History WMG / Inception

** This also explains a lot about ''[[Film/ScottPilgrim Scott Pilgrim vs. the World]]''.

Inception is the nightmare Batman had while he was under the influence of fear toxin in ''Film/BatmanBegins''. It explains why Saito (Ra's Al Ghul) is both trying to help and hinder him, why his love interest dies and why the scare crow is in it. Kitty Pryde being there is just a flash back to when he teamed up with the MarvelUniverse.

*** I always thought Ariadne was Canadian, like her actress, so she'd be able to speak French.

In Season 8 of ''24'', the child actress Claire Geare plays Jack Bauer's granddaughter Terri through his daughter Kim. In ''Inception'', Claire Geare plays Cobb's daughter Phillipa. In ''Inception'', Miles (Creator/MichaelCaine) is believed to be Phillipa's grandfather through Mal. This is because Mal was Kim Bauer, Cobb is her husband Stephen, and Miles is her father Jack, giving us our only glimpse at what happened to those characters after the show ended.

[[WMG: LightNovel/HaruhiSuzumiya takes place in the world of Inception]]

[[WMG: LightNovel/{{Baccano}} is a result of inception/extraction gone wrong]]

Note that 1: tokens are supposedly a tool to help you resist dream hacking. 2: Mal was just some enthusiast, but she had one. 3: Fisher was professionally trained to resist dream hacking and he didn't have one (or he'd also have been trained to use it the moment he starts to suspect something). Neither did Saito, and Ariadne had never heard of them. 4: We never see anyone successfully using a token to detect a dream hacking attack. Maybe Mal was just partial to tokens (maybe she invented them?) and that's why Cobb and his team use them, but they never saw widespread use because they've never been proven to actually work. Now why wouldn't they work? Let's go over how dream hacking works: the attacker creates a dream world and the victim unknowingly enters it -- and populates it with their own projections, including objects like secret documents in a safe. So a victims with a token will often also project their own token into their pocket, with all the properties they know it has, and then it'll just give them a false sense of safety.

[[WMG: Arthur's last name is Darling.]]

* Also, considering the big role that escapism plays in this movie (i.e. Dream Limbo is "Neverland"), it makes sense that one of the characters would have the surname "Darling" as an allusion to Literature/PeterPan.

[[WMG: Arthur thought [[spoiler: Dom killed Mal after she died.]]]]

[[WMG: God is performing Inception on Cobb]]
Okay, it builds upon ideas already enumerated below such as everything being a dream, Mal being right, Cobb actually being the one Incepted etc., but after rewatching the film, I had the idea that everything Cobb experiences is a dream (even before the film), specifically ''his dream''. So Mal was a projection ''all along'' as were his children etc. and his subconscious kept trying to, in more dramatic ways, tell him it was and to wake up, but other feelings in him resisted that notion. Anyways, this begs the question what is the purpose of the dream that is Cobb's life? Let's say God, like often described, does not violate free will but nonetheless wants to teach a very powerful and meaningful Truth to him, accomplished through the dream that ''is'' life. I.e. God was trying to perform Inception on Cobb. And thus perhaps Mal might have even been God descended into the dream with Cobb, offering him the Truth. What that idea is is difficult to say--it ''might'' have been that there was "more to this life" than what was actually the dream and thus beckoning Cobb back to God as some religions purport, or it ''might'' have been some deeper unspoken truth which ended up revealed through his feelings and sacrifice for his children, perhaps granting him access to Heaven in the end? Whatever the case, it might appear from the ending that Cobb rejects God by no longer caring if it was a dream or not, preferring to be with his projected children rather than wake up. ''Might''. But really, this argument, that life is actually God's Inception, is just the old "God uses life to teach us lessons", "everything is in the mind of God" etc. notions that appear in both Western and Eastern traditions. So anyways, not writing this in support of any god since I'm actually misotheistic but it just struck me as an interesting guess.

[[WMG: Limbo is not dreaming]]

[[WMG: This film takes place in the [[Franchise/StargateVerse Stargate universe]]]]

[[WMG: The film is connected to ''Titanic''.]]

At the end of ''Titanic'', [=DiCaprio's character=] sinks into the sea. Then at the beginning of ''Inception'', he washes up. Not my idea, though.

[[WMG: Cobb is dreaming EVERYTHING.]]

