7/31/2019 Inception: Dreams, Waking, and Epistemology

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I n c e p t io n : D r e a m s , W a k in g, a n d E p i s t em o lo g y

 by S ET H MI LL ER on JULY 18, 2010

The movie Inception is the best “question reality” movie since the Matrix (ultimately  the Matrix is better, in my opinion),

and it raises many fascinating questions having to do with the differences between the two primary states of consciousness

available to humans today: waking and dreaming.

This issue has been around for about as long

as recorded history, and has formed a central

piece of some very detailed philosophical

considerations. It shows up in the 4th

Century B.C.E. in the famous Taoist

Zuangzi’s “butterfly dream”:

“Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a

 butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy 

 with himself and doing as he pleased. He

didn’t know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he

 woke up and there he was, solid and

unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn’t know if 

he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a

 butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was

Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called

the Transformation of Things.”

It also forms a central part of Indian philosophy, especially  advaita vedanta, which explores cosmological questions through

the exploration of the nature of the different states of consciousness that the human being is capable of. As the movie

Inception points out, it is far more difficult to determine whether we are waking or dreaming than it may at first appear.

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Of course Inception is a movie, and as such remains beholden more to plot development than fidelity to current dream

studies. I comment Christopher Nolan (the director) for taking up this topic and developing it in ways that are terrifically 

engaging and not too ‘dumbed-down’. As the lengthy history of the topic implicitly indicates, understanding dreams and

their relation to waking life is no easy task, so any popular treatment that gets people interested and questioning gets kudos

from me. Personally, I get the biggest kick from movies which take up topics related to consciousness in ways that maintain a

high degree of fidelity to esoteric principles, and which don’t abandon them for the sake of simplicity or storytelling for itsown sake, or which at least achieve a healthy balance. Inception gets close to walking this line, but falls short in some key 

areas.

In regards to dreaming and waking, the most fascinating issue within the movie is epistemological: the question of how we

know whether we are awake or dreaming. In the movie, a “totem” is utilized, which is a physical device that exhibits some

particular behavior in accordance with the accepted (waking) laws of physics. Supposedly in a dream, the object will behave

differently, thus signaling to the dreamer that he or she is dreaming. (For all of you who are familiar with lucid dreaming, I’ll

get there later on, and am speaking now only about “regular” dreams.)

There are a few things to point out here. The first is that there is something very correct about the assumption underlyingthis technique, which we can sum up as: there is a certain quality to the way perceived objects behave in waking reality. This

quality could quite appropriately be called “inertia”, which is to say that there is a certain quality of stubbornness in our

perceiving. This inertia shows up most clearly in regards, specifically, to perceptions which rely on very simple and limited

physical constraints. All the “totems” in Inception rely upon this: the way, for example, gravity interacts with a particular

object, like a spinning top, a loaded dice, or a chess piece weighted off-center. The common utilization of the physical force

of gravity provides a perfect metaphorical quality of this kind of consciousness: it is a consciousness that tends to “fall” into

“facts” when perception happens.

In other words, day-waking consciousness is very  Earthy ; we meet with perceptions which have their own stubborn nature,

despite our moods, our desires, or our intentions. The loaded dice will always statistically perform in the same manner over

time; the spinning top will always eventually fall after about a certain length of time for a given initial spin rate.

Think back to your own dreams, for example. How often do

 you have dreams in which there are as many clearly readable

(visible) words as there are on even a single page of a

paperback book? In fact, you may not be able to remember a

dream that included visual words at all, or more likely if 

 visual words are in your dream, there are one or two, or perhaps a phrase at most. Additionally, if in a dream you “know”

there are words on a page, for example, you may not be able to read those words, even if you are staring right at them. So,

one quick test to see if you are awake is to find some text; if you can easily read it multiple times and it doesn’t change, you

are almost certainly awake.

