Jun 3, 20197 min read

The science in Inception

Updated: Jan 24, 2020

inception style image of a city — Modified from photo by Jonathan Riley @ Unsplash/ See link under sources

Inception is like giving life to a person’s deepest thoughts. It’s strange, it’s arbitrary, and above all, it’s science-fiction at its very best. The dream trope in literary works is not that uncommon, but for a movie to dwell into the depths of such a tricky concept is truly remarkable. So, is there any good science that we can absorb from the movie? Or is it just pure fiction that people can only fantasize about? If we elucidate inception from a movie enthusiast’s viewpoint, it will take ages to complete this essay, so for the sake of argument, let’s only cherry-pick the most interesting bits and pieces that proves/ disproves any scientific facts or theories.

Controlling a dream

Dreams are still a bit uncertain to us, yet it is one of the most intriguing subjects there is to talk about. In the movie, the major plotline revolves around a process, which involves manipulating someone’s dreams to obtain information from their subconscious. A major portion of this dream 'hacking' includes controlling dreams. So, can we control dreams?

Imagine the last dream you had, were you going with the flow or were you in control? If you resonate more with the latter, you belong to a section of the population who can experience what are called lucid dreams.

Being lucid in a dream means having various degrees of freedom to do as you chose. Stephen LeBerge[1], an American psychologist, was one of the first people to shed light on the science of lucid dreams. Being a natural lucid dreamer himself, his studies were based on eye movements of test subjects in a certain pre-requested manner. More recent scientific evidence focuses on sudden activation of the cerebral cortex of test subjects while experiencing a lucid dream. Though these studies are obscure in the 'hows' and 'whys' of the concept, lucid dreams do appear to be a real thing.

So, the ‘controlling a dream’ part of inception is indeed backed up by scientific evidence. However, manipulating someone’s subconscious to dream of specific things and then entering it to gather valuable information is mostly on the science-fiction side of things. But we only know so little about the brain and are yet to explain many mysterious phenomena that happen in there. So, perhaps it was Chris Nolan’s long-view of things yet to come.

Layered dreams

One of the things that make inception so visually and narratively spectacular is how the dream heist was made possible. The group of dream hackers delves into not one, not two, but unto a third dream, (four if limbo included) each layer testing their composure and determination. But do layered dreams have any science within them?

the different layers of dreams in the movie inception

The number of dreams per night varies depending on our age. The average person[2] may have three to five dreams, which can even go as high as seven. But you hardly remember one, let alone all of them. The ones you end up remembering are the vivid ones that mostly occurs during the REM[3] cycle of sleep, the same phase in which we can measure heightened activities of lucid dreams in test subjects. So, if a person has more than one lucid dream in a night, would that be speaking the language of layered dreams?

Dreams, lucid or not, can happen in relays. Though most of the time, they are not correlated, it is not hard to comprehend a situation when they are. Lucid dreamers speak of using dream journals as a conduit for achieving lucid dreams. Some say that it is even possible to ‘pause’ and ‘continue’ dreams while transitioning between sleep and wakefulness as if watching a movie on a laptop. If such feats are possible, then tying dreams together is not the most irrational of thoughts.

The movie immediately gets complicated when the 'dream hackers' transition into their second dream, and it only goes one way from there. If we could consider the four dreams as individual dreams, then from a ‘dream relay’ point of view, it functions with the least complexities. But if we look at it from another angle, the layering was done with efficiency, and the connections were tight, meaning, one person had to stand back in a layer to provide a ‘kick’ that enabled the rest to return to that level from a deeper one. But such a high degree of precision, with the 'dream hackers' being rationally aware of everything that needed to be done, is a bit of a stretch in determining the scientific authenticity of the concept. However, there’s no denying the fictional side of it.

a man flying in a lucid dream — Lucid dream/ composite work; links to the original images under sources

False awakening[4] is an interesting phenomenon in oneirology, which could also help explain layered dreams. In this, a person wakes from a dream into another, thinking that he/she has woken up in reality. I’ve personally experienced this, and have heard believable accounts from others as well. When a person experiences the false-awakening, they go through their day-to-day morning routines as if they would normally, not knowing that they are dreaming, until they come to grips with the falseness of their reality. In a way, this could be considered a pre-lucid dream. Though the dreams are not ‘layered’ in false awakening, they are connected, and the transition happens in a way that you are likely to remember each dream when you wake up in reality. This juxtaposition draws a subtle parallel to the concept of inception in a better way.

