Psychology In Inception

In the movie Inception, there were many Psychological principles of dreaming. Ones that stood out to me and appeared frequently are “dreams can be controlled”, “your brain assembles information when you sleep” and “bad memories can haunt your dreams”. These principles are very evident in Inception and makes me wonder if Christopher Nolan knew about these principles and intentionally put them in the movie.

In Inception, Cobb and the rest of his team undergo many dreams in which they have assignments to accomplish. One in particular is the first dream of the whole movie when Cobb and Arthur are trying to steal classified information from Saito. They are able to find their way through a building and find the safe they’ve been looking for which holds that classified information. They are able to make their own choices and are free to react to things anyway they want to. The psychological principle that I feel is relevant to this is “dreams can be controlled”. The principle states that when you are able

They end up doing this by bringing Fischer into a dream and planting an idea into his mind so that when he wakes up, he will remember this idea as if he thought of it on his own and it was just his subconscious that thought of it. “Your brain assembles information while you sleep” is when ideas cultivate or process in one’s brain allowing the person to see it in a new light when they wake up. When the problem or idea is being tampered with while one is dreaming, it increases their ability to make connections to it in their real life. When Cobb and the rest of his team bring Fischer into a dream, they are able to get Fischer to change the way he feels about his family business, which even though it’s never actually said in the movie if he does or not, it seems as though Cobb is able to do