This points to a quality of waking consciousness that is quite different from dreaming: it is chock-full of these sorts of 

“inertial facts of perception”. Indeed, the brain, in order to allow us to perceive, is built in such a way as to both rely upon

these types of inertial facts, precisely so that it can keep them from becoming conscious. This allows the brain to free itself 

from the need to process everything as if for the first time; it makes BIG assumptions about what we perceive in order to get

on with other processes. The key for waking consciousness is that if we decide to pay attention to a given fact, it exhibits a

certain quality of stubbornness.

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Inception did not (in my estimation) properly make this distinction: it showed the dream world as equally detailed as the

 waking world. But dreams simply don’t have the level of detail that is “stubbornly” available to waking consciousness. As

anyone who can remember a dream can probably see for themselves, however, in a dream there is only as much detail as is…

needed. In a dream there is generally only detail where our dream-attention is; the absence of detail elsewhere is ignored,

and we don’t question whether or not such detail could be there if we directed our attention to check. We may have a feeling that such detail is present, but it is very important to be able to distinguish between the feeling of the

presence of detail and the ability to actually check the individual details in a repeated manner.

Of course this raises the question:

“Couldn’t you just dream that you

checked the details repeatedly and

always found them consistent?” Apart

from the unavoidable and

fascinating deep philosophical nature of 

this maneuver, the practical answer is:

not really. Why? Because the quality of 

the consciousness of the two types of 

checking (waking and dreaming) is

different, and it is a quality that is

experienced from within during the

checking, not inferred after the fact on

the basis of its “results”. In other words

the results of the experience of checking

is less important than the quality of 

consciousness in which the checking is

carried out in the first place.

This is a very important point to get across: there is a difference between the content of dream consciousness and the quality 

of dream consciousness. This is equally true of waking consciousness: the content and quality can be distinguished. The

question raised in the movie that was supposed to help a dreamer realize they were dreaming appropriately (but only 

implicitly) utilized this difference. The question was “How did I get here?” (wherever “here” is in the dream).

Now first of all this is not a question that is usually asked from within the dream, but only upon waking, by consulting our

memory of the dream. As Inception rightly points out, we generally never can trace a dream to a “beginning”: they always

seem to start “in the middle”. I put those phrases in quotes because the determination of what makes a beginning or a

middle is not so much a specific content of consciousness, but rather the quality of our consciousness. We have to “feel it

out”; it isn’t presented as a stark, undeniable “fact”.

In waking reality we can trace our day backward, and if we get good at it, we can do so without encountering any “gaps” that

defy explanation. Indeed, this practice may be one of the most fundamental for developing one’s spiritual capacities; in the

discipline of anthroposophy this exercise is known as the ‘daily review’, and is best practiced at the end of the day right

 before sleep. Ideally one traces one’s day all the way back into the previous mornings dreams, and through the dreams to the

silent and mysteriously full space of one’s consciousness as it was just before it started dreaming.

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Now interestingly enough, practicing the daily review can quite definitely lead to the experience of being conscious that one

is dreaming. When we awaken within a dream we notice a fundamental qualitative shift to a mode that is almost

indistinguishable from the qualities of waking consciousness. I was happy to note that Inception included a common feature

of this transition to the lucid dream: dream characters may all suddenly turn and look at the dreamer. As projections of the

dreamer’s own subconscious, this is a literal expression of the quality of becoming awake to oneself in the dream. In this

moment a loop is closed, forming a recursive cycle: the dreamer is aware that the dream characters are dream characters, i.e.parts of the dreamer; thus the dream characters place their attention on the dreamer because the dreamer is placing her

attention on herself; the subconscious projections of the dreamer follow and embody the qualitative shift in consciousness.

The possibilities of lucid dreaming were not well explored in Inception. The main character, wonderfully played by 

Leonardo DiCaprio, was put in a strange situation where he knew he was dreaming, and knew that his subconscious was

generating dream elements against his will, but was unable to respond in the way open to most lucid dreamers: conscious

control. In the movie Leonardo had to psychologically deal with the subconscious projections in a sort of “working through”

that can be circumvented by lucid dreamers, because the prime quality of lucid dreaming (apart from the simple fact of being

awake in the dream) is that the dreamer can consciously manipulate the dream world. This brings me to a discussion of the

types of dreams and their nature.

