But 'guilt' is not an external force . It is internal , and subject to unconscious wishes and desires. Therefore, if Cobb wanted to dream of his children's faces, he would have dreamed of their faces. If he dreamt NORMALLY sure he would dream about them. But with Dreamshare...its a whole different ...

How would the faces of his children provide "assurance of reality"? In other words, what would prevent him from dreaming of their faces? Cobb's guilt of "choosing to leave them" did not only forcefully project the evil Mal, but it also made it impossible for him to see their faces. I certainly agre...

This film goes to great lengths to establish the rules of its universe. I don't think it was Nolan's intentions of using these rules to distract us from the sort of natural intuition a few of you keep bringing up. What really matters to me is what is in the script or what Nolan actually says about ...

Jungian wrote:He learned to let it go? If you pay attention in the end, its the faces of his children which is the assurance of reality.

How would the faces of his children provide "assurance of reality"?

In other words, what would prevent him from dreaming of their faces?

atilasantos wrote:
I'm still not sure this was a deliberate choice. But who knows - pretty cool nonetheless.

Surely it had to be a deliberate choice (by either Nolan or Ledger)--that's not a very natural finger-position.

(Also, it does seem quite relevant to the Joker's characterization.)

This is trivia that we've known ever since the movie was released. One of the marks of a great film is that viewers continue to make discoveries in it--discoveries that are new to them, if not to others. If there's not already a thread about something (say, the DREAMS initials) on the first few doz...

Jungian wrote:
fine. For YOUR ego its a useless test. but for Cobb's it was to immense help. clearer?

In what way was it a help for Cobb's ego?

But Saito didn't spin it until the end of the story. (Recall that the 'old Saito in his castle' scene shown at the beginning of the movie actually took place near the end-- after the Saito Extraction Job, assembly of the team to incept Fischer, and the Incept Fischer Job.) So how would this theory ...

The IMDb thread mentioned in the OP is long gone, of course. (IMDb trims the Inception board down to about two months' worth of threads. No doubt they've nuked at least 528,491 threads by this time. )

For those who have trouble recalling dreams like myself, do you find you're better at remembering when you wake up on your own or when someone or something (alarm, etc) wakes you up? I remember having a great dream, don't even know if it was "fun", but all I remember was being astounded. Unfortunat...