Science

The Science Behind Dreams in “Inception”

And how it compares to real life

The Movie

Inception is a 2010 film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who is well known for his work on critically acclaimed films like The Dark Knight, Dunkirk, Memento, and many more. The film received an 87% score on Rotten Tomatoes, a 74% on Metacritic, and an 8.8/10 on IMDB. Inception grossed 836 million dollars on a budget of 160 million, making it a huge success. The movie features a star-studded cast, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role and A-Listers like Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing supporting characters.

Real Life

While entering a person’s dream and stealing information isn’t possible, like in the movie, the technology we have today is surprisingly capable of doing similar things. With the power of an fMRI scan, it is possible to reproduce the images of a person’s dream. However, only the one dreaming will know for sure how accurate the image is. The laboratory in Japan known as ATR uses a different method of reconstructing dreams by analyzing blood flow in the visual cortex, which creates some simple black-and-white images. In Inception, the idea of consciously entering someone’s dream was based partially on lucid dreams, which are dreams where the person is aware that they are dreaming and not, in fact, awake. The closest we can get to this in real life is with the NovaDreamer, which is a sleeping mask designed to stimulate awareness while not waking the sleeper as a method to induce a lucid dream. Overall, technology with the ability to entire one’s dream is not yet possible, however, we have some extremely capable tech that has similar powers in its own right.