I was super lucky to have Couch Surfing Ori watch my dog Webber while away on my 6 week road trip. Never had Webber and I been apart for that long and towards the end of the trip I was starting to feel some separation anxiety.
Before Ori took off north to San Francisco to experience his next couch, Lana and I decided to take him to go see the movie Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio. Personally, I had no idea what the movie was about. No clue at all.
I kept making jokes about the movie being about making babies, but Lana quickly informed me that I was thinking of conception, not inception. O yeah. That’s right. So what does inception mean? Dictionary.com says inception means…
in·cep·tion [in-sep-shuhn]
–noun
1. beginning; start; commencement.
2. British .
a. the act of graduating or earning a university degree, usually a master’s or doctor’s degree, esp. at Cambridge University.
b. the graduation ceremony; commencement.
Oh well that sounds pretty lame. I was more excited to see Leo get freak nasty with some hot blonds. Lana tried to read me the synopsis of the flick but I wasn’t interested in listening. I like to see movies without any idea of what is going on so I don’t constantly play Mr. Spoiler to myself during the film.
The movie was really intense. So intense that we didn’t see a single person get out of their seat to use the rest room or to go stock up on greasy popcorn at any point in the movie. Nobody wanted to miss a single scene. Considering the movie was about 2 1/2 hours, that’s some serious bladder control. Or, people were just peeing in their Dasani water bottles. I’m not sure which.
I’m not going to go into many specifics about the movie because I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. What I will say is that the movie spends most of it’s time in the dream world. This fascinated me because as a young man I used to experiment with lucid dreaming for quite some time. Every morning I would set my alarm for 6:00 am and hit the snooze button about 30 times so I could re-enter dreams over and over again.
I got to the point where I could gain consciousness in my dreams, but would usually be too overwhelmed with excitement once I realized this and would instantly wake up. I couldn’t keep my cool in a lucid state for very long.
The excitement of being able to manipulate your dreams and to travel to specific places the mind wanted to go was super appealing to me at the time. Don’t even get me started about trying to do astral projection. That’s a whole different episode in itself.
Anyhow, a buddy and I decided we would try to meet each other in our dreams each night. That way, if we ran into each other it would be a cue for each of us to know that we were dreaming and hopefully it would trigger our brain to recognize that we were in a dream together. It never worked, but we kept at it for some time. I also kept a dream journal of every dream I could remember. The process of writing down the dreams the moment you wake up definitely helps you to have better recall of each dream.
The truth is, my dream life was becoming more exciting than my real world life. Sometimes I would sleep 14 hours a day because it was so intense. My REM’s must of been on hyper-drive.
Anyhow, back to Inception.
Overall I give Inception a 9 out of 10 rating. The only reason I didn’t give it a full 10 is because the length of the movie was a bit long and all the intense action scenes gave me a headache. This usually happens to me with any movie that is 2 hours long and has tons of graphic and intense images. I also am not fond of seeing tons of car wrecks, blood and guts, killing scenes, etc etc etc. I like to keep the images in front of my face full of unicorns, happy smiles and double rainbows.
The ending of the flick was excellent. I mean really excellent. Good job. I won’t spoil it for you, but will rather just say that it’s a must see movie. I know of nobody that did not enjoy the film.
Here’s a trailer of Inception if you have no clue what the movie is about and would like to grab a peak. And for those of you that did see it, what did you think? Blockbuster Hit or a Step In Dog Shit?
I thought the movie was brilliant too Jason! I mean FANTASTIC!
I went back to see the movie a second time and enjoyed it both times.
I thought about seeing it a second time but I think I’d rather laugh at something silly than to go through 2 1/2 hours of that intensity again. It’s taxing on the brain and eyes being in a dark theater for that long.
Looooved this movie!!!
Have been having Dreams within dreams ever since seeing it on Sunday!
Jason – I used to do the SAME thing in re: to manipulating my dreams and taking control of them when I was in High School. I did research on Dreams, and kept a journal where I jotted down everything I dreamt upon waking. Man, oh man! Where IS that journal packed today? That should make some interesting reading….
PS: I still hit the snooze button in the morning to have a bit of controlled dreaming to start my day off right!
I still have one of my journals laying around, and it’s cool because when I read the stories I can still remember the dreams well over 10 years later.
lucid dreams are freaking awesome but I have only been able to lucid dream once and it was an accident… I woke up after realizing it was a dream. I watched this little video course on lucid dreaming and tried what they said but didn’t get great results.
I think lucid dreaming can be used very powerfully though… it’s like the law of attraction and visualization on crack if you can actually do it… I’m sure i’ll be able to eventually.
I still have to see this movie! been so busy lately but I definitely will!
Thanks for sharing bro!
David King
My experience is that it takes a lot of practice for only short moments of lucidity. I shouldn’t have given it up and continued to strive for more. Although I may have gone crazy if I did so.
I couldn’t agree more with this movie. Definitely the best one I’ve seen this year. To those who haven’t seen it, it’s a totally mind f%*$, so hopefully you don’t have ADD. You’ll have to keep your attention the whole time or you’re going to miss something important.
I’m ready to go back and watch this thing in IMAX!
Joe Fier
Yeah IMAX would of been cool but it was sold out on this Saturday evening. Definitely a mind f%#@
Haven’t seen the movie but re dreams within dreams,
When regaining consciousness from a coma that lasted for over two months I found myself stuck in dreams that were unpleasant, scary even. If I fell asleep within my dreams I would reawaken into another dream that would eventually turn unpleasant.
As my body healed and I started ‘coming to’ the voices of people from the living world would integrate into my dreams.
Took me a while after that to decipher reality from dreamland.
I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet but it’s certainly at the top of my list. This is one of those movies that I’m itchin’ to see.
Meh its not a negative dvd movie
Hey Jason,
I loved this movie, I loved how Hollywood for once decided not to assume it needed to patronize its viewers. It is an intense movie with a complicated plot, but its easy enough to grasp.. I hate the fact that hollywood usually dumbs stuff down, assuming we need to be told what our brains can handle.
Loved the film, Leo as usual did a great job and I too used to play around with Lucid dreaming, that stuff rocked and I found myself discovering pretty quickly how my dreams were more interesting in real life. Since I have gotten older though, I have struggled to find the time to keep it up.. For me it required regular training of my mind to achieve.
Cool post Jason, catch you soon,
Josh
Yeah it was nice to see a flick that wasn’t targeted to the least common denominator. Good stuff.
This Inception movie did one helluva headjob on me! I really liked it though. Need to go see it again, and again, and again 🙂
Outstanding review of a movie I can’t wait to find out. Wish more writers knew ways to steer clear of spoiling a movie though giving somethign to take into consideration.