Spoiler Warning: The following article examines the plots of Inception. While I endeavor to retain the film’s mystique, the nature of this discussion requires specific examples drawn from the plot. Nonetheless, Inception is a breathtaking work and I encourage you to watch it before considering my analysis.





“Fiction does its work by creating a dream in the reader’s mind.” -John Gardner, The Art of Fiction

Inception is a vertical story; layered, stratified, buried within itself like a babushka doll. A classic katabasis [1] story, we follow its protagonists into a descent into an underworld of the mind–the human subconscious. Similarly, the structure of the film, in terms of screenplay, cinematography, even camera-work, is arranged in layers. Scenes are nested within scenes, stories wrapped within stories within stories. Therefore, the design of the film mirrors the experience of the film.

Form reflects function. The conceit of inception–inducing sleep, infiltrating the dream and descending into layer after layer of dreams within dreams to access the vault of the subconscious–mirrors the structure of Inception: action wrapped within action, scenes that last several minutes encapsulated within a scene that lasts mere seconds. The result is a framed narrative where the frame itself becomes a metaphor of the plot. Consider it this way:

Layer Zero: The audience’s waking dream, or the experience of the film itself The Fourth Wall Layer One: The Real World, as defined by the film. Layer Two: The world of Robert Fischer’s dream. Layer Three: The dream within Robert Fischer’s dream. Layer Four: The dream within the dream within Robert Fischer’s dream. Layer Five: Limbo. The Core. The center of the subconscious.

As the protagonists descend deeper into Robert Fischer’s subconscious, they become increasingly disassociated with that upper-most layer–reality–separated from it by more and more cognitive layers. At the deepest layer, Limbo, subconscious is king, and the subjects are the mercy of their minds. Freud once compared the human mind to a bottomless sea, the consciousness its surface, the deep leagues its subconscious. We are only aware of the separation between the ocean and the sky when we are above water. As we descend, that distinction begins to dissolve, and the surface becomes a memory, all our senses–sight, sensation, hearing–engulfed by water, lightless, endless. So it is that the descent into our subconscious drowns us, and we are engulfed by the silent depths of our own mind.





Fitting, then, that Inception opens with Dom Cobb awakening, delivered by the ocean onto the sands of some unfamiliar beach. His awakening signals the audience’s own entry into the layered dream of the film, but also illustrates that Dom, miraculously, survives a plunge into the open waters of the unconscious. Dom’s is the spirit of tenacity. He is the protagonist, and like the Orpheus or Aeneas of classical myth, he must descend into some dark recess and emerge alive. These are the conditions of his heroism.

I. Dreams, Mythology and the Labyrinth

A reference to mythology in a film as aggressively modernized as Inception may seem symptomatic of over-thought, as if attributing more symbolic depth to the film than Christopher Nolan had intended. [2] Closer scrutiny of Inception reveals a central appearance of mythological lore, however. Consider Ariadne.

“The great Minos…hired the celebrated artist-craftsman Daedalus to invent and construct for him a labyrinth, in which to hide something of which the palace was at once ashamed and afraid.” -The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur

In Greek mythology, Ariadne is the daughter of King Minos and Queen Pasiphae. She helps Theseus navigate the labyrinth of the minotaur by giving him a ball of yarn to find his way out. Ariadne of Inception inherits the quality of intelligence and reliability from her mythological counterpart, both the architect of the labyrinth itself and the voice of greater reason that guides Cobb through the maze of his own unconscious. Ariadne is thus both builder and guide, architect and navigator.

As the Ariadne of myth who gave Theseus a length of yarn like a lifeline to a deep-sea diver, the Ariadne of Inception understands the danger of losing oneself in a labyrinth of one’s own creation, of losing sight of the ocean’s surface. Throughout the film, she is the embodiment of Cobb’s better angel.

In fact, we may even claim that Cobb’s totem is not necessarily his spinning top but Ariadne herself. The moments in which Cobb’s physical totem fails him, those critical seconds spent in the wilds of his raw subconscious where all of Cobb’s guilt manifests itself, Ariadne remains his single anchor into sanity, a small but persistent beacon of conviction.

