Inception Wake Up
Gano Richardson
I distinctly remember a scene in Inception when Cobb is testing Yusuf's custom made super sedative. He then abruptly wakes up and goes to the bathroom where he proceeds to splash his face with water and spin his totem. However, before the top can reveal whether he is in a dream or not, it is interrupted and knocked off the counter. Cobb then sees Mal in the reflection of the mirror. Surely Nolan made the scene in order to help the audience understand how Cobb is starting to have trouble differentiating what's real from what isn't. But is there any definitive evidence to prove that the rest of the movie is not just part of a sedated dream he never escaped?
In order for this theory to make sense, we need to make a number of fundamental assumptions. Since we see Cobb using the top in the earlier scene with Ariadne (it topples) we have to assume that this is reality. Shortly after he meets her, she takes him into a dream world of her making, with highly complex architecture and filled with imagery from her imagination, not his.
In the scene you've mentioned, he does indeed fail to use his totem correctly and we could, theoretically still be within his dream. The question then is "whose dream is he dreaming?". If the remainder of the film is Cobb's own dream then that beggars the question of who is architecting everything for him.
Are we genuinely to believe that Cobb has sufficient imagination to independently control the actions of a dozen actors, several of whom are working at cross-purposes, at differing speeds within multiple layers of the dream world? After Cobb goes to Limbo, is he still controlling the actors on the higher levels, all of whom are moving thousands of times faster that he is?
When the team gets in the first level, they find out that Fischer has a militarized subconscious. After they freak out, and argue about it, they also find out that they can't die, otherwise they'd get stuck in limbo.
So, when Eames says that he won't go further, Cobb states that, since the first level sedative will last a week they would be killed. They needed to go on to the next levels as fast as possible, so the combined multi-level kick would make them wake up.
Ariadne: ...is ten years! Who would wanna be stuck in a dream for ten years?
Yusuf: Depends on the dream.
Arthur: So, once we've made the plant, how do we go out? Hope you have something more elegant in mind than shooting me in the head?
Cobb: A kick.
...
Arthur: Are we going to feel a kick with this kind of sedation?
Yusuf: Well, that's the clever part. I customize the sedative to leave inner ear function unimpaired. That way, however deep the sleep, the sleeper still feels falling, or tipping.
COBB: We need you there to tailor compounds to our particular requirements.
YUSUF: Which are?
COBB: Great depth.
YUSUF: A dream within a dream? Two levels?
COBB: Three.
Note that in the original shooting script, the suggestion is that they could somehow survive inside Fischer's dream for "a couple of days" then use a kick to completely exit the dream. In the film, this whole sequence was much compressed:
As to how they could have survived that long, it seems that the dreamer's subconscious only becomes hostile when the participant makes changes. By passively accepting the world of the dream, you could avoid an attack indefinitely:
Later on when everyone rides up using the kicks, they use oxygen masks and exit the drowning van. Here they leave Cobb to drown, this leads to Cobb's death (if Mal's stabbing doesn't). I would go with the drowning in the van for Cobb's death as that would explain the many years of time lapse between him and Saito.
You ask a difficult question! A lot of people have different opinions about this, and as the film continually skirts the line between awake and asleep, there is a lot of ambiguity that is left for the viewer to resolve.
The best clues to the logic of Inception can probably be derived from the interview between Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, which can be found in the book Inception: The Shooting Script (Insight Editions - you can read it in part at the link to Google Books).
Christopher recalls being in college, when he would get up after a couple of hours of sleep, go have breakfast, and then come back and sleep some more. This after-breakfast sleep was different - he calls it active dreaming (also known as lucid dreaming) - when you realize you are dreaming and take control of the dream. This got him interested in the "infinite potential of the human mind." He talks about how in dreams we create whole worlds and we think we are having conversations with people, but we are actually putting the words in the other person's mouth.
Inception ...is about a more everyday experience of dreaming...It doesn't question an actual reality. It's just saying, "Okay, we all dream every night. What if you could share your dream with someone else?" And it becomes an alternate reality simply because the dream becomes a form of communication - just like using a telephone or going online. I wanted it, then, to have a rule set, a set of reasons that you could graph for why it's not chaos and anarchy - for why it has to be order, and why you need architects and an architectural brain to create the world of the dream for the subject to enter.
First of all, you have to keep in mind that the movie repeatedly plays with and takes advantage from the fact that in dreams you don't always know how things happen. The movie doesn't have to provide any explanation of how someone gets to a certain place or how something just appears out of nothing as there is none. In the same way it is not really relevant how Cobb got there, he just did.
Cobb: Let me ask you a question. You never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on...So how did we end up here?
Ariadne: Well, we just came from the...
Cobb: Think about it, Ariadne. How did you get here? Where are you right now?
Of course I don't say we're not supposed to expect a reasonable and consistent story, but by employing the whole metaphor-filled dream world the movie gives itself the freedom to leave out certain connective details in the story because they might just not have happened in a clear way or one that the persons involved were entirely aware of. This can also be seen in the fact that Saito is a significantly older man than Cobb at the end, while still entering limbo after Cobb did (since he died on level 3 after Cobb and Ariadne went down there to search Fischer). So we see that time and space doesn't work entirely continuous or consistent for the different people trapped in there.
What we can see from the movie, though, is that it was a bit of a long time and travel to get there even for Cobb (albeit maybe not as long a time as it was for Saito). This is evident in Cobb's rather weary appearance and especially in his extremely dull and glass-eyed gaze during his conversation with the old Saito and his slighty hesitant and absent way of answering questions. While he has obviously come to remind Saito of "something he once knew", we see that Cobb has himself difficulties to not forget it. He has obviously passed enough time in limbo to slightly cloud his judgement of reality, even if not shattering it.
So why the ocean? Well, Saito's own built limbo reality is a fortess on an island (or at the coast at least), so the beach is a natural place to enter this realm. You can ask the same question of why Cobb and Ariadne wake up at the beach when they could as well wake up right in front of Mal's apartment building. We see that the physical picture of limbo is basically a vast ocean with landmasses constructed and shaped by the people having been there, be this Cobb's and Mal's city or Saito's residence. This fits well to what limbo actually is:
This fits naturally to an infinite ocean full of (infinitely far away) islands of the mind stuff of its residents. This ocean analogy might be an overly simplified/metaphorical picture of limbo, but that's how those dreams work in the end. The mind searches for natural and intuitive ways to represent stuff in a physical way, and in the case of limbo this means islands in an ocean that are entered by waking up at the beach, like a castaway from a long lost reality.
But how the ocean? Did Cobb swim there? Did he build a raft? Did he jump from the building in Mal's shattering city and fly there? We just don't know, but even more than that, we aren't even supposed to know nor to speculate about it, since a reasonable physical explanation is likely not existing due to the discontinuous nature of space and time in the dream world and limbo in particular. All we're supposed to know is, that Cobb somehow finally found Saito's world inside the (infinite) limbo after a somewhat long and exhausting "journey". (And that information is sufficient for the story.)
Was the fourth level not limbo after all or not the limbo Saito was in, and did Cobb go another level deeper to get to Saito's? This could explain Cobb getting in random surroundings if limbo had much changed because of Saito's long presence there.
That is an interesting thinking. The movie itself states two possibilities for getting (stuck) in Limbo: (1) Being killed while under sedatives, and (2) the way Mal and Cobb previously got in, but we do not exactly know how they did except from going deeper. On the other hand, the movie certainly presents the concept that reaching a deeper level is intentional and that reaching limbo is not or is by accident. So wether Cobb and Ariadne are in the fourth level or in Limbo remains unclear.
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