maybe a good hour, maybe-maybe about 45 minutes or so, we find out that Cobb is actually kind of lying about that. And he reveals this truth to Ariadne when, kind of, stuff has hit the fan, and he says, “well, I kind of planted the idea that the real world wasn’t real,” and ariadne just looks at him in horror. And it’s like, what did you do and so that means that Mal is 100% the victim, OK, and she is probably responding–I-we’re going to get a little more into this in a minute–but she is probably responding as Dom’s conscience, cuz he wronged her–wronged her deeply.

JASON: No, I think that-that’s absolutely accurate and the question as you mentioned we’re going to get into it shortly is-is “why do we empathize so strongly with Dom?” but le-let’s put that on hold for just a moment. While we’re talking about names, there’s one more. To me the most fascinating name is that of Ellen Page’s character, Ariadne. Now, it’s pretty easy to recognize that character from Greek mythology, if-if you’ve studied it at all, as the princess from Crete who knew the Labyrinth of the underworld–in Hades underworld–and-and the Labyrinth of the Minotaur. And Ariadne is the one who guided Theseus through that Labyrinth and saved him from the Minotaur in, at least, one of the many different versions of the story. But I think there’s-there’s more there, much more. Ariadne is the Greek name… the Roman counterpart in some versions is called Libera or Libera, depending on the pronunciation, and that of course is the root of the word liberate and what does Ariadne do in the movie? She is the essential character to freeing or liberating Dom from the influence of Mal and his subconscious, and it’s only after he has that sort of confessional moment where, as you say, he absolutely horrified Ariadne with what he had done, that she starts to understand the true nature his labyrinth, right? Of what’s going on deep down inside of him, and then she becomes essential to his ability to get freed from that. And there’s sort of an interesting role reversal that happens at different points in the movie. Early in the movie, when Dom and Ariadne are first introduced and he’s testing her… he asks her to draw mazes in just a couple of moments that he would not be able to solve and and she can’t do it and then he-he challenges her a little more she snatches the book out of his hand and creates this beautiful maze that he can’t solve. And then he kicks it up a notch, as Emeril would say, and he teaches her how to create labyrinths within dreams, as she is the architect of the dreams. So at first she’s creating the labyrinth, right, and then he asks for her to do one of the higher levels and then he hires her, and then later she becomes responsible for leading him through that labyrinth that she creates and later out of the labyrinth that he made many years ago. So, that character and the relationship to some-some mythological stories, I think, is-is absolutely fascinating.

ALEX: Yeah. I did not catch Ariadne as a Greek character. I will be the first to admit that  one went by me as well. So oh well, but she is a great character. She’s a great character and she plays the moral-moral compass for a good portion of the characters but mostly Dom, as you mentioned, right? And so that leads me into the bit that you wanted to put on hold for just a second and that is: “why should we root for Dom if he’s such a jerk?” I mean he-he immediately became a jerk to Ariadne. He’s like “Naw, I solved your-your-your maze, I’m gonna stop talking to you if you can’t fix this.” You know, why do we care about him?

JASON: Well, I mean, this is the idea of moral relativism that you and I discussed when we were sharing notes ahead of time. And it really does bring us to the question of who is the real protagonist of the movie and who’s the real antagonist? I mentioned earlier that Mal is set up for us to be the antagonist, and do we just accept that because that’s what the director wants us to accept? And-and I think the answer is yes. And again it’s not until later that we go back and think about it that we realize that there’s something wrong there. We’re drawn to feel empathy and even sympathy for Dom, but let’s not forget that he’s basically a thief who’s now going to violate a person all for money and for his own interests. And so the-the real question is why do we feel sorry for him? Why do we cheer for him to get home? We’re led to believe that he didn’t really kill Mal, and he may not have pushed her off the ledge, but he was directly responsible for her death. There was a case recently where–not in a movie but in real life–where a teenage girl was convicted for contributing to her boyfriend’s suicide by encouraging him to do it. So is Dom really innocent? And we accept that he is because he didn’t push her off the ledge because he’s hurting over her death but we don’t even question that during the movie. So what are the factors there that causes to, sort of, take leave of a real-a real moral analysis and see him as not someone we should be cheering for. If we’re going to talk about moral relativism, why are we on  Saito’s side? Why do we want his inception to work? He’s basically suggesting <inaudible> about corporate espionage of the highest degree and he tells us that he wants to get into the brain of his main competitor and essentially caused that guy to to shutter his own company. And he says it’s for the good of humanity and we just accept that. And the question of course is, why do we just accept that? Again, we are in a dream. It’s a movie, but it’s a dream, and we accept the context in which we find ourselves. And we don’t question it while it’s happening.