“Dream is the personalized myth; myth is the depersonalized dream.” -Joseph Campbell

The labyrinth itself, designed by Ariadne the Architect, becomes the physical and meta-physical representation of the subconscious, infinitely labyrinthine and immeasurably deep. The architecture of the dreamscape, in other words the work of the architect, becomes a spatial, physical representation of the abstract mind, so that every detail of the environment reflects a subconscious thought, and the architecture of the dream-world gives form, structure and illustration to something invisible, unknowable, purely abstract.

“We create the world of the dream. We bring the subject into that dream, and they fill it with their secrets.”

The technique of representing the abstract in something visual or concrete is known as semiotics. Extractionists practice a form of applied semiotics, as it were, wherein the the abstract actually becomes something visual and concrete. In other words, the dreamscape is the physical representation of the subject’s mind, so that a vault hidden deep inside the labyrinth is not just a physical vault but the abstract location of the subject’s deepest thoughts, and the contents of the vault are not merely a slip of paper or a will or a tangible object, but the manifestation of the subject’s secrets.

In order to understand the semiotics of Inception, we must first understand the way the subconscious communicates with the conscious mind.

II. Communicating with the Subconscious: The Creation/Perception Feedback Loop

The world of the dream, designed by the architect, becomes populated with the subject’s subconscious. Memories take shape and become idealized representations. Memories flood into the world, fill its streets, lounge in its bars, stroll on its promenades, drive its cars, guard its vaults. Herein lies the basic premise of extraction and inception.

Think of extraction as a hybrid between a psychoanalytical therapy session and a bank job. At once highwaymen and hypnotists, extractionists break into the metaphysical world in order to steal something of value in the physical world: information. The mind, formerly chaotic and infinite, becomes organized, categorized, arranged; it transforms from abstract to physical.

A skilled architect thus constructs a dreamscape that exploits the nature of semiotics. Inception postulates that it is the mind’s tendency to naturally give symbols to thoughts, that it is the mind’s nature to codify and make logical its memories. If you or I were to dream of a vault, then logically, within that vault we would find some secret of ours, given shape and form.

Why? The reason is, once again, semiotics. Our minds are incapable of visually representing abstractions. What does a secret look like? What does regret look like? What does doubt look like? What does scorn look like? A secret might be an envelope with a wax seal; regret, a paper pinwheel from your childhood; doubt, a spinning top; scorn, a secret will.

“In dreams, we create and perceive our world simultaneously.”

When creation and perception happen simultaneously, the subconscious yields what we might consider the purest form of poetry, the rarest art, or as a breath-taken Ariadne exclaimes, “pure creation,” when the symbol is both itself and what it represents–when a spinning top is both a spinning top and a symbol of the dream-state.

Another way to think about creation-perception: We think and become aware of our thought at the same time when dreaming. Cobb thinks of the dream and his top appears in his pocket, without causality. Yet another way to consider this: creation is the subconscious delivering a thought upward. Perception is the conscious mind recognizing that thought as it arrives to the surface. In the dream world, both activities happen at exactly the same time.

“The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up to the mind–whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Alladin caves.” -Joseph Campbell

The unconscious communicates in silence, in smoke signals and mood swings. But it is the persistence of the unconscious, and its great unfathomable scale (to the conscious mind what the depths of the sea are to the thin surface), that allows for inception at all. Inception, extraction in reverse, is something more sinister than its comparatively safe counterpart, what brainwashing is to identity theft.

In practice, inception requires care and subtlety. The act of inception necessitates a deep-sea plunge, a dive into the icy dark, trusting in one’s discipline and the capacity of the lungs, the furtive delivery of an idea, however complex, reduced to its most simple semiotic element, to catch on some inexorable upward current, up to the surface without a trace of malfeasance, to blossom like a virus.