This differs from other "All Just a Dream" theories in that this theory says Cobb isn't just dreaming the end of the movie, or dreaming the whole thing, but even his totem is a dream. In real life, Cobb did what he did to Mal in the dream- he created a dream that contained all his hopes and dreams. Eventually, like Mal in limbo, he got so caught up in it that he now lives in the dream. Mal, the kids, Ariadne, Yusuf, Eames, even Arthur- they're all projections. Certain mistakes in the dream, like Ariadne failing to draw the 1min/2min maze at the beginning or his children aging are his brain trying to trick him into further believing the dream. After Ariadne's brief mistakes, she is everything Cobb could have wanted in an Architect. Arthur, Eames, and possibly Mal are memories of people who have probably died in real life- maybe it was their deaths that drove him into the dream. As noted by some below tropers, the movie plays on a lot of common dreams: Mal falls to her death, Cobb being unable to run away from agents of Kobol, and the inception taking place on a plane- in flight. This would make sense in a dream. Also, consider his line "Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange." He's talking about how in this dream, there is technology to enter dreams- which is really weird if you think about it. In the real world, he is probably in a drug-induced dream, like in Yusuf's opium den. That scene makes more sense too if it was a dream; it's implied Cobb used to be addicted to opium or another drug. And finally, the totem. The top doesn't actually matter here, because he is dreaming that too. The top isn't real. Nothing is real except for Cobb.

[[WMG: Whether the top falls or not, Cobb gets his happy ending.]]

** This explanation is more or less the one that The Last Psychiatrist goes for in his blog. In essence, the movie ''is not actually about what is the dream and what is not.'' The entire narrative attempts to confuse you, right out to the last scenes, about what is the dream and what is real. That's because whether Cobb is dreaming or not is actually irrelevant: the narrative is actually about '''catharsis,''' about the fact that Cobb has been able to move on from his wife's death - whether he moves on by just falling completely into the dream or waking up, the result was the same: he let her go. The entire point of the inception mission was to plant a cathartic last confrontation in Fischer's mind ''that did not actually happen in reality.'' Fischer then begins to act on that catharsis nonetheless. Whether Fischer actually had the experience that caused the catharsis or not is irrelevant, i.e. reality itself does not matter - the mission was accomplished. Same thing goes for Cobb: he had a cathartic confrontation with Mal that never occurred in reality, but he still acted upon it by choosing to change how he behaved. He still got his catharsis.

[[WMG: No one actually saw this movie]]

[[WMG: They're all speaking French.]]

[[WMG: I am dreaming this right now.]]

[[WMG: The above troper is [[KilledOffForReal actually dead]].]]

[[WMG: Mal will make Cobb wake up. Eventually.]]

[[WMG: Arthur and Eames' past history.]]

[[WMG: The dream sequences are all real.]]

[[WMG: They never left Yusuf's basement]]

[[WMG: When Cobb tells Fischer he is the head of his SS (short for Subconscious Security) he really is telling him the truth]]

[[WMG: They are the same place]]

** [[CompletelyMissingThePoint sigh]]

[[WMG: The real world (level 0) of ''Film/{{Inception}}'' is the dream world of ''Film/TheMatrix''.]]
The machines of ''Film/TheMatrix'' found that once they were able to instill a convincing dream-world within a large population of human drones, to instill additional layers of dreams is a simple matter of applying the basic dreaming process recursively. The original vision of ''Film/TheMatrix'' was that the machines utilize collective human brainpower to create a massive supercomputer distributed among many billion "nodes", i.e. human minds -- not that they harvested humans for their energy output, as Morpheus explains in the film. As Cobb explained in ''Film/{{Inception}}'', when we dream, we use our brainpower more fully. The machines realized the advantages of this for their purposes and began to provide people with some degree of control over this process, with the one restriction that they cannot wake up from the Matrix without Matrix-external assistance. With even a small handful of people delving deeply through successive dream layers, those individuals' computational power increased by many orders of magnitude -- ten people manipulating their own dreams have the computational power of ten '''''billion''''' people who never go further than level 1.

Latter on they tried the tech for other things and then it caught on: computers got smaller and researchers like Cobb got the idea to have someone else direct the dream.

[[WMG: This film takes place in the Stargate universe]]
This one is actually pretty cut and dry, in Stargate: Atlantis they reveal that the military has reverse engineered alien shared dreaming technology, and military research is the only origin ever given for the shared dreaming tech in Inception.

Cobb and company showed that the dreamscape can have many levels. The tech was "supposedly" made for the military to train soldiers. What if it was really used as an interrogation technique? TheSixties and TheSeventies were a time when every intel agency was trying any wacky UsefulNotes/ColdWar scheme to "brainwash" operatives. They tried with the huge room-filling computers and punch cards of the era. Number 6 was just too good. Each Number "2" was an attempt at what would be latter called Extraction or [[TitleDrop Inception]]. They just thought they could break Number 6, but they didn't know he was controlling the dream. They wrote it off when Number 6 decided to stay in the dream - that's why "Fallout" is so trippy - he took over the dream.