ALEX: Yeah. You know, we accept it because bang bang, shoot ‘em up! Explosions, gunfights… we’ll accept–

JASON: Yeah, Leonard DiCaprio. We accept it cuz he’s attractive.

ALEX: I mean, he-he distracts you. And you’re like, “I will do anything for you, I apologize. I don’t know why I’m apologizing to Leo but I apologize.

JASON: I think you’re going to hurt his feelings.

ALEX: I know. I’m sure he’ll be fine with all–swimming in all of his money. OK, so, there’s a white elephant in the room that I mentioned earlier. Ha ha ha, see what I did–see what I do there, I just I connect things from earlier in the episode. There’s a white elephant in this room.

JASON: Wow.

ALEX: He’s got a name. He’s got a name.

JASON: Wow. Are you going to mention the name? Or am I gonna mention the name?

ALEX: Well, I’ll let you mention the name so people can get mad at you.

JASON: Well, they all know the name. I just call him the F word.

ALEX: Indeed.

JASON: So, you know, we’re gonna talk about Freud. And we have to talk about Freud, because if we don’t talk about Freud, we’re pretty much not doing our job here. But let’s just-let’s just acknowledge from the beginning that if we talk about Freud, some of your listeners are going to roll their eyes so hard that they’re going to need a chiropractor. And that’s-that’s just the way it is, and-and I get that. And-and I would just say the same thing before we get into it that I tell every one of my students: I’m not telling you whether I believe Freud, I’m not telling you whether I hate Freud. I’m going to present it to you and let you make up your own mind. But there is literally so much Freud in the film that if we were to go through this entire conversation and not mention it, we would not be doing our jobs.

ALEX: Yeah, he–I mean this is gonna be one of the things in a movie about dreams. Because Freud is so well-known by non-psychological scientists. I mean, he has-he has entranced his work, has entranced the lay public regarding psychopathology, psychotherapy, and most notably, the subconscious mind, right? And his id, ego, and superego. And I think you had a couple of points about who was who in that, and so I’ll let you mention that in just a second. But, I mean, it’s throughout the movie and it’s–I mean, you have to accept that Christopher Nolan knew about that when he was in the process of writing this film. So, it- it’s not surprising that the guy who wrote a book about dreams at the turn of the 20th century. So there’s literally so much stuff in the film–like it’s hard to pinpoint exact things. I mentioned that I think that Mal is Dom’s subconscious conscience, like, “you did this bad thing, you know, and I’m gonna try to mess your stuff up, because you really need a reality check, sir.” There’s a bit of a pun for you. But there are certain notes and lines throughout the film that just draw directly from Freudian Theory. So the idea that the third level of dream heist is 100% of motion drape in this is when they’re at the castle Japanese building a hundred percent by emotion-driven, like it’s ruled by emotion, and there’s no logic. This is when they’re at the snow chalet/castle Japanese building–is ruled  100% by emotion. So that’s the only way you can get through to Robert, in this case, is by his emotions, not appealing to his sense of logic. And then even further down in the dream space is limbo, which is unstructured dream space–it’s essentially limitless subconscious and that was Freud’s idea of what the subconscious could actually be. It’s just vast, unused and untapped–I guess we’ll say–mind energy, right?

JASON: Sure, and, you know, there’s other parts of it, as well. There’s some of that are rather humorous. I mean, when we talk about dream interpretation and you know latent and manifest content of dreams–and again folks please stop rolling your eyes at me, it’s not my theory–we always talk about fixed symbols and then we have this movie where when they go into a dream, there’s this gigantic train plowing its way through the street knocking everything out of the way. And I’m sorry you really just can’t get over the fact of Nolan put a gigantic medal penis driving down the street of their dreamscape, and it’s-it’s really kind of hysterical when you think about it in those terms.

