"Inception" Dreams and reality, spiritual exploration and physical action. Nolan's intellectual action drama that combines contradictory elements

“Dreams within dreams”: Tracing the origins of multi-layered dream stories

The phrase "a dream within a dream" that is repeated throughout the story clearly expresses the story development in which the team led by Cobb enters a dream at the same time, and from that dream world enters an even deeper dream... . Among the works listed above, there are several films that deal with multi-layered dreams (or multi-layered virtual worlds), but let's trace the origins of these story types.

In an interview, Nolan revealed that he was influenced by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges's collection of short stories, The Legends (1944). In the included work ``The Ruins of Ento'', a man arrives at the ruins of a circular temple and creates a ``world'' and a ``son'' in a recurring dream, but soon realizes that he too is dreaming of others. I realized that it was just an illusion.

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Before Borges, the American writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe published a poem in 1849 with the correct title, ``A Dream Within a Dream.'' There is a line in this poem that says, ``All that we see and see is but a dream within a dream.''

Although it is somewhat different from a multi-layered dream, Zhuangzi, a Chinese thinker from around the 4th century B.C., left behind a famous story called ``The Dream of the Butterfly.'' In my dream, I (Zhuangzi) turned into a butterfly and was dancing. When I woke up, I was Zhuangzi. It is unclear whether Zhuangzi dreamed that he became a butterfly or that the butterfly became Zhuangzi. This way of thinking can be said to be one of the origins of the series of works that deal with the ``uncomfort with reality'' mentioned at the beginning.

Nolan's play explores the control of time