Inception vs Lucid Dreaming

Hey guys, I recently got back into lucid dreaming and I recently saw a post here where there was a little clip from the movie inception. I was wondering how much of inception is actually true? Because I haven't been lucid to where I can control the dream, I've never been able to experiment with this.

Inception was about extracting information in other people's minds through shared dreaming from what I can remember. That is not something we can do (yet). Controlling your own dreams however is fully possible.

Picking apart what is and isn't possible, or likely, to happen in a Lucid vs Inception would take far too much time and space on this forum. Christopher Nolan is supposedly a long time Lucid Dreamer, and therefore should have certain knowledge of Lucid Dreaming. You have to remember tho, he needed to stitch together the world of Dreaming AND the story he was writing in a way non Dreaming audiences could comprehend. There will no doubt be places where Dreamers find he could've done something differently with the story, but this is his vision. And just like Dreams, no two visions are the same.

The idea of a totem is interesting, I will start there. Totems would not be foolproof as they are shown to be in the story. This is because of the expectation factor within Dreams. Totems are supposed to let you know when you're Dreaming, beyond a doubt, but if one were expecting the totem to act like it should in the Waking world while they were Dreaming, they could trick themselves into falsely believing they were awake. This point is never touched on in the movie because it annihilates their dependability.

Then you have the obvious "well why don't they just..." scenarios. Every Dreamer knows that fantastic things happen all the time within Dreams, and that Dreamers themselves are capable of doing these things, so then why don't we see them doing many of these limitless things within the movie? Because he tried to keep it as true to waking life as possible. When you start adding in abilities like flight, teleportation, super human strength, etc you complicate the game. He would also risk being compared with The Matrix. He wanted a visually entertaining way of delving into the psyche of a man ridden with guilt. By using Dreams, he gets whatever visuals he desires and creates another layer to the story that he can and does use.

Awesome movie btw!

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Originally Posted by PlanesWalker

Picking apart what is and isn't possible, or likely, to happen in a Lucid vs Inception would take far too much time and space on this forum. Christopher Nolan is supposedly a long time Lucid Dreamer, and therefore should have certain knowledge of Lucid Dreaming. You have to remember tho, he needed to stitch together the world of Dreaming AND the story he was writing in a way non Dreaming audiences could comprehend. There will no doubt be places where Dreamers find he could've done something differently with the story, but this is his vision. And just like Dreams, no two visions are the same.

The idea of a totem is interesting, I will start there. Totems would not be foolproof as they are shown to be in the story. This is because of the expectation factor within Dreams. Totems are supposed to let you know when you're Dreaming, beyond a doubt, but if one were expecting the totem to act like it should in the Waking world while they were Dreaming, they could trick themselves into falsely believing they were awake. This point is never touched on in the movie because it annihilates their dependability.

Then you have the obvious "well why don't they just..." scenarios. Every Dreamer knows that fantastic things happen all the time within Dreams, and that Dreamers themselves are capable of doing these things, so then why don't we see them doing many of these limitless things within the movie? Because he tried to keep it as true to waking life as possible. When you start adding in abilities like flight, teleportation, super human strength, etc you complicate the game. He would also risk being compared with The Matrix. He wanted a visually entertaining way of delving into the psyche of a man ridden with guilt. By using Dreams, he gets whatever visuals he desires and creates another layer to the story that he can and does use.

Awesome movie btw!

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It is an awesome movie! I thought they might have had dreamers on set for the movie to tell the producer/writers what to add or remove. Hopefully one day I'll be able to experiment im my own lucid dreams what is and is not like Inception, thanks!

There are no dreams within dreams.

Time dilation hasn't been proven yet, but there are people on this site that would support the idea of it.

Same goes with shared dreaming.

Extraction isn't possible... Yet.

Inception has a few of the fundamentals of lucid dreaming, but at a quick glance, it's pretty inaccurate in everything.

apart from the apparent LD-esque parts of Inception, I always thought JK Rowling nicked the idea of the Harry Potter form of teleportation from Dream Spinning. Well it was the other way to be precise, when I read about dream spinning I instantly thought of the HP teleportation ;)

I have always thought that Inception lacked the real "dream feeling" - it felt more like waking life were bizarre things happened here and there.
From my perspective, dreams have a very specific quality to them that cannot really be compared to waking life - they almost feel like stepping inside a vivid realistic animated movie and marvelling at the unexplored world in there - or possibly like getting drawn inside a painting.
In my opinion, The Matrix did a better job at conveying the "dreamy" feeling - especially that Jump Program scene, that scene felt very much like a genuine lucid dream.