Inception did a good job of pointing out that the

content of most dreams arises through a process

of unconscious projection, whereby everything

in the dream is generated by a part of the

dreamer that is not usually open to the day-

 waking consciousness. We say it is

“subconscious”, and it has been thoroughly 

noted (most helpfully by Jung) that

subconscious projections often have a symbolic

character, sometimes even an archetypal

character. Yet the source of such symbols often

remains elusive, and not all dreams have overtly 

symbolic content.

For example, the “lowest” level of dreaming is often completely symbol-less. This type of dream is often known as a “night

terror”, and occurs most often in children. Significantly, it is very common for there to be no recollection of any dream

content whatsoever; the dreamer simply awakens in a state of panic, often with disorientation. Sometimes feelings of falling

or emptiness or almost existential dread are reported, but not “normal” types of dream sequences that might account for the

terror, such as being chased by an unknown figure. These dreams are essentially time-less and space-less, and generally 

aren’t experienced from within as having either of these qualities.

 A step up from this lowest level of dreaming is the “normal” dream that we are all familiar with. These dreams are full of 

content, often have “plots” which can be written down with some coherence upon waking, and which contain one or many 

symbols of various types. In normal dreams we are not aware that we are dreaming, and we usually experience the dream

from within qualitatively “in the present”, without consciousness of either past or future. However, these dreams unfold in

 both time and space.

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Next is the lucid dream, which, as discussed, involves awakeness of the dreamer to the fact of dreaming while in the dream.

Such dreams are often far more vivid than a normal dream. Indeed, the qualitative difference between a normal dream and

a lucid dream is essentially the same as between a normal dream and being awake normally, and if we look at the brain

activity of a lucid dreamer it is almost impossible to distinguish from waking. In a lucid dream, it is often possible for the

dreamer to control the dream to a greater or lesser extent.

 Are there any dream states “above” that of the lucid dream? Yes. We can call these “significant dreams”. Significant dreams

are as qualitatively different from lucid dreams as lucid dreams are from normal dreams. Unfortunately, while it is possible

to train to become a lucid dreamer, it is not possible to control the appearance of a significant dream. Why? The short

answer is that this is not possible because significant dreams are literally beyond the individual dreamer, and arise as a

consequence of a connection from the spiritual world to the dreamer, essentially as a “gift”. Significant dreams are very 

uncommon; we may have one or two or none in our whole life. But if we do have a significant dream, they may change our

lives, often in subtle or long-term ways. The key characteristic of a significant dream is that it actually feels like it is a gift

from our higher selves.

 Although we can’t force a significant dream, we can preparethe way for their arrival. The key is to cultivate a state in the

dream where consciousness is present to itself (as in a lucid

dream), but the dreamer relinquishes control of the dream.

 We could say that we invite significant dreams when we

maintain consciousness without content within the dream.

This is essentially a practice of listening participation in the

spiritual environment of the dream, which operates somewhat

like a question to the spiritual world: “What needs to come to

me in order that I may fulfill my karma?” The extent to which

 we ourselves fill our dream consciousness with content is the

extent to which we block the possibility for the kind of 

connection to the spiritual world which can occur in a

significant dream.

I would have liked to see a movie about dreaming which

realistically explored these different levels of dreaming.

Inception confuses the differences between the normal and

lucid dream, and confuses also the difference between waking

and dreaming in general. But I do have to say that these

confusions are probably lost on the vast majority of those who

 will see the movie, and won’t affect the viewing experience atall. Nolan created a very elaborately conceived and internally consistent set of dreaming principles that were used to great

effect, regardless of their fidelity with “real” dream experiences.

There is quite a bit more that can be said about the levels of dreaming and their nature. Stay tuned for an elaboration of the

esoteric origins of each level of dreaming and their specific connections to the different aspects of the human being in

relation to transformative work… as the saying goes, “truth is stranger than fiction”, and is also much more fascinating!