Why did Cobb spin Mal's totem and put it back in her safe? Why would that make a difference whether it is spinning or not because it is locked in the safe ?

LiveFree wrote:Why did Cobb spin Mal's totem and put it back in her safe? Why would that make a difference whether it is spinning or not because it is locked in the safe ?

Because when she opens it again, she will see it spinning. Hence, she will know that she's in a dream world and will have to question her "new" reality--the reality of Limbo.

Ahh ok. And because it is an inception done on her, she will think that the idea was hers and so she then believes that reality is dream and throws herself off the building?

The spinning top in the safe was to help Mal realize that the world she was in is a dream (The safe represented Mal’s subconscious). Unfortunately, that “idea” grew and stayed with Mal even when she awoke from the dream world (Mal and Cobb getting killed by the train). She thought the real world was also a dream, so she decided to jump.

I still don't understand why Cobb can't just spin the totem for Mol once she gets back to reality, and when she sees it fall, she knows she's no longer dreaming.

I seems to me that Cobb successfully using the totem to create an inception is predicated upon Mol's understanding of the mechanism of the totem (keep spinning = dream, stop spinning = reality), and that there's no reason to believe that once Mol woke up to reality she couldn't see the top stop spinning and figure out she wasn't dreaming any more.

That has always been nagging at me. I understand that the movies intentions wasn't how I perceive it, so give me little credit, but I was under the impression that whatever the safe contained was what Mal thought of as reality...to lock it away. Almost like the safe itself was titles, "put whatever in here that is reality so you can live your dream as such". Therefore, when the top goes spinning, it would change her mind about the top and that spinning forever would mean it was reality. If she opens up the safe and the top is spinning, she'll think that if it spins forever, then it is reality and not a dream. Hmmmm. Am I making sense?

I think maybe it's because the top is in the safe (spinning? did he definitely leave it spinning), which is the place where ideas are at their most powerful, that mol can't be persuaded that a fallen top is an indicator of reality. A Spinning top in the safe is a far more powerful idea than a fallen top in the real world.

Another question - why is fisher the only one with an army of projections? Dicaprio brings mol in as a projection, the English guy is able to project the godfather independently of 'forging' him, Dicaprio's first dream with ariadne is rife with him projections, - so why aren't there five or so (presumably very well-reained) projection armies battling against Fisher's army during the whole inception caper?

safes in dreams are secrets
putting the top in there NOT spinning means she secretly believes that limbo is real.
once Cobb spun it, it meant that her secret was that she thought limbo was a dream, therefore reality was a dream because she believed it to be.

#1fan wrote:safes in dreams are secrets
putting the top in there NOT spinning means she secretly believes that limbo is real.
once Cobb spun it, it meant that her secret was that she thought limbo was a dream, therefore reality was a dream because she believed it to be.

That makes sense to me - thanks.

Yeah, the safe was her deep subconscious, and also symbolized her evaluation of if the world around her was real. The top not spinning meant the world was real. The top spinning meant it wasn't real. However, once she got back to the real world, the top was still spinning in her subconscious, and it was so deep that nothing could convince her that the world was real.