‘Inception’: Reality or Dream?

No, Cobb’s wedding ring is not his actual totem.

Angela Rong
5 min readJan 6, 2022
A spinning top on a table. Screencap from Inception (2010).
Did the top fall, or did it continue spinning? The age-old question that inspired WatchMojo as a school of YouTube thought and popularized the tradition of Googling “ending explained” upon exiting the theatre.

Just some fun theorizing on Inception (2010). The intended audience should have watched the movie and may have already read several articles/watched several YouTube videos titled “Inception: EXPLAINED”.

Many viewers agree that Inception’s ending is less about determining whether Cobb is living in reality or a dream and more about Cobb’s resolution with his own guilt. And I concur! But I’d argue that the movie rejects totems as valid test of reality. In fact, writer-director Christopher Nolan deliberately sabotages the very concept of the totem, rendering Cobb’s totem a defective test of reality.

By definition, a totem is a deeply personal object used by the dreamer to determine whether they are in a dream or in reality. Totems are necessary because dreams, when we’re in them, feel like reality. Without a totem for their consciousness, the dreamer would become lost in the dream world: a world that would embody their new reality.

An ideal totem is an everyday object with a quirk. This quirk should be unable to be discerned and replicated by someone else. For example, the totem of Arthur, Cobb’s point man, is a loaded die. Only Arthur knows which number the die will consistently land on. If he was in someone else’s dream, their dream world would simply cause his die to land on random numbers, given that they have no idea 1) Arthur’s die is loaded and 2) what number Arthur’s die is loaded to.

Consider Eames, the forger of the group. His totem is a poker chip with a very specific manufacturer’s spelling defect. In someone else’s dream, all poker chips would be standardized for poker utility. If Eames was in someone else’s dream, the poker chip would read correctly because the dreamer is not privy to the exact spelling defect of Eames’ poker chip.

Arthur shows Ariadne his loaded die totem but doesn’t tell her the loaded number.

Accordingly, Arthur instructs Ariadne that Rule #1 in dreaming is no one can touch your totem. To let someone touch your totem and discover its quirk is to render it useless. They would then be able to assimilate your totem’s unique rules into their own personal dream world.

And yet Cobb not only states he shares the same totem as his wife, but he then instructs Ariadne on its exact mechanics: if the spinning top falls down, reality; if the top spins indefinitely, dream. In fact, the entire team understands how Cobb’s totem works, completely defeating the logical purpose of spinning the top.

“Hey, Cobb, you should try therapy.” Ariadne, let me explain exactly how my totem works and share some fun facts about my dead wife.

But wait! Even if Cobb didn’t inform his team about his totem, his top still isn’t of much logical consequence because it never had a quirk to begin with.

Wait a second, you might be asking, doesn’t the top have rules? If it falls down, it’s reality. If it spins continuously, it’s a dream. Well, yes, the top does have stated rules, but those rules are incredibly arbitrary. Any dreamer would naturally rule that tops fall in their own dream: we understand that spinning tops eventually fall due to gravity and friction.

So what’s the use of Cobb’s top (Mal’s top) as a totem, then? Nolan explains how totems determine dream from reality with the deeply expository character that is Arthur, but Nolan also ensures that Cobb violates all those rules. We’re so invested in scrutinizing the top for a telltale wobble or extrapolating other possible totems (the wedding ring-as-totem theory…) when Cobb so easily disregards his own totem as a test of reality. In the meantime, Cobb’s totem is also fundamentally useless and the entire reality of Inception becomes ambiguous.

But how is Cobb’s existence in a dream any less valid than a textual acknowledgment of his reality? If filmmaking is the manipulation of time, space, and perception, a film can be a representational dream for the audience. Inception begins with Cobb awakening on the beaches of Limbo under Saito’s lofty mansion and it ends with James, one of Cobb’s children, exclaiming that he is “building a house on the cliff”: a direct recall to the very first scene with Saito’s mansion. This narrative structure continues the looping nature of the dream, and the film reel cycles on.

Nice one, James.

As viewers, we gloss over the faulty logic of Cobb’s totem because we cling to direction in this heady Nolan heist-thriller, which is both about dreams and a dream itself. Why do we care so much whether Cobb is dreaming or not? His dreaming shouldn’t invalidate his joyous reunion with his family. Because films — or their constructed narratives, at least — aren’t “real” beyond their physical stock or digital metadata: meaning is manufactured at the site of the viewer. By drawing our attention to the formal elements of the story, Nolan also makes Inception a movie about movie-making. (Fans have already spawned theories about the team representing a film crew: Cobb as the director, Arthur as the producer, Eames as the actor, etcetera.)

But let’s disregard all of the above for a moment: who’s to say Cobb isn’t dreaming his own dream? A totem will always feel right in your own dream, escapist fantasy or not. Cobb, however, is done with escapism and ambiguous, passive existences. He’s done with hiding from the shadows of Cobol Engineering and his long-dead wife. Cobb chooses to return home and embrace his children. Choice matters on all levels of consciousness, and so Cobb chooses reality as the world he wants to live in.

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Angela Rong

Angela is a Chinese woman of the internet. Somehow, she still finds time to watch movies.