Inception: All 5 Levels In The Movie Explained

The five stages of Inception explained in full are critical to understanding the various dream layers the characters travel through, and they serve as the stage for director Christopher Nolan’s monumental sci-fi blockbuster. Inception remains a celebrated modern classic and a landmark in terms of visual and storytelling ambition. Inception‘s ending remains one of the most hotly-discussed movie endings of all time, and that is very much thanks to the complex design of the narrative, which echoes Nolan’s dream landscape.

Inception‘s dream heist has five dream levels, each key to convincing Cillian Murphy’s Fischer — the mark — that he must break up his father’s company, to the benefit of Saito (Ken Watanabe), the rival businessman who employs Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cobb and his team. Only some of the levels are planned as part of the heist, with the dangerous Limbo becoming arguably the most important to Inception‘s ending. However, each one of the stages of Inception plays a very important role in the heist.

Reality Is Where Everyone Resides

The Real World In Inception Is Still Important For Understanding The Science Of Dream Travel

To differentiate dreams from reality, the first of the five stages of Inception,Cobb and his team use totems — unique items that no one else’s dream could recreate in exact detail. Thanks to this handy mechanic, the audience can be sure Inception‘s ambitious heist begins in the real world. Saito engineers a situation where Robert Fischer must fly first class instead of taking his usual private plane. Cobb’s gang occupies the seats around him and brings an air hostess in on the con.

They slip Fischer a sedative and all seven hook up to the shared dreaming apparatus. For over a decade, film fans have repeatedly argued over whether Cobb is still dreaming in Inception‘s ending or not, with Christopher Nolan giving absolutely nothing away. Inception only shows Cobb waking up on the plane finally reuniting with his children, infamously ending before revealing whether his spinning top totem ever stopped twirling.

If Cobb is still dreaming, then Inception‘s final glimpse of reality comes when the six thieves and Fischer simultaneously hit their complementary airline pillows. In an alternate timeline, Arthur and the others will wake from a successful mission and either leave a slumbering Cobb on the jet or smuggle him through immigration.

The “Kick” And How It Works

It Is The Method For Waking The Dreamers

With all of the levels of dreams that Cobb and his heist team are attempting in Inception, one vital part of the plan is how to get the crew out of the dreams when it is the right time. The most effective method of waking the dreamers is called “the Kick”. Cobb explains the method with the relatable example of the feeling of falling that can sometimes jolt a person awake. The trick is to create that feeling for the sleeper and cause them to wake up.

However, as with everything in multi-level dreaming and shared dreaming, the Kick is more complicated for Cobb’s mission. When people are sharing a dream at various levels, it is required that they must experience the Kick simultaneously. What’s more, the Kick must begin at the deepest level of the dream and occur at each previous level to ensure the dreamers are waking from each level of the dream and not becoming stuck.

In order to achieve this, there is a lot of necessary planning involved, especially given that there is time dilation between the levels of dreams. The team eventually comes up with the idea of using music that will play throughout each level of dreaming in order to warn the team of the impending Kick and to synchronize themselves.

Level 1: Raining City

The Base Layer Of Dreaming

The opening level of Inception‘s dream takes the form of a sprawling city — the first dream, but the second of the five stages of inception. As with all three levels, the layout was designed by Ariadne, who taught each team member her designs before the mission began. Curiously, the hidden meaning of Ariadne’s name in Inception is from Greek mythology — Ariadne helped Theseus find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth with a ball of string, not unlike Ariadne’s purpose in the mission.

While Ariadne is a newcomer, everyone else already knows their way around the dreams, except for Fischer (the mark). The dreamer of this city is Yusuf, and because the chemist needs to pee, the weather is rainy. To successfully execute inception, Cobb can’t simply tell Fischer to break up his father’s company — the idea needs to grow organically in the target’s mind. Consequently, the purpose of Level 1 is to gently introduce the core concept Saito has requested.

Eames impersonates Fischer’s Uncle Peter, the trusted figure in his life, and reveals a secret last will and testament residing in a safe that disassembles the company if Fischer wants. Proving why he’s essential to Cobb’s inception team, Eames drops the suggestion that Fischer’s father loves him, setting up reconciliation for a later level. The second will is a fabrication by Cobb’s group. Fischer is also forced to generate a random six-digit number that will act as the password to this imaginary safe on Level 3.