ALEX: I mean even the conversation with guns between Eames and Arthur:  <in a slight British accent> “don’t be afraid to dream a little big, darling.” Then he takes out a freakin’ grenade launcher, you know. Grow your penis, how about, you know? So, yeah, there’s just literal stuff. But you had a you also had ideas about, for the id, ego, and superego, which characters represent what in the film?

JASON: I remember that when we discussed that I talked about Ariadne as the superego. She is the one who-who-who really is that–is trying to be that moral center. And as you mentioned, she-she’s horrified by what Dom has done in the past and she wants to-she wants to be, you know, good. She wants to be reasonable. But I think later on in the film, she may actually morph into a bit of ego, again in Freudian Theory, where she recognizes that in order to be moral, they’re going to have to be immoral for a little while. And she sort of balancing that it’s superego problem, especially when they’re sort of stuck, and I think it was the second level of the dream, where she said “we’re going to have to go deeper in order to be able to come back up.” So her character really undergoes some pretty interesting transitions a la this theory, if you buy any of this. And if you don’t, that’s OK too, she still did a great job acting.

ALEX: <laughter> Indeed. So, I mean, we could have spent the entire episode talking about Freud. I think most people would have turned the episode off at that point or maybe you’re a Freud fan, I don’t know. I think you can kind of tell where we’re sitting on this one. But to kind of round out the philosophical punch of the film, which is also essentially a psychological question, I think it’s both, philosophical and psychological, about what is real. Jason, what were your thoughts about that really difficult question?

JASON: Well, I mean, smarter people than I have pondered that for many millennia, so I don’t pretend to be able to do it justice, but the question of what is real is really–see what I did there–where we could spend the entire talk if we’d wanted to. And in this regard, Inception is really in my opinion on some levels a multi-layered nod to the Wachowski siblings’ Matrix movies, particularly the first Matrix movie. Remember in that-in-in-in that movie, as within this one, in order to get into the reality place–excuse me, in order to get into the-the altered reality place, they have to get jacked-in in the Matrix. They get stabbed in the back of the neck, which to this day is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen a movie, right? And in Inception, they get jacked in through IV sedatives using some machine that they never really explain to us how it works, and in both cases they have to sleep in order to wake up. In fact, in Inception in the caverns of Yusuf’s labs, the elder gentleman suggests that they go to sleep in order to wake up. In those words, or some words like that. Again, looking at both movies and both cases, there are rather involved narratives at one point or another about what is real. You’ll remember the the Morpheus character. <In deeper voice> “How do we know what’s real? What do we accept as real?” <Regular voice> I remember the Matrix line about “there is no spoon,” which to this day I still don’t know what that was supposed to mean but it’s a–

ALEX: It’s code.

JASON: –question of reality. I-I know it’s code, but it’s code for what, and I don’t care. In both movies, right, once a person has experienced the altered reality they cannot continue to exist separate from it. In The Matrix, there’s a line about freeing a person after a certain age; they say we never free somebody after a certain age because the mind cannot accept it and in Inception, Cobb speaks about how Ariadne will come back to their laboratory even after she leaves in anger because the real world just won’t be enough for her now. And therein, we have the similarity. You mentioned earlier, Christopher Nolan and Tom Hardy collaborated later in The Dark Knight Rises where Hardy plays the Bane character. And there were very salient themes of challenging reality–

ALEX: <In Bane’s voice> I am Gotham’s reckoning!

JASON: Yeah, don’t ever do that again. Bane’s character challenges the people of Gotham to question the lives that they’ve been living in and-and, of course, he has his is horrible criminal motives, but <inaudible>. So, you know, we see this across many different movies and I think that it-it is a theme so often, because it is so fascinating. If we-if we move from there to some specific psychology and we sort of connect them, didn’t Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis give us an entire systems of psychotherapy based on the notion that what happens to us is less important than what we think about what happens to us? And the-the notion of cognitive restructuring is a therapeutic-as a therapeutic technique, and all of its variations, speaks directly to the relative and subjective nature of reality rather than a singular objective truth to which we should all subscribe and which we should all accept at any given moment.