Ironically, while the act of inception evokes–with good reason–strong ethical and legal objections, it is for Cobb a means of redemption. The criminal act becomes complicated in terms of motivation, and in the course of his last job, Dom Cobb must inevitably confront a deeper agony troubling him within the core of his subconscious: Limbo. This descent is what Joseph Campbell called the katabasis that all heroes experience during their journey: the confrontation with their darkest fear. Their day of reckoning.

III. The Katabasis of Dom Cobb and the Minotaur of Guilt

A labyrinth, as in the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, is built to house within it a source of great fear and shame. If dreams are indeed personalized versions of myth, then we may consider Limbo the central layer of the labyrinth, the abstract bottom, the dwelling place of Cobb’s guilt. And, if dreams are indeed personalized mythology, then Cobb’s descent into Limbo constitutes a necessary rite of passage. Dom Cobb cannot know peace until he confronts his fears and emerges victorious or loses himself forever. Hence, the katabasis of Dom Cobb.

“The first step…consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world. Macro to microcosm. A retreat from the desperations of the waste-land to the peace of the ever-lasting realm that is within. But this realm, as we know from psychoanalysis, is…the unconscious. It is the realm that we enter in sleep. We carry it within ourselves forever.” -Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces

The ever-lasting realm of the unconscious–or Limbo–is for Dom Cobb the precise opposite of peaceful: a crumbling seashore Eden, cityscape of dilapidated architecture, masonry mortared with reminiscence that erodes back into the primordial ocean of unconscious. The general disrepair evident in the scenery, in skyscrapers that collapses into tides like sand castles, illustrates the gradual disintegration of idyllic illusion of Dom and Mal Cobb.

Thus the city of their dreams becomes the labyrinth that presently houses the manifestation of Dom’s guilt, and who better to guide him through it but Ariadne, weaving her yarn of reason and sensibility? Dom’s purpose here is self-therapy, and so where Theseus armed himself with a sword against the bestial Minotaur, Dom girds himself with exhaustion, wields conviction. Mal has exhausted him, sapped him of his strength–the idea of her has become a parasite draining vitality and sanity, and it is the exhaustion, the exasperated finality, those last few slivers of Dom’s tolerance that drives him to confront her.

The act of confrontation is semiotic of psychoanalysis; in destroying the illusion of Mal, Dom seeks to destroy a part of himself that has become malignant, and so the discussion between Dom and Mal is, underneath the layer of appearance, a confrontation between Dom and the part of his emotional network that refuses to rid himself of her memory. In terms of the classical confrontations, this is a case of simultaneous Man v. Man and Man v. Himself [3].

Dom’s internal struggle paraphrases the idea of spiritual struggle, ancient as religion itself. Consider the following excerpts, juxtaposed for emphasis:

“The first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside…and eradicate them. This is the process known to Hindu and Buddhist philosophies as viveka, or discernment.” -Joseph Campbell, Hero With A Thousand Faces

“That army of yours / that the world with its devas cannot overcome / I will smash with the power of discernment.” -The Buddha, spoken to Mara, Demon of Illusions, in the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism

Campbell has aptly described what Dom calls Limbo: those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside. As an extraction/inception team dives deeper and deeper through the layers of the unconscious mind, the heart of the subject’s troubles becomes more evident. Thus it is in Limbo where Dom finds the beating heart of his suffering and it is there that he must eradicate it (paraphrasing Ariadne who, apparently, paraphrases Campbell.)

Discernment is the weapon of extraction/inception. It is the lifeline of the diver. Discerning illusion from Truth is the centerpiece of introspective philosophy, of self-conscious faith, and it is a bitter irony that the same discernment that Dom seeks to cure himself of Mal becomes a weapon of infiltration, a cure turned crowbar.

Inception challenges the veracity of Discernment. It is said that the Truth shall set you free; Inception argues, with a bitter smile, that a sufficiently advanced illusion is indistinguishable from Truth. Siddhartha spoke of discernment as a weapon that smashes the armies of illusion; Inception observes that a weapon is only as effective as its wielder, and in the hands of flawed humans (who include among their many shortcomings not being the Buddha) smashes without discrimination, breaking illusion and perception until the mind itself is damaged.

