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Lilly Friedman

Miss DeWinne

DCA Senior Seminar

4 June 2020

To Dream or Not To Dream?

In 2020, almost everything seems as though it is entirely outside of our control. Disease,

violence, suffering, and pain surround everyone, but most people can find solace within their

own thoughts, dreams, and imaginations. However, Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception

calls the sanctity of our own minds--and even reality itself--into question. The complex structure

of having dreams within dreams within dreams and so on brings up interesting theories about the

structure and role of the unconscious. Freud’s theories on the structure and importance of meta-

dreaming and unconscious mourning processes are interesting to examine, but the presence of

outside influences almost completely invalidates any conclusions about an individual’s

subconscious that might be drawn through normal psychoanalysis.

The concept of a “dream within a dream” has been widely explored throughout

psychoanalytic history, and many different works incorporate similar elements, including

Shakespeare’s use of the “play within a play” in Hamlet. However, Inception does not just stop

at a dream within a dream; most of the movie takes place in a dream within a dream within a

dream, and a large portion takes place in “limbo,” which is a state of “raw, infinite

subconscious” (Inception). Freud theorized that dreams within dreams portray reality and serve

to distance the dreamer from the reality of the events that happen in the dream within a dream,

but he did not explore the deeper levels of meta-dreaming. The behaviors of the characters of

Inception demonstrate that the deeper the level of dreaming--i.e. the more “dream within”s there
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are--the more dream-like reality itself feels. Once a person reaches limbo, which seems to be the

highest level of meta-dreaming, all of reality seems like a dream. This makes sense, considering

that limbo is “infinite,” so any memory, thought, or idea within a person’s mind is put into this

infinite “dream within a dream within a…” state, effectively disproving its reality entirely in the

dreamer’s mind. All of reality feels like a construct of the subconscious.

Within these meta-dreams, one of the most common underlying problems is the

reappearances of Mal within Cobb’s unconscious. Over the course of the movie, the viewers

learn that Cobb feels incredible guilt and grief over the death of his wife, and these repressed

feelings account for why Mal is such an omnipresent part of Cobb’s unconscious. During the

mourning process, Freud says that one needs to “overcome the loss of the object” and “absorb all

the energies of the ego,” but he also details a phenomenon known as “melancholia” that can

occur when mourning consumes the unconscious and leads to

profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the

capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to

a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a

delusional expectation of punishment. (Freud 244, 255)

Clearly, Cobb is experiencing melancholia, as he exhibits multiple of the listed symptoms, most

notable “cessation of interest in the outside world.” Within context, Freud makes it clear that he

is referring to the world outside of a physical home, but Cobb displays a marked lack of interest

in the world outside of his own head. Nearly all of the movie is spent inside of Cobb’s

subconscious, and his frequent encounters with Mal show just how wrapped-up Cobb is with his

melancholia that arises from his guilt and grief.

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Despite the fact that one of the main goals of psychoanalysis itself is to unlock hidden

truths about the human mind, one of the most significant problems with psychoanalysis is

inception itself. Throughout psychological history, there are many well-documented instances of

false memories, or untrue memories formed retrospectively based upon the processing of

information. In fact, the movie is decidedly untrue in saying that people “can always trace the

genesis of an idea” (Inception), as psychological experiments have found time and time again

that wording, carefully slipped details, and other influences can completely modify a person’s

thoughts. A 2008 study used fMRI technology to see if there are any major differences in the

processing of true memories and false memories, which were based upon information carefully

fed to the participants, and both sets of memories activated similar pathways (National Research

Council). Most psychoanalytical conclusions are drawn through psychotherapy and free

association, but the suggestibility of the mind during those processes make it easy to implant

false memories, and Freud himself was accused of taking advantage of clients’ suggestibility in

order to create false memories to justify his own theories (Mendez and Fras). The entire field of

psychoanalysis itself falls apart as soon as inception is considered, as there is no way to know the

difference between the true unconscious and false memories.

The entire premise of the movie Inception, though interesting and arguably in support of

Freud’s many theories about dreaming and mourning, causes the foundations of the

psychoanalytic field to crumble upon closer inspection. By traveling deeper into the unconscious,

the line between reality and fiction become blurred, and the ways in which reality can seem

fictional and vice versa increase. The mind itself is not a fortress, and clearly, so little of what we

know, perceive, experience, and think is within our control. Maybe we should all pick up a totem

and do our best to take control of knowing what is real and what is all inside our heads.
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Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia." The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. University of Pennsylvania,

www.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_MourningAndMelancholia.pdf.
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Accessed 4 June 2020. Originally published in On the History of the Psycho-Analytic

Movement: Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, translated by James Strachey,

London, Hogarth Press, pp. 243-58.

Inception. Directed by Christopher Nolan, 2010. Netflix, www.netflix.com/title/70131314.

Accessed 3 June 2020.

Mendez, M F, and I A Fras. "The false memory syndrome: experimental studies and comparison

to confabulations." Medical hypotheses vol. 76,4 (2011): 492-6.

doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2010.11.033

National Research Council (US) Committee on Military and Intelligence Methodology for

Emergent Neruophysiological and Cognitive/Neural Research in the Next Two Decades.

Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies. Washington (DC):

National Academies Press (US); 2008. Appendix F, True and False Memories as an

Illustrative Case of the Difficulty of Developing Accurate and Practical

Neurophysiological Indexes of Psychological States. Available from:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207945/