"Am I a man dreaming I'm a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I'm a man?" Chuang Tzu asked 2,300 years ago. In Christopher Nolan's stylish sleep thriller "Inception" he answers we're both -- butterfly and man.
Yet the science behind Inception is more surreal than the film, whose lovingly layered plot still underplays the wonderfully weird wildness of dreams. So, dream thief Mr. Cobb, what about your job is science fiction and what's science?
(Spoiler alert: plot elements are revealed)
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BrunoChopps said on 21 Wednesday 2010 pm31 11:17 pm: I don't care about the facts, they don't change my opinion that this is the greatest movie in many years. I confess that I "suffer" from cinephilia, but this movie is amazing on so many levels. No pun intended. Its 10 out of 10. Two thumbs up. "Avatar" sucked, yet it'll still end up make more in the box office than "Inception". People have crap taste in movies, music and the arts in general. |
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Your comment did not make any sense to me. Could you please explain what you meant?
If this movie is that good, I'll be buying a dozen of the DVD's....8
I do admittedly have very little knowledge of the subject. But I will say this: A few months back I woke up from a dream that was entirely in French. I don't speak French, though I had a class and watched early French films for a classics course I had a few years ago. It was odd because the words I wrote down (I'm a writer so I have ideas at the most peculiar time) were actually perfectly conjugated and made sense in the context of the conversation. Yeah, it sounds far-fetched. I suffer from horrible short-term memory but somehow it seemed as if my dream-state had a much more accurate and organized thoughts. (I also have A.D.H.D.) It makes me wonder if there is some type of external aspect rather than chemical that affects me.
The main precept of the story is that a living being that goes back in time will revert to what its evolutionary ancestors were, so as not to interfere with the time-line, aka the "butterfly effect". Thus, one of us homo-sapiens that goes back sufficiently far in time would become a lemur, or whatever else would be appropriate for that point in time, but nothing more advanced than the most advanced life form in the evolutionary tree for homo-sapiens. Constraints on the physical form do not absolutely apply to the consciousness. Thus, the lemur would lose the ability to think in words, but could still appreciate the wonder of what it was experiencing. Congruently, if a descendant of homo-sapiens came back to our time, it would find itself limited to the physical capabilities of a human, but might retain some memories from the time line. (It is only a work of fiction.)
“Just like in science fiction movies, we wake up each morning with different memories than the person who went to sleep.” The problem with differing memories is that the person selectively filters experience and creates an individual memory that is decidedly different from the actual input. Direct electrical stim of brains in the 60s proved this subtle fact.
To me the oddest thing about dreaming is that it is so hard to remember dreams. Within my dream I'll tell myself to remember it, and when I wake up I do. But within a half hour or so of waking, I usually can't remember anything but the sparest details.