But it is also central to the human endeavor. We push ourselves so that we may know who we are. We break our boundaries so that we may re-discover them. Inception: an impossible task, until the idea of its possibility grew in Cobb’s mind like a virus.

IV. The Water’s Edge – Where dream/reality begins/ends

Inception opens with a shot of Dom Cobb waking up on the seashore, sand and seawater tangled in his hair, the shore before him and the sea behind him. The violent sea at his back suggests the tumultuous unconscious. The shore before him suggests the beginnings of cognition.

The conceit of Inception is an old paradox of perception, one that has been explored before, and one that will continue to nag at us: what is reality but a bombardment of sensory perceptions? The question is an elementary one, not particularly groundbreaking in Socratic depth but a persistent idea intimately tied to the nature of cinema itself.

We posit our enjoyment of film on what Samuel Johnson called the willing suspension of disbelief–our ability to momentarily and willingly forget that what unfolds before our eyes is pure theater. Seated in a dark theater, we are nearly immersed in the experience of the film, such that for two and a half hours it encapsulates most of our perceptions. We escape into it.

The question is hardly original, having been recapitulated, recycled, revisited in every genre, but it is an immortal question owing to its inherently unknown quality. Christopher Nolan merely gathers the fragments of this distinctly human, immeasurably old question of perception, and configures it into an original film. To give you an idea of this question’s heritage, consider the following passage by a Chinese philosopher of the 3rd Century BCE, Zhuangzi:

“Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamt I was a butterfly. I was conscious only of my own happiness as a butterfly. Suddenly, I woke up, and there I lay, Zhuangzi again. Now I do not know if I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.” -The Butterfly Dream

Zhuangzi’s question has existed for as long as we have had dreams. It is a question we ask ourselves when we arrive at the water’s edge, on the sand of the seashore, awake into the real world but yet sunburnt with our dreams, briefly unaware of our surroundings and the veracity therein. This question lingers in our minds whenever we snap awake from a powerful nightmare, yet terrified of spectral threats. It is only until we have “come to our senses,” sufficiently perceived the world around us, that we realize it was a nightmare.

For us, the paradoxical question might plague us for just a few drowsy moments in the morning. Inception buries its characters within the heart of the question for decades, in a sleep so profoundly deep that they perceive years where only minutes passed. The scale alone is enough to traumatize. To have slept an entire life away, only to awaken into one so distant as to remember it as only a dream.

“During our dreams, we do not know that we are dreaming…Only on waking do we know it was only a dream.” -Zhuangzhi

Characters in limbo experience nested lives. Lives experienced in layers, full durations encircled by the span of a single night. The essence of Christopher Nolan’s narrative experiment is an expansion in scale, a change in size, such that sleeping and waking, dream and reality, become different only in relation to each other, only visible by the power of our discernment. If dreams last the span of an entire life, then life and death become matters of transition, of slipping between one layer of reality into another.

“Dreams feel real when we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was strange.” -Dom Cobb to Ariadne

Inception asks this: Do we trust the waking world because we live the majority of our lives within it? If we spent as much time living as we did dreaming, would we lose our power of discernment? That is the true narrative conceit of Inception, its real punchline, the idea nested within the dream nested within the film. Infiltration and shootouts, drugs and car chases, explosions and deceptions, these are the layers that conceal a hidden idea, silent, but inexorably persistent.

[1] A descent, or a downward progression. In classical mythology, often refers to the journey a hero takes into the underworld and a subsequent ascent, or rebirth. The katabasis is a central element of the Hero’s Journey.

[2] The Intentional Fallacy, a term coined by New Critics Wimsatt and Beardsley, wherein a writer attempts to discern the intention of the author. Wimsatt and Beardsley contend, correctly I think, that intention is not only unimportant, but impossible to discern just by examining the work in question. Therefore, I cannot attempt to explain what Nolan wanted to say when he made Inception; all I can do is explain how he tells his story, and what the story itself says.

[3] The Seven Basic Conflicts that we all learned in high school English class: Man v Man, Man v Nature, Man v Society, Man v Self, Man v God, Man v Machine, Man v Destiny.