Is it possible to do what they do in inception

By the time Cobb gets home from LAX and goes to hug his children, it is implied he is free of any burdens of his past. His is not wanted for murder, he has let go of the angry shade of his wife which keeps barging into his consciousness, and he can hug his kids.

But, wait, when Cobb sees his kids for the first time in multiple years, they appear not to have aged from his memories. And that top keeps spinning long after he walks away from it. Also strange. With these two final curiosities to ponder and a whole-ass movie's worth of doubt about Cobb's reliability as a narrator coming before it, the only thing left to ponder is if the world Cobb is seeing, his home, is real.

Cobb spends the movie processing, unpacking, revisiting, and trying to figure out how to break free of his traumas. Cobb seeing his children's faces at home is not the result of release from legal pursuit, but rather the result of him allowing himself to see them after letting go of Mal. It is very possible, in this new dream and I do believe the ending is based in a dream, not reality Cobb is going to have to process his absence from his children and work through the guilt of his actions rippling into their lives.

Dreams feel real. To varying degrees, they operate by the laws of nature which govern our world while also possessing something of a surreal quality. Dreams are a time for us to process our world, our thoughts, our feelings, the day we just witnessed, and so one. Dreams are a sacred space which we cannot hope to hold onto after we wake.

We can spend precious time unpacking the meaning of dreams, pondering the messages they hold for us. Those messages and answers, whatever they seem to be, come from within us. We process our own minds and our world.

Inception is, simply put, Cobb's dream. Inception is now available to watch on Netflix. Get even more Christopher Nolan-related updates here. Image via Warner Bros. Share Share Tweet Email. Allie Gemmill Articles Published. Read Next in movies. Who Is Starfox? The final utterance happens near the end of the film, in Limbo, as Cobb finds the aging Saito. In Inception , too, everybody has their box — be it a safe, a fortified hangar surrounded by armed guards on skis, or a stop on an elevator on which no one is allowed.

Cobb defeats his regret by finally telling Mal that the two of them did grow old together in their shared dream. In other words, he fulfilled his wedding promise to her. So, is Cobb being pulled back to reality by this thought, or is he being prodded further into his dream?

That depends, perhaps, on how you view the very end of the film: At this point, Cobb seems to be finally freed of his regret and of his memory of Mal, and has been reunited with his children. The final shot seems to indicate that he may be still dreaming because his totem keeps spinning. Nolan takes the concept of lucid dreaming -- a dream in which the subject is aware that they're dreaming and can manipulate the dream -- and runs with it.

Throughout the movie, Cobb forces himself to sleep by attaching his arm to a machine that looks like a vaguely ominous reel-to-reel tape player. He retreats into his dream world to reconnect with his deceased wife, Mal, effectively putting his memories of her on repeat.

Controlling one's dreams has been possible for centuries -- Tibetean Buddhists practiced it 1, years ago; so did yogis. Nolan himself began practicing lucid dreaming and dream manipulation as a teenager and mined his own dreams to conceive "Inception. Figuring out what a sleeping person is dreaming about is possible as well. Cognitive neuroscience techniques allow researchers to view three-dimensional brain scans as they happen, and methods of monitoring the subconscious continue to advance.

Or the language centers are very active. It's not impossible that we would eventually have some technology to both manage what's going on in a dream and influence what people dream about.

What's more murky is the idea of dream-sharing -- that several people can engage in the same subconscious experience. While groups of dream sharers exist, evidence of dream sharing is more anecdotal than evidential.