ALEX: That is very fantastic, I will say, because–it’s not my area of expertise, psychotherapy, and so I didn’t honestly did not know about the Beck and Ellis stuff–I mean, I know who those people are, but i didn’t know what the idea of this cognitive restructuring was in the sense that you just represented it as. And I think that fits with what I say to my intro psych students, my cognitive psych students, my research methods students, my sensation and perception students, that we have this notion that science is trying to describe an objective reality but we all exist and experience reality in an adjacent way, because of our perceptual systems. We don’t experience the world as automatons, we experience it  with all of the knowledge and experience we’ve had thus far, which makes us reality -adjacent. Not Jason, adjacent, OK? And I asked them very pointedly: “how many reality-adjacent understandings would we need in order to achieve objective reality?” And they stare at me for a little bit and they’re like, “what? what kind of question you asking? Are you on drugs right now, Dr. Swan?”

JASON: You know they have no idea what that meant, right?

ALEX: –Right–and I say you know, think about it for a second. How many would you need to get that objective reality? And it dawns on them and they’re like, “oh yeah, you know what, it’s infinite!” And I’m like, Yeah! It would take an infinite amount of subjective realities to reach the objective reality. And that’s, you know, essentially what we’re trying to do as scientists, is trying–and to those of us who do the science versus–and-and those of us to explain the science, we try to express ideas this way. And I think it’s a great-that’s a great comment.

JASON: So the-the main thing that people are going to come away from Inception with is-is-is the unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question: did the top keep spinning, right? Did the top keep spinning or did it topple over and obviously if you’ve seen the movie you know that we do not have an answer. In interviews, Christopher Nolan has specifically refused to answer and we’re left to decide for ourselves if Cobb is awake or if Cobb is asleep. And what I think is far more interesting than the answer to that question, is the fact that he seems in the last moments of the movie to no longer care. He decides that he just doesn’t care anymore. He’s back with his children and he leaves the top before it does or does not topple. So the question which I can’t–

ALEX: I have to stop you, Jason. I have to stop you.

JASON: Go ahead.

ALEX: Which camp are you in? Does it fall? Or does it keep spinning?

JASON: Why-why-why do you hurt me, sir? Why do you hurt me?

ALEX: I need to know. I need to know. It’s a simple, dichotomous choice–

JASON: I am of the camp that it-it does not-it does-it does not topple. I think it keeps spinning and I think he’s dreaming.

ALEX: Aha! OK, well, I’ll let you continue your point but I have a counterpoint to you, sir.

JASON: I want to hear your counterpoint. So again, he’s back–why does he no longer seem to care? He’s back with his children and why isn’t he interested in knowing? Throughout the entire movie, every time he spun the top he waited–it did or did not, it always fell. And in some cases even had a gun pointed at his head… he was so-so entrenched with knowing that he was in reality that if he wasn’t he was going to kill himself in the dream to wake himself up. Is it because he’s finally free of Mal? Because Ariadne helped him escape that labyrinth and now he can accept the dreamworld again where Mal won’t be there to mess it up. Has he accepted that he can never have what he wants in reality so he’s decided to descend back down into limbo? Is this related to reality testing–the reality testing or lack thereof–of a person suffering from schizophrenia. A psychotic individual typically does not accept that their delusions are not real–forgive the double negative–because they are real to them, OK? And there are, of course exceptions, but getting people to challenge their own realities is extraordinarily difficult. The movie A Beautiful Mind about John Nash did very little to help with the situation because it fictitiously suggested that Nash could now recognize and simply disregard his Illusions–his delusions–any time that he wanted and that’s-that’s just not what happened with John Nash. There was a very small piece of that-that was real. But that aside, can we try to use this movie to understand how one advances or regresses into psychosis? So those are some interesting points that are raised for me when we don’t see the top fall over or continue spinning.

