Photo I took during the filming of The Dark Knight. Christopher Nolan is to the far left.
On New Year’s Day, I recommended a couple things to do. One thing was watch Inception for $.99 from Amazon.
Tina and I ended up taking my advice. We never saw it before. I recommend seeing Inception if you haven’t seen it already.
Inception was written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Momento). It’s about a guy (Leonardo DiCaprio) who is able to get into people’s dreams to extract information from them.
In a way, it was a lot like the Matrix. Like those movies, DiCaprio’s character can take his crew with him inside dreams. The dreamscapes are designed by one of his team, kind of like how the Matrix was designed by one major Architect and smaller Matrix situations were designed by code writers.
There was quite a bit of exposition about the rules of entering and exiting the dreamscapes, but for the most part, general laws of physics were obeyed inside the dreams. There was gravity, but that gravity could be affected by extenuating circumstances. Time could be bent depending on the layer of dream. It was bizarrely possible. As long as you suspend disbelief, the movie made a lot of sense over time.
The script did a pretty good job at keeping the rules simple so that there could be more characterization. Sometimes movies can get so wrapped up in the alternate worlds that the story is left behind.
All in all, the effects were awesome, and the whole idea is somewhat mind blowing at times.
I want to steal the script!
Inception reminded me of similar fantasies that I had as a kid, and it made me angry for not harnessing the thoughts sooner to develop a script before Christopher Nolan. Nolan took his fantasy world many steps further than I ever did. But in many ways, I had a similar fantasy place where I would go in my spare time.
Maybe you had something similar.
The best way I could describe my fantasy is being able to enter and exit a dreamscape. Like the vocabulary in Inception, it was “down there”. When I was down there, I was in a place, much like the physical terrain of my “real-world” environment, only I was the only inhabitant. When I was “down there,” I could stay there for weeks, months, or even years. I could grow older. I could learn things. And the second I decided to return to the real world, only a moment had passed by. But I could bring back my knowledge, and even things like computers or gadgets that I built in my alternate universe.
I would use the escape of going down there just minutes before going to school. In my mind, weekends were awesome in the real world. I would want to spend time with my friends and play. But when it came time for school, I knew I would eventually have to go, but I needed extra recreation time. So I would pretend I would go there for a few months to a year. When I came back, I would go to school as if I was never gone.
Another situation was that before a test, I could go “down there” and study even more for a test. Not only would I master the information, but I would learn beyond what was necessary.
I could take anyone I wanted with me into my dreamscape. But I would only take one or two people at a time. I had to physically touch them to bring them along. As I grew older, I took more and more friends there. I took girlfriends or girls I wanted as girlfriends. One way I got away with bringing people down there was that to them it was only a dream. To me, it was real life. Upon returning, they thought it was a dream. In my mind, I would know it was real.
There were times when going down there was much like a video game, and I was able to battle robots and monsters I made up. Growing up as a Christian, I would never kill another person, so the bad guys always had to be mechanical or completely made up.
Other times, I would drive fast cars that I dreamed of owning, Ferraris and Lamborghinis. Porches and even fighter jets. It was my world and I did what I wanted.
It was all just a fantasy.
Sometimes I wish I did a better job of remembering my youth. Lots of people seem to think it’s better to leave that stuff behind, but then there’s someone like Christopher Nolan who probably strapped on his youthful creativity and created a cool idea. He brought his imagination to life and for 2 hours, you could enter a small part of his mind.
How cool is that?
Surely Nolan bounced his ideas off of other people and in the end, Inception was a collaborative effort of many minds. The byline on the script is Nolan’s, but the writers were plenty, I can assure you. To make something that believable takes many minds.
And then there’s religion
Christianity is only a manifestation of mind’s creativities. Or — to be more accurate — many minds’ creativities. So is Islam. So is Buddhism. So were Greek and Roman mythologies. They are constructs. They are Matrix-like worlds, and when you’re involved in religion, you enter into the architecture of an evolution of memes. You enter a developed-land equipped with a script and a whole crew of engineers. You enter into someone else’s dreamscape.
I remember when I started to see religion as a summer blockbuster that would have been a movie if there were motion pictures 2,000-5,000 years ago. Groups of really creative people developed the Christian-movie script and passed that information along in the best way they knew how. Now that script is the bible and its spinoffs are the myriad of sects with different views of the “same” message.
Instead of entering a theater and exiting with the understanding that it was a movie, people leave thinking the movie is real life. The Christian Movie has all the building blocks of every great mythology. It’s got good guys, bad guys, drama, a climax and a cliffhanger ending. It’s been studied for eons. And it will continue to be studied.
The biggest difference between people is that some people go to see the Buddhist movie, the Mormon Blockbuster, The Islāmic love story or the Christianity double feature, and some leave knowing it was fantasy.
Could you imagine if every time you saw a movie, when you left, you thought that it was real life and you changed the way you viewed the world until the next movie came out?
Crazy.