The city level doesn’t completely go to plan. Like many rich folks, Fischer’s mind has been trained to detect and defend against infiltration, which manifests as armed soldiers following Cobb’s group wherever they go, and Saito is hit in the firefight. To make matters worse, Mal (or, more accurately, the guilty projection of Mal in Cobb’s subconscious) is already wreaking havoc, sending a freight train to attack the invaders.

When the city part of the heist is done, Fischer is sedated again (within the dream) and everyone apart from Yusuf (he’s needed to keep the city level active) plugs into another shared dreaming machine. There is no machine, of course, but the process takes everyone down to the next layer. When it’s time to exit, Yusuf will play music to count down the upcoming Kick, then drive off a bridge to jump everyone out of Level 2.

Level 2: The Hotel

Arthur’s Dream Is Where Physics In Inception Starts To Become Truly Warped

The second dreaming layer in Inception takes place in a fancy hotel, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Arthur the dreamer on this occasion. Facing unexpected resistance from Fischer’s projections, Cobb wheels out the risky “Mr. Charles” stratagem. This particular ploy involves Cobb putting on the facade of “Mr. Charles” and pretending to be in charge of Fischer’s mental security. Level 2 is where Inception‘s zero-gravity corridor fight scene takes place, the overall third of the five stages of Inception‘s main heist.

Cobb tells the businessman he’s dreaming to earn his trust and plays the role of a projection designed to keep Fischer safe. The tactic works and Fischer comes to trust Cobb’s team, mistakenly believing them to be part of his inner security system. The point of Level 2 is to convince Fischer that the rainy city is reality and that his dad’s secret will and testament might not be so bad. Cobb leads Fischer to the “enemy’s” room, with Eames pretending to be Uncle Peter again, framing Fischer’s godfather as a traitor.

Eames tells Fischer the will is a challenge, taunting the son to create something of his own instead of following his father. Eames even hints that Fischer could build a better company if he started afresh, which in turn hints at the real hidden meaning of Inception — the re-framing of reality. Fischer is now starting to believe that forging his own path could be good. Cobb tells Fischer the only way to know what Peter planned is to enter his dream. Fischer willingly plugs in, and the others follow, leaving behind Arthur.

At each level of the dream, the time dilation multiplies. The exact formula is difficult to decipher, but 10 seconds on the city level is three minutes for the hotel, which translates to an hour down on Level 3. Because of this, Yusuf starts his Kick before Arthur is ready, and drives off the bridge on Level 1.

Originally, Arthur’s hotel Kick was going to be an explosion that dropped his sleeping allies from the fifth floor into the room below, but with Yusuf’s van in freefall, Level 2’s gravity was lost. Improvising a way out of Inception‘s Level 2/Arthur’s dream, Arthur rigs the hotel elevator with bombs to provide a Kick instead, then relies on the van from Level 1 hitting the water to provide another makeshift Kick.

Level 3: Snow Fortress Hospital

An Impenetrable Labyrinth Constructed For Personal Healing

The last of the three dream layers that Ariadne designed is generated by Tom Hardy’s Eames and comprises a snow-covered hospital guarded like a fortress. A projection of Robert’s father lies inside next to the safe containing his fabled secret will. In Level 3, the fourth of the five stages of inception, Fischer believes he must discover what’s inside to understand Uncle Peter’s plot against him. Cobb’s gang wants him to reach the center of the maze because that’s where the actual inception will finally happen.

After fighting off more tenacious opposition, Fischer enters the well-guarded room containing a projection of his dying father. This strangely underrated scene is central to how Inception changed contemporary sci-fi movies, as it serves as the final proof of the possibility of the act of inception if the sci-fi dream-sharing technology was real. A character entirely crafted by Eames, old man Fischer tells Robert Fischer that he was only ever disappointed that his son never tried to be his own man.

Not only does the locker contain the second will (which Fischer now thinks was written with love), but there’s also a paper windmill. This toy comes from the one wholesome childhood memory Fischer has of his father — a memory his dream self carries a photograph of at each level. Fischer finds solace and catharsis in his father’s words, and this harks back to Cobb’s suggestion during an earlier scene. To make Saito’s idea grow naturally in Fischer’s mind, it must be attached to strong emotions.

Inception‘s dream-sharing technology is truly compelling because of what the team sought to do. While the gang could’ve played on the rift between father and son, Cobb believed positive emotions would be more effective. Therefore, the purpose of the hospital level is to give Fischer a subconscious sense of healing around breaking up his father’s empire.