ALEX: Those are some good points. I will grant you them. But I do have, like I said a counterpoint to whether the top doesn’t fall vs. keep–er, keep spinning vs. falls. You know, wobbles down and falls and stops spinning. Now, first, the top isn’t Cobb’s or Dom’s totem. The totems are these things that each dreamer has to make-to make sure that they are in the real world, and as you mentioned, you know, he would possibly shoot himself in the head to see whether or not he was in the real world and they explain the rules about only the person knowing about  top itself–excuse me, the totem itself, can touch it, OK. And I think it’s very important to know that the top isn’t his totem. So actually the fact that it keeps–the fact that we are cut off from the final answer doesn’t matter. It actually doesn’t matter, because it’s not his totem. One filmmaking–I guess I’ll call it little detail–that somebody much smarter than me on YouTube noted was that we get to see a small little detail on Cobb’s character, on his person in a dream versus not in a dream. So when he’s dreaming, he wears his wedding ring. When he’s not dreaming or at least in the situations where we are told that it’s not a dream, he does not have his wedding ring on. So whether this is his totem is entirely up for debate because nothing is said about his wedding ring at all throughout the film, but it is really indicative of how the movie sets up dream versus not dream. And I-I believe he is not wearing his wedding ring in the final scene when he sees kids.

JASON: So the real question then is, is it possible for somebody in the movie–and-and we’re not going to know the answer–is it possible for somebody in the movie to have a totem that they don’t know is a totem? And the reason why I don’t-I don’t agree with your explanation–with your counterpoint–is he clearly uses the totem as the top, OK? And I agree–I think you said that the top was Mal’s totem before she died and now it’s his, and he uses it. We don’t know the rules of this fictitious circumstance; if one person can ingest another person’s totem or not. We don’t know if a person can have a totem of which they are not consciously aware, though everything in the movie speaks about conscious and subconscious and unconscious recognition, so that’s certainly possible. We don’t know if in fact the top is–sorry–is it possible for somebody to have multiple totems? Could both be a totem? I don’t know and if so what happens if the totems are not consistent with each other? If he ingested Mal’s totem, and the top is his totem, does he also therefore ingest her inability to distinguish real from the dream? I don’t know, and we can speculate, but I think your points are very well-made. I don’t agree with the idea that the ring is his totem but I think it’s certainly defendable position.

ALEX: Well, I’m not saying that the ring is his totem, I’m  just saying that it’s quite peculiar that it’s on his finger in certain places and not on his finger in other places. I’m just throwing it out there. If it wasn’t clear, I am in camp “he was awake”. And you know, just going to live his life. You know, one last heist. Those one-last-heist movies, where the bad-the bad guy is gonna get out and be clean, you know, live for his kids–

JASON: He’s gonna go legit.

ALEX: –or something like that. Yeah, go legit! Exactly. So you know, like you said, Christopher Nolan plays coy when he’s asked this question. I mean, it’s been almost 10 years since the film came out, so he’s been asked several times and each time he’s like, “Meeeeh, I don’t know.” And you’re like, “yeah, you do.” And he’s like, “I do, but I’m not going to tell you.”

JASON: And in that way, he’s very much like Quentin Tarantino, who is a genius, and Tarantino is always asked about his remake of the movie Inglorious Basterds and they say to him, “why did you misspelled the word ‘bastards’?” and he says, “well I could tell you but I’m not going to. It’s more fun if you figure out for yourself.” And of course what he’s really saying is even if you think you figured it out, I’ll never tell you if it’s right, so I’m going to I’m going to be a little bit of a tool bag about it but that’s fun for me.

ALEX: Yeah, I think it comes with the territory of filmmaking–I suppose a true auteur gets to have their secrets.

JASON: Exactly.

ALEX: Yeah. Any other interesting bits–tidbits–that you saw in the film?

JASON: A few of them. One of them that I think it’s kind of just amusing is the idea of the kick, right, where if they cha–i-i-if they-if they take a person in a dream state and they disrupt their balance, the person will wake up. And if you remember the scene when Arthur is leaning back in his chair and Ariadne asks what a kick is and then Eames just kicks his chair out for a little bit then you see Arthur jump, it occurred to me that the kick is basically a myoclonic jerk. Sort of–myoclonic jerks happen when we’re falling asleep, not when we’re waking up, at least that I’m aware of, but I think that the-the kick was very similar to a myoclonic jerk, from my understanding of consciousness.

