another _Inception_ question

[alexandra_thorn]

It almost seemed clear, but we've had a few debates/explorations of the question, so maybe it isn't.


What is the nature of the behavior of "totem" objects in the movie _Inception_?
Why is it so bad if someone holds your totem object? (what possible consequences are there?)
What are the differences between behavior of totem objects: in your dream, in someone else's dream, and in "top level" physical reality?
Is there any difference between the general behavior of Mal's top versus other totem objects?

Comments

[alexandra_thorn]

Tim and I also struggled to try to understand what was going on with the totems.

The best interpretation that I've been able to come up with is that in the general case, the totem is a physical object that has been manipulated to have non-intuitive behavior that no one but the owner will know about it (altered center of mass, etc.). As long as only you know how the object is expected to behave, only you can dream the correct behavior for the object, so you are able to distinguish between your own dream and someone else's.

As far as I can tell, Mal's top was different from the others. This makes *some* sense from a plot standpoint, because she was the one who came up with original idea. As far as I could tell, her top had no special properties at the top level, but that she could tell that she was dreaming (and not at the top level) by spinning it: only in a dream could it have the magical property of spinning forever. I'm not sure whether this was supposed to enable her to distinguish between her dream and someone else's, but I guess that maybe when she and Cobb were futzing around in Dream there weren't necessarily that may people with the technology to hijack dreams.

It's plausible enough to me that she would have come up with this idea to have an object that behaved differently in dream from physical reality and that her collaborators would have modified the design a bit.

That said, I'm not sure how the distinction between your dream and someone else's is supposed to work when anyone in the dream has the ability to manipulate the physics of the dream world. Couldn't you be in someone else's dream and nevertheless assign the appropriate behaviors to your totem object? Or maybe you can't manipulate Dream unintentionally?

As for Cobb telling people what the top did, I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that he was talking about it because it *wasn't* his totem: it was Mal's and she was presumed dead. So there might have been an implication that he had his own totem that he didn't talk about. Or it might be that he'd already gone off the deep end and was breaking all of the rules anyway...