dreams, projections and Inception

Okay, I admit it.


I’m an Inception junkie.

Seen it five times so far. I’m sure they’ll be more.

It has layers.

Beautifully arranged layers.

I won’t presume to analyze it. I’ve read some very smart analysis by some very smart people in reviews and magazine articles and blogs. I feel like I’m trying to run with horses just to enter the discussion.

But I know it strikes some chords deep within me. Hard to articulate. Almost don’t want to. Perhaps I fear it would spoil it – like trying to explain why a painting or sunset or a particular piece of music can deeply stir me and bring me to tears or why a joke is so deliciously funny. It’s just a lovely piece of work – visually, audibly, and “soul-ly” for me.

But here I am thinking out loud (or at least “on page”) about it, so some analysis and risk of spoilage is inevitable.

Being taken to the realm of reality and dreams and memories – perhaps that it. The complexity of life, the complexity of us. How deeply buried our wounds can be; how deep the resulting catharsis; how very simple the means can be of unleashing it (a pinwheel! a speck of leaven). How much like a freight train are these wounds and memories that we cannot change; wounds that we so often only “heal slightly” by applying religious remedies (someone else’s dream, a poorly attempted inception?). How easily indeed we can find ourselves caught up in someone else’s dream – and how easy to miss the kick (or to be unwilling to take the fall) when we realize that’s just where we are. How seemingly narrow a line is there between dreams and imagination and reality. Makes me think of the question a very young Christian Bale asked his mother in Empire of the Son, “Mum, is God our dream, or are we his?” And how much is real prayer potentially like Ariadne practicing “pure creation” as she starts “messing with the physics of things.” Just how much does God wish we would do just that on this layer of his “dream”…

And then there’s the projections.

I was struck by the first and each succeeding viewing with the absence of blood in the considerable carnage. The real characters (Saito, Arthur and Fischer) along with Mal (who is nearly real in Cobb’s mind) bleed. But none of the projections in the gunfights and zero gravity wrestling bleed. It’s just “bam” and they’re down. Ariadne’s question to Cobb, “Are those parts of his mind that you are destroying?” Cobb: “No, they’re just projections.”

Just got me to thinking as a believer, as a pastor, as a human being. On this layer of reality, how often are the people I encounter on the road, in the neighborhood, in the check-out line, on the job, at church – how often are they no more than projections to me? How often do I work around people, seeking to get them out of my way so I can move more quickly from point A to point B, forgetting that these people do, in fact, bleed? That they are not mere projections to be exploited or used or resisted, but hearts and souls and minds and dreams and imaginations all fashioned and shaped in the image of God? How readily do I treat people as projections from whom I can learn or get or extract something that will contribute to my obsessive agendas – and in the process treat them as no more than “a fast-food meal over which I am too busy to pray”?

And how ready am I to face the basement of my own darkest memories and fears?

Am I willing to let my own Ariadne into that maze?