Upon waking in reality, Fischer won’t suddenly start believing a second will exists. He’ll begin to question whether he really wants to live in his father’s shadow until the idea eventually becomes impossible to ignore. Subconsciously, he’ll believe the act will bring the same sense of catharsis he experienced on Level 3, and he’ll believe the idea was his own. The fortress kick is simple enough — blow it up.

Limbo Is The Most Dangerous Level

The Final Layer Of Dreaming Can Be Deadly

Limbo is the last of the five stages of Inception. With enough sedation, digging deeper through the levels will lead to “raw subconscious.” Limbo is an unpredictable dream level. Any of the dreamers can alter it, and if a member of the group has already visited, the remains of their Limbo will still be present. So appealing is the freedom and creativity Limbo offers, it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish reality from illusion, and the time dilation is so extreme that decades pass in a fraction of real-time.

Initially, Cobb refuses to know Ariadne’s layouts, hoping to prevent his subconscious projection of Mal from wrecking things, but as time gets tight on Level 3, Ariadne is forced to reveal a secret path. Mal kills Fischer, while Saito succumbs to his wound from Level 1, consigning both men to Limbo. Ariadne and Cobb voluntarily descend there to retrieve them.

Once Cobb finally lets go of his guilt, “Mal” releases Fischer, allowing Ariadne and the businessman to kick back up to Level 3. Cobb tracks down Saito, who has since become an old man due to the slow passage of time this deep in dreamland. As Inception warned would happen, Saito has no grasp of what’s real in Limbo, but Cobb’s familiar words trigger a realization. The Japanese entrepreneur glances towards the gun, suggesting both men shoot themselves in Limbo and return to Inception‘s reality.

What Christopher Nolan Says On The Importance Of Inception’s Stages

The Inception Director Has Revealed A Few Key Details

For Inception director Christopher Nolan, the five stages of inception were crucial to his core intent of telling a multi-layered narrative — moving at different speeds — without audiences in theaters getting confused. The stark differences between each stage or dream layer’s color palette, apart from giving Inception its distinct look, also served to make distinguishing scenes between levels easier for viewers. As ​​Nolan explained (via Wired):

“We wanted to have the distinctions there in the design and the feel, so I wrote it into the script. It’s raining in level one, it’s a night-interior in level two, and it’s an exterior with snow in level three. Even if you’re cutting to a close-up of Yusuf in the van in level one, you know where you are because the rain is there.”

Fleshing out the levels of reality in Inception entailed shooting in six countries and massive practical effects sets, which played a role in why the film is considered to be among the best of Christopher Nolan’s movies. As Nolan said in HBO’s First Look, “As soon as you’re entering into the idea of what can the human mind conceive of, you want to see this on a grand scale.” The five stages of Inception achieved this, most notably as the backdrop to a story that forever changed viewers’ expectations for heist and sci-fi blockbusters.

The Inception Levels Allowed Christopher Nolan To Play With Time

Nolan Has Played With Time In Many Of His Movies

Christopher Nolan has always implemented his fascination with time into all his movies. This started with his debut movie, Following (1998), which saw him tell the story out of order, with scenes playing out at different parts of time like a puzzle until he had the final piece in place at the end to tie everything together. He then mastered the effort in his next movie, Memento, where he didn’t mix up the scenes but instead told them all in reverse order, once again playing a game where the last scene tied all that came before together.

Nolan has said that he wants people to “feel” his movies more than anything, and that is where he plays with time. He did this in Interstellar when he had Cooper fall into a black hole, where time no longer existed as expected, and he was able to travel back to warn his daughter and his past self of what was happening in the far reaches of space. In Tenet, Nolan does something even more daring when he shows how the characters can “reverse” time in a way that has never been seen before to affect the outcome of events.

“I actually think the mechanism of time, the way that conventional film grammar deals with time and the portrayal of time is incredibly sophisticated. And the films I make are actually much cruder. They actually demonstrate the mechanism, they bring attention to the mechanism. And I think the relationship between time and films, the camera is a time machine. It captures time” (via
YouTube
).

Nolan also implements a time-altering element into Inception. Each dream layer runs faster than reality, which means that some characters have to get things done at a different pace than others to make it work. It is not quite as scientifically exact as Interstellar, but it does play around with the idea that he later approached again in Tenet. This technique in Nolan’s movies allows him to show how two people who travel through time at different speeds intersect, and the levels of Inception in the movie display that expertly.