God I love that movie.
A: Inception?Inception, to put simply, is not possible. Seeing as we currently cannot connect dreams together with two people being able to interact with eachother, the entire concept of being able to plant an idea in somebody's mind is botched, along with Extraction and all the other related operations.
B: Can we still do what they did in the movie?Yes. Lucid Dreaming is when you become aware of the dream you are in while sleeping. To lucid dream, you must first be able to remember the dreams you have or else you will never know if your dreams are lucid or not. Once you can remember your dreams, becoming aware is the second most difficult part. Steps like counting footsteps as you dream or remembering a song lyric and repeating it over and over again in your head will aid in causing you to become aware. Once you are aware you are dreaming, your subconcious has already constructed the world around you in the dream, and you will be able to change and modify anything you want. For example, the scene in
Inception where Ariadne takes half of Paris and puts it face-down on top of the other half, is completely possible.
The last step is being able to stay sleeping. a "Kick" is simply either A) when something occurs physically outside the dream in real life such as tipping over in a chair, falling into water or being slapped in the face, or B) inside the dream, when you are killed, fall down a huge distance, or something like that. Waking up may accidentally occur when you're in a dream because you've done something wrong and accidentally "Kicked" yourself (died, derp). After huge amounts of self training with lucid dreaming you should naturally be able to stay in the dream without kicking yourself.
What about that whole "multiple layers of a dream" concept?Also completely possible. If you manage to be lucid dreaming and you fall asleep inside the dream, you will fall into a second layer of dreaming, that is harder to get out of. Killing yourself in this type of dream may result in falling into a deeper state of dreaming or "Limbo" as said in
Inception. Falling into the 4th layer of dreaming (Limbo) can be seriously dangerous, because you may loose grasp of what is not real and what is, and become completely insane. If you manage to start lucid dreaming I highly suggest you stay on the first layer, and only go to a second layer if you're heavily trained.
Anyway, yeah, that's my ramble. It's just too awesome to contain to myself. I'm starting practice again on Lucid Dreaming, and I suggest some of you guys give it a try as well.
Discuss the movie
Inception and lucid dreaming.
Dreaming time chartLayer 0 (Real Life) - Time amplification: x0 (Stays the same)
Layer 1 - - - - - - - - Time Amplification: X10 (5 Minutes IRL = 1 Hour in dream)
Layer 2 - - - - - - - - Time Amplification: x100 (5 Minutes IRL = 10 Weeks in dream)
Layer 3 - - - - - - - - Time Amplification: x1000 (5 Minutes IRL = 10 Years in dream) [REQUIRES SEDATIVE]
Limbo - - - - - - - - - Time Amplification: x10,000 (5 Minutes IRL = 100 Years in dream) [REQUIRES SEDATIVE]
At the risk of sounding crazy, this concept is called "mutual dreaming" or "shared dreaming" and I have attempted and achieved to some level a shared dream. While its not scientifically accepted, two others I knew who I saw in the dream recalled it before I did. I will elaborate if you are interested.
Dream recall does not prevent lucidity, its just better to ensure you have good enough recall to be able to remember most of your dreams so no efforts go to waste.
"Reality checks" or "RCs" are important, but the ones you have listed are hideously poor. More common RCs are counting your fingers (an uneven number of fingers is an obvious sign) looking at an brown townog clock twice or a digital clock once (skipping of time or morphed imagery are common with these) or even simpler, plugging your nose and trying to breathe. RCing must be practiced throughout the day, so when you are asleep you do it naturally.
Very truce, I saw the trailer of the movie and have accomplished the face-down thing. Except in my dream I watched the earth fold over and then I jumped into the flipped version and I got sucked into a parallel world LOL.
Again these are crap examples hurp. To stay in a dream or to make it more "vivid" you should either touch your own arms or hands (the sensation really hits you in the face and sinks you into the dream) or spin around. Falling or death generally results in waking up.
Even the most experienced wake up. You can only stretch a dream so long before your sleep or REM cycle dictates otherwise. If you do wake up, train yourself to NOT MOVE so you can fall back into the dream. Your brain won't realize you are awake and it can take a matter of seconds to be asleep again. This technique is sometimes referred to as "DEILD" which stands for dream exit induced lucid dream.
Are you kidding me? False awakenings are all part of the experience, nobody goes "insane". You'll just wake up with intrigue, there is no danger.
I myself have been lucid dreaming randomly for life, but only since late 2008 have been practicing it as a hobby. I've had hundreds of lucid dreams, I get a few each week if I can be bothered (sometimes you are just so tired its not worth keeping mentally prepared). I recommend you keep a dream journal and write down dreams in diary format, helps your recall.