ALEX: Yeah, I think that-I think that fits with the overall idea of what some sort of body movement would be associated with it, because if your body starts moving, then you’re probably not dreaming, right? Because we go into atonia when we are dreaming.

JASON: Well, I suppose your body is moving, it depends on which of the dream stages were in, but, yes generally speaking, I would agree.

ALEX: Well, no, when we’re dreaming, not sleep stages–

JASON: Oh, excuse me, not sleep stages, dreaming, yeah. Yes, of course.

ALEX: We are and then there’s a real disorder, which–

JASON: REM Behavior Disorder.

ALEX: Yeah, REM Behavior Disorder. Where people begin to act our their dreams because their bodies do not no atonic and lose muscle tone. It’s very–it’s a really interesting, and I–a really interesting disorder, and every year, or actually every semester, I talk about sleeps-sleeping and dreaming and that question inevitably comes up. Either somebody knows somebody with REM Behavior Disorder or they actually have REM Behavior Disorder.

JASON: Sometimes it comes up in a way where they actually mistake REM Behavior Disorder for somnambulism and they keep saying, “well, you sleepwalking is just acting out their dreams,” and I say, “no it’s not.” And you know, when you talk to students about dreams, of course, the most common answer is we don’t know, and they get a little sick of that, but you know, as you started our discussion with we know what we don’t know and it’s it’s so the awful lot when it comes to dreams.

ALEX: Indeed. Any other tidbits?

JASON: Another one that I think is interesting is the question of whether or not the entire movie is in fact actually a dream. And we accept based on, again, what the director and the actors tell us that at some points they are dreaming and at some point they are awake, but there’s an awful lot of evidence to suggest that the entire thing is actually one extended dream, based on some, you know, interesting and convenient action scenes that happen. Whether or not those are meant to indicate that they’re always asleep or whether that’s just, you know, film play is anybody’s guess. But you know that’s not a question… One of the things that I think is just cute–and maybe I’ll end with this point tonight–is if you look at the license plate in one of the-one of the cars during a dream sequence, where the state motto or the license plate’s little cute saying should be like, you know, in Pennsylvania has the “Keystone State” there or whatever. The license plate in the dreams says the “Alternate State” and I thought that was just absolutely perfect for just a little nod to being, you know, maybe a little sarcastic flair.

ALEX: Yes that is, I think, one of the little bit that we can kind of giggle at. Because that was-that was-that was the filmmaking team having a little bit of fun.

JASON: And I’m sure that there are Easter eggs like that all over the place but, you know, that’s-that’s part of the fun of watching a movie again is-is trying to find more of them, cuz I know that they’re there, and I’ll be watching movie again for another reason, because I like the BWOM sound right at the beginning.

ALEX: There’s another one coming.

<Deep bass drop sound effect>

ALEX: I want to thank Jason Spiegelman for joining me to discuss Inception on this episode of the CinemaPsych Podcast. While saying goodbye, Jason, is there anything you’d like to plug?

JASON: For those of you who are inclined to travel or if you live in the eastern part of the country, the Eastern Psychological Association annual conference will be happening this year in Boston–Baahhhston–so come up and <in fake Bostonian accent> “pahk ya cahr at Hahvahrd Yahd” and come join us. Another–I know–another one that I’m a big fan of is the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology, which happens in the first year of January each year in St. Pete Beach, Florida. If you have never been, you really should. But those-but those are two that I would mention–I could go on and on about other great conferences, but those are two that are near and dear to me.

ALEX: Excellent. Well, again, Jason, thanks for joining me to discuss Inception. And hey, viewer, please share and subscribe to the podcast! That would be awesome! As I mentioned at the top of the show. Also, I recently learned that leaving reviews on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc, makes us a little bit easier to find. Gives us a great footing on those platforms. So you can leave a review, you can give us a rating, you can do both, or one of the other. It doesn’t really matter to me, because that’s feedback. I would love that feedback! Any platform of your choice would be absolutely lovely. And until the next episode, thanks for listening…