Dom Cobb's Inception

Dreams are worlds that are created based on what we choose them to be like making them solely ours. These worlds feel real because our mind creates them using our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. The movie, Inception, revolves around the idea that we have the ability to make our own worlds through dreams, and consequently choose our own realities. The purpose of this essay is to prove that the movie, Inception, uses dreams to convey the message that our reality is the one we choose it to be. I will prove this argument by analyzing Dom Cobb’s experiences as an ‘extractor’ using Arnold van Gennep’s theory about rites of passage and its stages. I will also prove that the movie conveys the message by analyzing Dom Cobb’s dreams using Freud’s theory …show more content…
This ritualistic behavior of entering this dream every night can be explained using Sigmund Freud’s theory of neurosis, that rituals are an unhealthy mind’s way of giving comfort. Dreams are products of our imagination, and being able to imagine is usually the mind’s way of providing us things that are not in our reach. Cobb’s state of mind is unstable because he has a lot of regrets after his wife passed. He is living while blaming himself of planting the idea in her head, which caused her to kill herself. As a result of this, Cobb creates a projection of his wife and a dream world using his memories with her because simply reliving her in his imagination is not enough to make it feel real. Entering this dream world every night and spending time with his projection of Mal provides Cobb comfort and a way to cope with her death which he admits when Ariadne asks him why dreaming was so important for him, saying, “In my dreams, we are still together.” In this dream world, Cobb refuses to let his wife go and he lives as if dreaming is his only way to feel the love that he once felt because in his dreams he is together with people who make him happy. Just like in Freud’s theory, Cobb chooses to live in these moments, as if it was his reality, because it gives him comfort. This relates to the message of the story that our own realities are based on our choices and when …show more content…
This can be related to the reductionist approach in explaining beliefs, which were evident in Marx and Freud’s writings. Inspired by Ludwig Feuerbach, both theorists decided to take a reductionist approach in explaining beliefs. This approach states that the divine reality is actually the human reality where “the object of beliefs is nothing more than human constructions,” and that the divines are modelled based on what those who believe in them want them to be. In the film, Mal locks the top, which she uses to indicate which world is real or not, in the safe, as she chooses limbo as her reality. This is because their world in limbo was a world where they could do and build everything they want to, which is a promising world for them. Similar to the idea of reductionism in the study of beliefs, where the deities that they worship are actually the purest reflection of their own nature, Mal chooses the limbo as her reality because it is the best reflection of the world she wishes to create. This idea then shows the message that reality is not something fixed and that there are multiple realities in life where the one that we choose to believe becomes our own