The thing to remember is, all the rules that the protagonist tells "us" (in the form of Ariadne, who is the proxy for the audience) are at best bendable and at worst completely wrong. (See Arthur's comment to that effect...) He's making it up as he goes along, and pretending that this is reality. This became ridiculously apparent when he explains away exactly how his totem works to Ariadne--he's telling the audience, so that later we can construct a dream (mental fantasy) that he can live on in. He's dead, you see, and only lives on it the dreams of others--yours, for example. Or, possibly Mal's...
On to more-traditional explanations.
As first explained, the idea is that if someone else knows your totem, they can construct a dream which will fool you into thinking it is reality. As you say in comments, something which has been altered in a non-standard way. Mal's totem (when it is her totem) is not used for this purpose, or maybe it is: she locks away her ability to tell reality from dream, so she can forget that she is trapped in a dream. I don't think she conceived of using it defensively, against someone trying to make her confuse reality and dream--I think she just conceived of it as a self-check, not assuming an attacker. Cobb generalized it from there.
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dancing_serpent
I have had not much sleep, so this may be slightly incoherent...
Date: 2010-09-16 01:17 am (UTC)The thing to remember is, all the rules that the protagonist tells "us" (in the form of Ariadne, who is the proxy for the audience) are at best bendable and at worst completely wrong. (See Arthur's comment to that effect...) He's making it up as he goes along, and pretending that this is reality. This became ridiculously apparent when he explains away exactly how his totem works to Ariadne--he's telling the audience, so that later we can construct a dream (mental fantasy) that he can live on in. He's dead, you see, and only lives on it the dreams of others--yours, for example. Or, possibly Mal's...
On to more-traditional explanations.
As first explained, the idea is that if someone else knows your totem, they can construct a dream which will fool you into thinking it is reality. As you say in comments, something which has been altered in a non-standard way. Mal's totem (when it is her totem) is not used for this purpose, or maybe it is: she locks away her ability to tell reality from dream, so she can forget that she is trapped in a dream. I don't think she conceived of using it defensively, against someone trying to make her confuse reality and dream--I think she just conceived of it as a self-check, not assuming an attacker. Cobb generalized it from there.