Review: "Inception" Limited Science, Spectacular Fiction

If all dreams were like “Inception” I would never sleep.

Every dream in the film seems to end unpleasantly. Try going to sleep knowing you’ll likely get mauled by a mob of angry rioters or stabbed in the chest by a beautiful French woman. It doesn’t sound pleasant.

Not to give away the film’s convoluted plot, but the dream world is a violent place where everything happens for a reason. In that sense Christopher Nolan’s vision is more “The Matrix” than the ICSD-2.

That isn’t to say “Inception” is a bad movie, it’s actually fantastic. Just don’t expect it to be an educational experience. The film has its own rules Nolan reportedly came up with well before he reinvented the Batman franchise.

“Inception” is a heist movie at its core. Only instead of breaking into a money vault ala “Ocean’s 13” the protagonists try to crack companies’ deepest secrets. A fugitive Leonardo DiCaprio assembles a global team of highly skilled specialists for one last job. His roster includes a dream architect (Ellen Page), a master of disguise (Tom Hardy) and a chemist/ anesthesiologist (Dileep Rao).

The squad infiltrates dreams by drugging their target and hooking themselves up to a special suitcase. Once inside, the dreamer’s subconscious, or the dream world’s citizens, tries violently to drive them out. Die in the dream and you wake up. Except for that aforementioned one last job where the stakes are higher. Die there and you go to dream limbo where you’ll spend agonizing many decades alone waiting to wake up.

Alternatively, falling or waiting for time to run out also wakes up the dreamer. But minutes in the real world can last hours or days inside dreams within dreams within dreams. Each level of the dream hierarchy is more difficult to penetrate, with a more advanced subconscious security system.

And there are still more rules, involving “dream totems” and gravity. It’s all complicated but if you suspend your disbelief you’re in for some incredible set pieces.

There is some real-life basis to this science fiction. “Inception” was inspired by Nolan’s lucid dream experiences.

Lucid dreaming involves being aware that you are dreaming while you’re still asleep. Most people are unable to have lucid dreams unless they train themselves using pre-sleep “autosuggestion.”

The process is somewhat like how the Ellen Page character designs dreams. You can prepare yourself to see certain images and recognize the bizarre events of the dream. The same sort of rehearsal process can be used to improve learning or treat recurring nightmares.

Some of the rules inside of the dreams also apply. Most of us have woken from the “kick effect” of falling dreams. It doesn’t happen for most people but death can occur in the dreams of the elderly or terminally ill. Multilayered dreams can also occur outside of “Inception.”

The rest of the concepts of “Inception” fall well into the realm of psychobabble. It doesn’t take a clinical sleep specialist to know you can’t dive into someone else’s dreams and steal their secrets. But you can influence them by suggestion. A lifetime in dream limbo is also ridiculous, though it works well as a plot device within the film.

“Inception” is a wildly original movie in a summer movie sea of sequels and remakes. Go see “Inception” right away, or better yet see it twice. Don’t wait for it to come out on DVD.

Photo by Warner Bros. Pictures

The Dream Team: Nolan’s “Inception” getting high praise

From the art house to the megaplex, we’ve seen countless attempts at recreating dreams for the big screen. Dream depictions date back to the beginning of film, and the success stories are limited. Most of the time dreams in film are hackneyed plot devices or lazy attempts at character development.

The few exceptions are artsy surrealist films. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali best portrayed the shocking incoherence of nightmares in the 1929 silent short “Un Chien Andalou.” David Lynch is the modern master of the tradition. His films like Mulholland Drive and Eraserhead paint dark, unsettling dreamscapes where the rules of the waking world don’t apply.

Reviews show “Inception”, opening at midnight Friday, appears to sets a new benchmark for movies about dreams. Accessible to audiences but impossible to describe on paper, it’s not your typical summer blockbuster.

Roger Ebert said it best when he wrote in his review “Here is a movie immune to spoilers: If you knew how it ended, that would tell you nothing unless you knew how it got there. And telling you how it got there would produce bafflement.”

Here’s what we know from the previews and press releases:

Leonardo DiCaprio leads a team of specialists who infiltrate people’s dreams to steal their secrets. He’s offered one last job as a chance at redemption. Instead of stealing an idea he has to plant one. Something of course goes wrong as the trailers and commercials are filled with images of the world bending and cities collapsing.



"Inception's" pedigree is unmatched on paper. Director Christopher Nolan is the man who reinvented Batman and set records with “The Dark Knight.” Oscar winners and rising stars fill out the large ensemble cast. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page and Michael Caine are just a few to name aside from DiCaprio.

The Rotten Tomato ranking, which averages all positive and negative reviews, is at a very respectable 87 percent. Mr. Ebert himself gave “Inception” four stars.

Look for a full review on the Sleep Education Blog in the coming days.

Lucid Dreaming: A Sleep-Wake Hybrid

A new study in the Sept. 1 issue of the journal Sleep investigated lucid dreaming.

What is lucid dreaming? It involves the conscious awareness of dreaming while you are still asleep.

Lucid dreaming combines aspects of waking and dreaming. You have hallucinatory dream activity along with reflective awareness; you realize that you are not awake and are dreaming. In contrast, during non-lucid dreams you mistakenly think that you are awake. Lucid dreaming also can involve the ability to control what happens during the dream.

Lucid dreams tend to occur after several hours of sleep; they are more common during later periods of rapid eye movement sleep – or REM sleep. The longest period of REM sleep may last for an hour near the end of the night. REM sleep makes up about 25 percent of total sleep time in normal adult sleep.

According to the authors, spontaneous lucidity is rare. But people can be trained to become lucid. A special electronic device can help induce lucidity; these devices emit specific light or sound signals.

But most often the training is done through pre-sleep “autosuggestion.” Before going to sleep, you tell yourself to recognize when you are dreaming; you prepare yourself to notice the bizarre events of the dream.

The authors also report that it is possible for you to communicate that you have become lucid during sleep; you can make a sequence of voluntary eye movements as a signal.

The study preparation involved 20 college students in Bonn, Germany. They took part in weekly lucidity training sessions. After four months, six people claimed to be lucid more than three times per week.

These six volunteers participated in the study. Their sleep was monitored during multiple overnight sleep studies.

Results show that three of the six volunteers were able to have a lucid dream in the sleep lab. In each case, lucidity occurred in the morning hours.

The dreamers were able to signal that they had become lucid with a pattern of horizontal eye movements. Lucidity also was confirmed by self-report after waking.

Brain-wave recordings confirmed that lucid dreaming occurs during sleep. But the recordings also showed that it differs from REM sleep.

The authors suggest that lucid dreaming is a “unique, hybrid state of sleep;” it involves features of both REM sleep and wakefulness. They conclude that lucidity requires a shift in brain activity during sleep.

Image by Cornelia Kopp