There was the dark animus who had harassed me since I was ten.
In my nightmares this faceless man chased me and threatened me and insisted I didn’t look at him.
I thought, as most would do at 10, that he was my bogeyman and it certainly didn’t occur to me that he was a psychological complex and/or an archetype.
From the blog La Belette Rouge:
One of the wonderful aspects of Inception is that it takes dreams seriously, enough so that they provide the main architecture of the film. It also very intellectually complex, asking for the viewer to think on many levels about the nature of reality.
Unfortunately, director Chris Nolan filled the movie with too many chase scenes, explosions, gun battles. For about ten minutes during the film (during the action sequence in the fortress in the snow, I thought I was watching a James Bond movie.
The dream scenes also were just to much like reality (compare this to Dali’s dream sequence in Hitchcock’s Spellbound) at times to be believable as dreams; Nolin is confusing dreams and “reality”.
In spite of the above caveats, this film is well worth watching, brilliantly conceived, a movie to puzzle over and talk about, a movie to remember.
INCEPTION: Art, Dream and Reality
A cinematic meditation on the elusive nature of reality.
August 1, 2010
Dr. Stephen Diamond
Excerpt
Inception pays respect to the powerful reality of dreams. In the film, the main infiltrators of the dreamworld (along with the audience) tend to become so confused between outer and inner reality, dreaming and waking, that one of the only means they have of distinguishing between the two is by carrying with them a “totem”: something they can use to tell them whether they are still dreaming or not. For Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, it is a tiny metal top: if it eventually slows and topples after spinning it, he is presumably awake; if it just kept on turning into perpetuity, he is still asleep. Another problem faced by the “dream team” is how not only to deeply penetrate the dreamer’s unconscious, but how to find their way back from the “underworld” to the outer world of waking reality. This is an archetypal motif found in many myths, including that of Theseus venturing into the labyrinth to meet the Minotaur.(See my previous post.) It is no coincidence that DiCaprio’s female (Ellen Page) co-star’s name is Ariadne: it was Ariadne who, after falling in love with the young Greek hero Theseus, secretly provides him with both a sword and ball of string to help him defeat the Minotaur and find his way back out of the winding, dark, maze-like labyrinth and into the light. Dreams, which Freud famously referred to as the via regia, the royal road into the unconscious, can, like the unconscious itself, be perilous places to dwell too long in, precisely due to their sometimes immensely seductive and convincing reality.
Inception pays respect to the powerful reality of dreams.
Source<
From The Asheville Jung Center
Len Cruz, M.D.
May 15, 2010
Dream:
Jung and his father are in a mosque. They find themselves kneeling and beginning to bow. Evidently, Jung’s father bows fully allowing his head to make contact with the floor. However, Jung stops within a millimeter of the floor. He will not permit himself to bow completely
Yesterday Dr. Stein suggested that in Jung’s later years Jung stated that he did not believe but he knew.
This may reflect Jung’s integration of the figure of Philemon a sort of prophet with whom he had engaged in fertile relationship for years.
According to Dr. Stein, the famous dream described above reflected Jung having outgrown a childish faith. Soul had invited Jung to offer obedience to the gods, an exhortation he refused. He argues with this anima figure and refuses to offer unqualified, blind obedience. Instead, Jung proposed that if the gods wanted him to obey they must do something for him.
Dr. Stein suggested that this is evidence of Jung’s mature faith, a fully flowering faith founded upon knowing and not believing.
At an earlier point in the conference Dr. Stein explained that Jung did not oppose faith but that the German word to which he objected might be better translated as belief, the experience of believing in something because you have been told to do so or because it has been transmitted to you. Belief, in this context, is the untested, un-lived version of knowing. (more)
