One day he had a dream that he has become butterfly. He woke up restlessly. His friends laughed and suggested,
"That was just a dream, forget it".
He was serious. He murmured:
"Who knows if I am a butterfly in reality, and being human is only just a dream..."
[A Chinese Story (Courtesy: Jay Vasavada from "Anavrut")]
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Dream... A world formed in our mind which might be the manifestation of our past memory, existing situations, future life or anything real/unreal. Dreams might be the projections of what we have already experienced or what we are going to. We all experience dreams in a different manner. I.e. A person who is mostly kind of visual, he will see things/events occurring. An Auditory may hear some music/sound. Kinesthetic people will mostly feel them. A personal way of overall experience may be the accumulation of different proportions of above types of styles. We all dream. If someone says he never dreams, it means he does not want to notice them due to any complex like, he may had a nightmare in childhood, so he might be given advice just to forget/to ignore them. Dreams affect the real world, which is true. But dreams are also affected by the real world stimulus like if it is raining outside, somebody may experience snow fall or swimming in a dream. If somebody falls down from bed in reality, he might experience the dream of like falling into valley or like diving into an ocean. As dreams also show future events, in a deep inside, they may just manifest reality (might be a future reality) with Movie-like, fast and dynamic script in a strange manner. Those are dreams only which encourage a mankind to expand horizons. In the Stone Age, man must have imagined the small roof to be sheltered in a heavy rain before constructing luxurious sky-scrappers He must have imagined the small slow rolling wheel before he runs at 200 mph with Ferrari. Before building marvelous TITANIC, he must have imagined small, light wooden boat to cross the river. He must have observed that heat makes food soft and tasty before preparing delicious dishes in electric oven. He must have thought of the small 2-seater plane before constructing gigantic Airbus A380. From an outstanding sculptor to a brilliant architect, from a great painter to a successful film director, from a local entrepreneur to a leading Industrialist, even from a 4th standard student to a genius scientist; all knowingly/unknowingly responds to their ideas and redefines the revolution. We have progressed from gypsy life of the wild animal to highly luxurious and well-mannered social animal. Today, we are preparing to conquer Mars. He is challenging creation power of God by trying to recreate himself (clone). Just look around, observe number of things. Are they created by God himself? No. Most of all of them are man-made. They are originally generated in the form of an idea in human mind and then transformed into an imagination as a dream and then as a real invention/object. The seed of bloomed tree of all inventions/events/crisis (even whole world what are able to see now, is just the manifestation of): Idea. But... How do we dream? Through mind. Mind, which physically does not exist but it has been (and going to be) the cause of each physical effect/event in the real world. Mind accesses the dream and makes us experience the movie of dream depending upon individual experiencing style (Visual, auditory or Kinesthetic). Then how we are able to experience dreams? ... By inner senses. Generally, It is believed that we have only 6 senses (5 outer senses + intuition, the sixth sense). There are 5 more internal senses, which function same as 5 external senses (Touch, Smell, Listen, Watch, Taste), called inner senses. For example, during sleep, our eyes are closed. But still we see dreams through our inner sense of eye. Sometimes we hear sound/music in a dream even if it is not being played in real world. That's because of our inner sense of Listening. Sometimes we smell the fragrance through our inner sense of Smell, even if the cause of that fragrance is not physically present at that time. That’s because our mind has stored all the information of the object (how does it look, smell, taste) from some past experience. Usually, when person is dreaming, at that time he is not aware that he is dreaming. So at that state, mind simply works as a receiver. But in a conscious dreaming, which is also called lucid dreaming; mind can also work as a transmitter or as an extractor. In a deep lucid dreaming, we can control ours’ as well as others’ mind. There is no bound/limit of time in dreams i.e. 10 minutes of a real world can be stretched to an hour in dream world. Dreams of night sleep may show the events occurring in the mid-day light. Our mind switches between dream and reality so fast and so smoothly that, sometimes it becomes difficult to draw a line between a reality and a dream, while dreaming. But what happens if dream world is misunderstood as a reality...? To just imagine it , just have a amazing journey on the most thrilling and the smartest cinematic ride of this century in a psychological genre, “Inception”...