Dream sedatives

The movie does not specify any particular sedatives they use to create multi-tiered dreams. But numerous drugs can induce varied sleep patterns, which in turn could change dream patterns as well. Antihypertensive drugs, antidepressant agents, sedative-hypnotic drugs, general anesthetic agents, endocrinal agents, opium, cocaine, caffeine, etc. are known to affect patterns of sleep in one form or the other. While some are known to induce vivid dreams, others are notorious for terrifying nightmares. But as far as lucid dreams go, an article on PLOS[5], explains how certain drugs like Galantamine can increase the frequency of lucid dreams with an increase in dosage. The usage of galantamine under specific conditions is one of the best methods to induce a lucid dream that exists today.

Use of totems

The dream hackers had an object of choice that they carried with them while dreaming. In the movie, these objects or totems, are anything small and basic, like Cobb’s spinning top, which behaves specifically different in dreams and reality, making them the best way to tell dreams apart from reality. The totem of one cannot be touched or felt by another, or else it would render its purpose useless.

a spinning top that represents a 'totem' in inception — Totems in inception/ Photo by Christophe Hautier @ Unsplash/ See link under sources.

Totems are not very far off from the concept of conditioning. In classical conditioning, a neutral induced stimulus changes the response over time with the frequency of inducement. Lucid dreaming devices that are available in the market tend to use the same principle. A Kick-starter project called Instadreamer[6] is a band that vibrates in the daytime, conditioning the brain to wakefulness, offering reality checks, and then tracks the REM cycles of sleep to do the same whilst dreaming, carefully manipulating the brain into thinking that it has woken up, triggering a lucid dream.

This forms a baseline technique which is used in behavioral studies to determine variations in behavioral patterns. The totems in inception do the same for the dreamer as each object has a specific mass and scientific qualities, which could change drastically in a dream. Base-lining the totem, in reality, enables the dreamer to observe the totem in their dreams and tell the differences if they fail to identify it themselves.

Concept of limbo

In the movie, a limbo is equivalent to a coma[7], where the dreamer gets caught in the depths of a dream, forgets real memories, and becomes unable to wake up in the real world. According to the movie, limbo is achieved when a powerful sedative is used in tandem while transitioning into deeper dreams. When a person dies in an innermost dream, they often fall into limbo. When Sato dies within the dream, he falls into limbo, and Cobb, a person who previously escaped from limbo, guides him out.

an abstract image of showing how a fantastical dream realm would look like — What would limbo feel like?/ Photo by JR Korpa @ Unsplash/ See link under sources

A naturally induced coma does not last for more than four weeks[8], and the recovery is gradual. Generally, coma patients become more and more self-aware of reality until they recover fully over time. The final scene in the movie is not so different from this process. Cobb helps Sato remember his past, which enables his consciousness to wake up. Though in most comma cases, self-awareness is induced from within, Cobb uses a form of fictional justice to serve the same purpose.

Final thoughts

There are more notable scenes from the movie which could be scientifically analyzed for validation. But there’s a lot more than science going on in inception. It’s packed with hidden meanings, clues, and paradoxes that we could still pick up even while watching it for the umpteenth time.

“Dreams feel real when we are in them, it's only when we wake up we realize that something was actually strange.” —Christopher Nolan, Inception.

In a speech[9] at Princeton University, Christopher Nolan stated that the most frequent question he receives from the audience is about the ‘spinning top’ in the final scene of Inception. Does it fall or not? This tiny bit of detail makes people scratch their heads. Here, the movie draws a subjective conclusion from us, and we must decide if the movie was a dream all along, or if Cobb had returned to reality. But this uncertainty is what Nolan tries to stress. He tells us that reality is as fascinating as dreams. People often forget this and allocate more time for dreams. And at the end of the day, by ending the movie abruptly, people are left wondering how related dreams and reality are. Inception may not be the most scientifically accurate movie, but it has some of the coolest concepts and visuals which rank it high amongst some of the greatest Sci-Fi movies ever produced.