The Beach, Blood Diamond, Catch Me If you Can and now Inception. Who knew 12 years ago when Titanic released that this sweet looking lad (just 24 back then) would star in such great, cult movies. I was totally floored when I first saw Matrix; Neo has been a personal favourite for years. But after watching Inception last night, it is safe to say that this one totally kicks Matrix’s ass. It took me about 15 minutes in the beginning of the film to get in tune with what was going on and then I was almost pissed off at the ten minute interval; hell with cheese flavoured popcorn!
Planting an idea in someone else’s head; in their subconscious! At the top of my head, I can think of a million ways in which people can abuse this skill. Controlling other people’s thoughts, dreams and subconscious thinking! This to me sounds rather familiar. Taking a spiritual lesson from the movie, I really started pondering on this phenomenon – a dream within a dream; each time you go deeper you need a thud, a kick, and a nudge to bring you back into reality. Or who knows; perceived reality?
“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awaked, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a barrier. The transition is called metempsychosis.”
While we are in the dream it seems real. Everything about it feels real. Just like in “real” life, every stress seems worthwhile, necessary to get us through the day, week, month, year, etc. Paying the bills, putting up with idiots, liking what we do or doing what we like; would this all be so damn serious if it was just a layer of our dreamy reality? Knowing we could be getting up any moment remembering just a blurry sequence of events we dreamt about, which probably gets ingrained in our memory. Memory; oh memory! How to summarize this metamorphic, colossal, pain in the ass word? At the end of the day or our journey (sorry for sounding too philosophical) are we just a collection of all these projections, thoughts, dreams and memories? Does that draw a pretty picture from the end of the tunnel?
Planting a thought or an idea in someone else’s head and succeeding in fertilizing it will give any human being a deluded power. I guess we have all tried doing it at some point, consciously or unconsciously or subconsciously, while we are on the subject of dreams. We all probably have a master script tucked away in some part of our head, which has all the dialogues of all the characters in our life. That’s why we want to decide for everyone around us – how they should behave, with us or in general, how they should dress, talk, what they should do with their life or more importantly how what they are doing is so wrong. And the minute things don’t function according to our master script we can’t let go. If someone’s dialogues don’t match to the ones in our master script we deem them culpable, mean and deceitful.
Time to wake up; who are we kidding here? Controlling our own wandering mind can take a lifetime or several lifetimes. And taking the responsibility to reign over everyone else’s mind, thoughts or projections is only the beginning of all the hell breaking loose; probably just in our head, where we anyway choose to live most of the time.