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Christopher Nolan adapted the idea of lucid dreaming and created one of the smartest, brilliant and original puzzled sequences of drama: “Inception”. He is best when it comes to psychological thrillers. He usually considers one system as a centre (memory system in Memento, social crime & Law system in Batman series, and magic system in The prestige) and shows dual-perspective of the system and open-ended clash between the two. (Short term memory loss but with the persistent memory of revenge as in Memento, the most brilliant and cult cinematic portrayal of the eternal clash between : good and evil as in The Dark Knight and Complexity of some good magic tricks lies in their simplicity as in The Prestige) and leads to the thought-provoking climax. In which, audience do not leave cinema hall with 100% happy or 100% sad experience but comes out with thrilled, amazed but bitter experience of reality with some open-ended questions. This time, He has come with the core spellbound topic: Dreams. Movie revolves around Cobb (one of most experimentalist actors in a recent time, Leonardo Dicaprio) who has mastered the art of extracting ideas from people’s mind. But he has one deep rooted complex which he can’t share with anyone. He is charged with allegation of (his wife) Mal’s murder (Marion Cotillard, looks as gorgeous as Venus). As a result, he is extradited from his country. To reach back to his children, he is assigned one last difficult job of planting an idea: inception. For the task, following roles are set:
The point-man: Executes the script of dream.
The architect: Designs and builds the architecture of a dream.
The forger: Forges the person's identity based on his personal information.
The chemist: Prepares the chemical compounds to go deeper and for being stable in the State.
Cobb is an immensely capable architect. But he has guilt, rooted deeply in his mind that he is the cause of Mal's death. Cobb and Mal were studying and venturing the dream world together. They have spent number of years together in dream world (means few hours/days in real world). Mal misses the line between dream and reality. She starts believing that their dream world is their reality. So Cobb decides to bring her back into reality. He knows Inception is possible because he has planted the idea: “We live in a dream world, we need to get back to our real world.” into her mind to bring her back into reality. But this simple idea stuck so hard in her mind that, even after she came back to reality she continued to believe that “We live in a dream, we need to get back to reality.” which eventually leads her to death as you have to kill yourself to wake yourself up from dream. So Cobb is so guilty that, his projections of Mal become his biggest antagonist. Actually he does not struggle with Mal but struggles with his own guilt. Awesome!!! [Mostly people get stuck /fail/suffer not because of external stimulus but just due to their own mental blockages/garbage (guilt, inferiority, lust etc.)]. So he does not want to know each specific location information otherwise his wife's projections would know it and he would not be able to proceed. That is why he can no longer work as the architect because he needs to have specific details of each location. So he hires another architect.
As they use chemicals to go deeper into the dream level, if they get killed then they may not come back to reality but may get trapped into “Limbo”, a state where person loses his awareness that he is dreaming and effect of aging starts as he has completely lost connection with reality. He stays there until some external alarm does not remind him. Rest of the story is how he plants the idea into subject's mind in a dream within a dream within a dream by fighting to all the obstacles of Mal's projections. That's quite dramatic. The best thing which sets the benchmark on Nolan’s brilliant capability to show dual-perception theme is: “Inception “causes his wife's death, “Inception” forces his extradition. “Inception” forces him to stay away from his children. But at last, “Inception” only helps him to get back to his children and his country. Bravo!!! Again Nolan has completed a circle. If we remove all the wrappers of thrill, drama, suspense and action then deeply, Inception is nothing but a fresh, soft, beautiful and heart-touching love story. In which, Hero becomes skilled architect and the extractor while venturing the new world with his love. He learns Inception only to save his love. He is able to go deeper into a dream because he has created a beautiful dream world along with his love in which they happily live for decades. He creates and visits number of new dreams but locks all the moments that he has spent with his wife, in his own dream bubble. He knows his wife is dead but still he keeps her alive in his dreams. He cannot imagine a dream without his love, so everywhere he wants to see Mal as a projection.
DESSERT:
“A good creator always tries to perceive his creation from two angles: from an audience (user) view and from a creator(owner) view. If he is satisfied and enjoyed in both ways then it becomes a cult masterpiece, the great manifestation: INCEPTION...”
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