I first want to say that I love this film. It is fun to think about dreams in such a creative way. Inception portrays ideas about the unconscious mind and the lost unconscious. It also has many themes on layers of dreams and time seeming slower in deeper layers of dreams. There are a number of themes regarding dreams and trauma in Inception.
I hope the information I provide in this article does not make dreaming seem less “sexy” or intriguing than portrayed in Inception. Much of the way dreams are portrayed in the film is for literary and visual effect. It shows lucid dreams and many aspects common to dreams, but dreams that are often more intense than what might be considered sweet dreams.
Some of the things I discuss here may be “mild spoilers”, but I won’t summarize the plot of the film in much detail. If you haven’t seen it, it is definitely intriguing and you might find it worth seeing.
Click to watch Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio
The Run Down on Inception
The filmmaker, Christopher Nolan, paints an amazing and dynamic world of dreams. It’s a world in which humans have discovered the ability to “share dreams”. This allows anyone to enter your dreams if they can catch you during a sleep state or kidnap you and induce sleep.
Inside a dream, people can extract the information you have in memory. There are also representations in your dreams of those who are important to you or who represent your struggles. In one case, there is the representation of a significant other. These representations often fight back against attempts to steal knowledge, but they can also provide that knowledge.
As the film progresses, the characters attempt to do something new: implant or incept an idea into someone else.
The Uncounscious Mind and Dreams in Inception
The film is influenced by Freud’s theory of the mind and dream theory that developed from his theory. Part of Freud’s theory states that there is information deep in your mind. It can be difficult to access that information from conscious thought. This is especially true if the information is part of a deep emotional struggle that is difficult to experience.
In the film, extracting this deep-seated knowledge must happen within a dream state. It also must occur discretely so as to not trigger or frustrate the mind. Such frustration leads the mind to shut down and prevent information from being accessed.
Real Life Presence of the Unconscious Mind
The idea of the unconscious (sometimes referred to as the “id”) is really intriguing. This idea has helped to lure many starry-eyed students to want to study psychology in the first place (myself included!).
Interestingly, there has never been any research evidence to support the existence of an unconscious mind. This is due, in part, to the fact that it is hard to study. How can you observe or measure something that is speculated to be some deep internal state or entity? And where does it physically reside? In the brain? In the heart? In the gut?
Throughout the history of psychology and mental health, we have found that many things that contribute to difficulties or struggles in our lives can be accessed at a conscious level (sometimes with a mild to moderate degree of effort).
For example, therapists or counselors can help uncover deeply held negative beliefs we have about ourselves within days, weeks, or months. Needing to access deeper layers of dreaming (“going deeper into the unconscious”) has not been found to be necessary.
Accuracy of Dreams in Inception
The film is accurate in its portrayal of the strange quality of dreams. In fact, dreams often appear strange. Strange dreaming is especially possible in times of stress or unusual circumstances. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people reported stranger and more vivid dreams.
Strange dreams are likely due to a more recently discovered phenomena that dreaming helps our brain organize and process information about everyday or even stressful experiences. Vivid dreams may be your brain attempting to make sense of events that are difficult to understand. For example, those that may be stressful or that we do not usually experience.
This same concept explains why people may have nightmares in response to high stress or a traumatic event.
We can’t extract knowledge from a deep unconscious reservoir. But researchers do believe that dreams allow the brain to process or organize information from our day that we may not pay attention to explicitly. This helps us make sense of things in our world and even cope with difficult situations or stressors, even if we do not notice this assistance from dreams.
Accuracy of Coping in Inception
In terms of coping, Inception portrays the idea that we, as humans, lock away deep-seated conflicts. Our minds can even get restless or aggressive if an outside source attempts to access that information. This idea of unconscious struggles with dreams and trauma in Inception seems to be based on ideas by Breuer and Freud (1895) about the nature of trauma or “hysteria”.
According to current research, the content of dreams may or may not signal deep-seated struggles or beliefs about ourselves. Sometimes dreams can reflect how we analyze or interpret current situations that occur.
For example, if we may believe that a social situation is difficult to navigate, themes related to this may be present in our dreams. This helps our brain organize and understand information related to the situation and generate possible solutions. Again, we may not notice the effects of this “brain work” in our waking lives. But evidence suggests dreaming does help us better understand and navigate many situations throughout our day.
Trauma Depiction in Inception
Inception does show accuracies in its depiction of trauma experienced by Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Dominick “Dom” Cobb. It is difficult to know which diagnosis Cobb meets the criteria for. A mental health professional would need more information to give a diagnosis. But he shows some symptoms of both posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and prolonged grief disorder (aka “complicated grief”).
Check out of video post on PTSD if you have an interest and want to learn more about PTSD. Or see our video post on grief and prolonged grief disorder.
In terms of trauma, Cobb recounts the traumatic way in which he loses his wife. The viewer is then exposed to Cobb’s self-blame, guilt, and difficulty forgiving himself for what happened. The idea of him being able to “go home” may actually be a metaphor for being able to forgive himself.
Blaming himself for the way he lost his wife appears to contribute to his continued struggle and difficulty letting her go. Research has increasingly found that self-blame and guilt/shame can prolong traumatic stress and keep people in a cycle of PTSD symptoms (e.g., traumatic memories continually intruding, having nightmares or difficult reminders during dreams, etc).
Trauma Treatments
Specific treatments have been developed to explore and challenge these beliefs. These treatments may be used when an individual has a lot of negative beliefs about their role in a traumatic event. Cognitive processing therapy, or CPT, is one of those treatments.
The more direct approach CPT provides is shown to be highly effective. This is compared to sifting through the content of one’s dreams and their meaning. Research findings show that this and a few other direct approaches result in less distressing dreams and memories of the event.
Summary of the accuracy of dreams and trauma in Inception
Overall, there are a couple of major aspects of Inception that research does not support. Many of them are very interesting and intriguing ideas though. Despite this, there are many aspects of dreams and trauma in Inception that are consistent with what scientific research has found. Either way, this is a really intriguing film!
If you have an interest in learning more about dreams, check out our post on dreams. Or read this great book with the latest findings on dreams and dreaming. If you haven’t seen Inception or it’s been a while and you are ready for another viewing, check it out here!
