Lucid Dreaming In The Film Inception

Within the film Inception, the basis of it’s plot and understanding is formed around the interpretive styling of psychological principles. The most notable principles seen in the film are the usage and effects of the unconscious mind, the role of perceptual sets, and the application of lucid dreaming. This film incorporates the use of lucid dreaming into the main character's job of extraction, while we see the effects of the unconscious mind and perceptual sets affect his ability to correctly perform his ultimate task of inception. The movie itself while exploring the realm of the unconscious and its effects on cognition and perception, also strays from the clinical explanation of lucid dreaming, and it’s role on the dreamer themselves.

You see the role of the unconscious throughout the movie, as the premise of which the main character’s objective revolves around the taming of the unconscious to achieve the desired extraction. The lack of the ability to handle this is seen most predominantly in the scene

where Cobb is unconsciously affected by his late wife, and ironically the extracter himself could not weed out the distractions, as they bubbled out into his thought while he was entering other client’s mind. The whole movie utilizes the Freudian concepts of the unconscious mind, as the only way to achieve inception is through planting the “seed” of an idea. While Cobb is extracting into the unconscious of a client to plant the idea, his own unconscious was affecting his ability to correctly interpret the mind of others. While Cobb claims that Mal killed herself because they got too deep in the multi-level building of dreams, this would not make sense based on the previously stated facts of how dream building works, and how this would advance their trek into the architecture of the dreams. Cobb claims he cannot control this, yet every instance that involves Mal shows other forces interfering with the outcome of his dream patterns.
These scenes and the unpredictability and hypocritical nature of the dreams all lead back to the common link: the unconscious mind. This movie is left to the viewer to perceive what they saw, which is why many fundamentalists and common movie-goers struggle to appreciate this film as they want a concrete solution to the movie, and a conclusion that can be logically explained. This Freudian concept is based around the influence of past events and experiences on one’s behavior, which can be seen in the way Cobb experiences interference, yet explains to his colleagues that the dream is all architecturally based, and uses the totem to understand where he is in regards to reality. The conclusion of Mal and the inability to plant ideas through his inception of his clients and Saito, all exemplify how the unconscious works. (Mcleod 2009) explained, “Our feelings, motives and decisions are actually powerfully influenced by our past experiences, and stored in the unconscious”. The whole point of the film was to force people to use their unconscious mind to interpret the conclusions of the film, and allow their personal discretion to comprehend Cobb’s actions. This is reflected through how it is used so often in the movie itself, and ironically tries to use a logical means to construct and perceive a dream.
Simply put the unconscious mind is an abstract layer of perception that can be used to better explain abnormal behaviors or emotions from preexisting sentiments or experiences. Freud broke this down into three major parts; the id, the ego, and the superego (Mcleod 2010). This clinical explanation of this abstract concept helps to visualize how Cobb’s unconscious and more specifically the instinctive Id subconsciously controls his ability to extract Saito, and experiences illusions within his own dreams.
Like the concept of the unconscious, you can see the perceptual set theory most significantly in its involvement with Mal inside of Cobb’s dream. Cobb explains to Ariadne that he only sees her in his dream, and that it is the only time he can be with her. He ignores all other stimuli when he sees Mal, and focuses on her, and how he is effecting her emotions and actions, rather than concentrating on the actual extraction and inception onto the subject's mind. This is the perfect example of how Cobb interprets these events based on how he wants them to be seen, rather than how they are actually occurring. This movie is focused around Cobb, and how his internal conflicts are affecting his extraction performances along with his teammates success in the film. When Mal stabs Cobb later in the movie, this shows how he is focusing his guilt and his unconscious is tying into this creating a perceptual set, and he is interpreting the events differently than an unbiased viewer in this dream would have. His guilt of his past experiences with Mal and how he felt that he pushed the layering concept too hard causes his to have a preconceived notion of how he views his unconscious experiences with Mal, and this leads to different behavior, and causes emotional spikes that are present inside the film.
As mentioned by (Mcleod 2009), the theory of perceptual sets is based around “A perceptual bias or predisposition or readiness to perceive particular features of a stimulus.” This leads to the user having a different point of view of an event due to a prior event or experience that could lead to a type of emotion linked with a stimuli.

This was shown perfectly with an example done by Sanford where he deprived people of food for up to four hours, and showed them equivocal images. These people had responses that were much more linked to food than those that were not deprived of food (Mcleod 2009). This link to emotional, psychological, or even physical needs shows how a subject is more inclined to perceive a certain situation a specific way based on their interpersonal view. Unlike the unconscious mind, these perceptual sets are much easier to identify the root of their cause, but similar to the unconscious they have a major influence on behavior and

emotion.
Perceptual sets were linked to six main motivations linking a perception altering set. (Mcleod 2009) shows how Allport described the six as: bodily needs (e.g. physiological needs), reward and punishment, emotional connotation, individual values, personality, or the value of objects. Cobb exemplifies the reward/punishment, and emotional connotation as the two major sources of his perceptual sets involving Mal. (Myers 2011, 162) describes the use of context effects and their role in a perception changed, which can be seen in almost every scene in the movie, and the creation of the movie was designed to have each viewer perceive it in their own way. These views would all be different due to contextual effects. These different triggers would change our view, as Mal is the main trigger to Cobb.