Michelle Rafferty, Publicity Assistant
It starts with a simple question: Did the totem fall? And then turns into a mind warping exercise of “who incepted who whom?” and “how much was a dream? Am I dreaming?” Christopher Nolan’s Inception has given us hypothesizing hemophilia, for the moment at least. But for some people our real, sans IMAX dreams are enough to sustain a lifetime of “what ifs.”
Dr. Rosalind Cartwright has dedicated her entire career’s work to studying sleep, and in her new book The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives she proposes a new theory on the confluence of our dreaming and waking selves. Here Cartwright reveals the scientific truths behind Inception and why, once we resolve Leo’s unconscious self, we should start tending to our own.
1.) In Inception, Ellen Page plays a “dream architect.” Can we actually influence what people dream about?
That answer is: A little. If I drip water on you while you are in REM sleep (when most dreaming happens), you may tell me you dreamt it was raining. You would already have a dream story of your own creation going on but the water can be added to that dream as “Suddenly as I was trying to escape from this guy it started raining.” If I play a tape with the name of the love of your life over and over, you may begin to dream of that person. But what you dream of that person is what your unconscious needs to express about them. Dreams have an imperative of their own and resist our meddling.
2.) In the film, dream death automatically brings the dreamer back to consciousness. I’ve heard that we always have to wake up before that moment of death in a dream. Is that true, can we not “die” in our dreams?
Death is not a common theme in dreams—unless you are elderly or very ill when death is a topic on your waking mind—and we do not often dream our death occurs even when we are falling from a height. We typically wake ourselves up before we hit the ground because our unconscious memory bank has no helpful images stored to handle the emotion in the dream. But others do dream of their own funeral or see themselves dead in the hospital. These dreams are rehearsals in fantasy for what is to come.
3.) The Inception crew can only escape from a multi-layered dream (dream within a dream, within a dream…) through a carefully engineered “kick” or that leg jerk that wakes us up when we are dream free falling. Why is the “kick” so common an experience in sleep?
This is very common especially as we are falling asleep and the muscles relax. We often experience the need to resist that falling sensation and “save ourselves” by abruptly tightening the muscles again. This is called the hypnic jerk. It is a normal response and benign, except that we have to start over to fall asleep again and another hypnic jerk may happen again.
4.) Through a special machine the crew can enter one subject’s unconscious together. Is this something that people actually think could be possible? Has there ever been any record of people sharing dreams?
Very occasionally identical twins who share so much common experience will have dreams that are very similar. Also people who share their waking experiences and tell each other about how they feel about it will have similar dreams on the same night. The next day one can finish the dream story the other is telling because they have had the same dream. None of this is magic or even science. We can know WHEN y