watching Inception again

11:41 PM 1/28/11

If this seems to jump from topic to topic somewhat it's because I'm half watching the movie Inception while writing, and writing whatever I think of. 'Disjointed' would be the word for this.

The last Mike's Video Rental in this area closed just recently. I found out a couple days ago. People on the forum were talking about Inception, and I decided I wanted to see it again. I wasn't committed to buying it, but I didn't mind renting it. And I've been renting the old-fashioned way, by walking into a video store. I haven't gotten onto Netflix yet.

Netflix isn't the only reason video stores are closing. And it isn't because of people using YouTube or 'illegal file sharing programs' or any other thing that they might blame it on. (This applies to the music industry too.) Every time people talk about 'competition' being the reason why some kind of store is closing, I get frustrated, because I want to tell them that it's caused by more than just competition. If it were only competition, there would be some way to counter-compete and fight back. Wal-Mart didn't merely out-compete all the mom and pop stores that closed after Wal-Mart moved in. There are forces that give power to Wal-Mart and every other 'new business' that seems to be outcompeting old businesses.

Borrowed money is one of those forces. Also, rising land prices and high property taxes making it unaffordable to sell things from a 'brick and mortar' business.

But that's not what I was going to talk about.

I was going to talk about why I like the movie Inception (which I went out and bought, as soon as I found out that Mike's Video was now closed) when it's a movie about mind control from the attackers' point of view. Why would I like a movie where the bad guys win?

This movie is a 'different take' on the idea of mind control. Some movies about mind control make it seem like only the government would ever do it, or that it's always for government-related purposes. This movie shows the corporate purposes. (I don't like saying 'corporations are evil' either, because their power comes from, once again, borrowed money and other artificial things created by government.)

This movie feels more like what I experience. The people talking to me seem to be like hackers. Some of them have been like churches or religious people. Some of them seem to be police. Sometimes they seem like therapists. I don't know who they are. But Inception feels like what happens to me.

What's bad about this movie? There will be people who watch the movie and say, 'Hey, that looks like fun. I want to do that. Controlling people's dreams is cool.' Then there will be other people who say, 'All of reality is a dream, and the only way to escape is to die.' I don't want anybody to believe either of those things.

***
I'm watching this movie again, and I caught the moment when it happened. When Cobb gets lost in the dream - I caught the exact moment when he lost it.

It was when he first met Yusuf. They went downstairs and they saw the people who were all there to dream, voluntarily. Then he let Yusuf give him a 'test' of the drug that they were going to use.

He went to sleep for a couple seconds and saw Mal talking to him. Then he suddenly snapped awake and Yusuf said, 'Sharp, no?' as in, the dream that he experienced while taking this drug was a clear and sharp dream. I guess that's what he means, unless he means that he poked him with something sharp. Then he's at the sink washing his face and he still sees the curtains blowing and Mal's silhouette. He's not sure if he's awake or not. That's the moment when he's lost it. He's actually still asleep. He did not wake up when Yusuf put him to sleep in that basement.

The word 'disappointment' was on the markerboard behind Eames as he was talking about how he was going to impersonate Peter Browning. But Thomas Fischer had never mentioned yet about how his father said he was 'disappointed.' That's a sign that maybe Cobb was already dreaming.

In the beginning of the movie he spun the top and it eventually toppled, but in the end of the movie it seemed to keep spinning. He might have been still asleep.

***
This fits with something I've experienced. There is this horrible thought that has gone through my mind sometimes. Sometimes the voices talking to me claim that they are asleep and they can't wake up. I've wondered if they were people in a coma. Someone is projecting them into my mind and making me talk to them, but they say they can't help talking to me, they can't stop themselves from talking to me, and they say they need help.

One interpretation is that somebody somewhere really is trapped asleep and their thoughts are being projected into me and I am forced to hear them and interact with them.

Another theory is that the electrical signals caused by the attacks are making another part of my brain talk to me. However, I don't believe that theory. That theory was suggested only recently because I read a news article about 'alien hand syndrome,' where a woman had a lobotomy and it caused her to have a conflict between her left and right hands. The left hand would act on its own, doing things independently, while the right hand was trying to do something else.

I am rejecting the idea that some other part of my own mind is talking to me. The voices are something electrical and unnatural. They do not come from within my own mind. I remember what life used to feel like, years ago. There were no voices talking to me from other parts of my brain, not like this. My own thoughts felt very different from this. 'Voices whispering' isn't the way the voice thinks. I don't think that anyone will convince me that the voices are just another part of myself, that they belong to me or originate within me.

There often seem to be negotiations going on between different people controlling me. I don't know if this is real or just a strategy/tactic that they are using. I often called it the 'good cop / bad cop' tactic. You bond with the people who seem to be nice to you, because the other person was really mean to you. That seems to happen to me.

***
Another thing that I like about this movie is that it's about freeing an innocent man. Cobb didn't mean to kill Mal in the real world. He meant to wake her up from the dream and he didn't know that it would cause her to commit suicide in real life. I usually like movies about freeing an innocent person. (However, he's not 'innocent,' because he's a dream extractor, but that's a separate issue. I haven't even begun talking about how to prosecute people for controlling other people's thoughts and dreams.)

He didn't kill Mal - she killed herself - and, based on my own experience, you can't just give someone an idea once - you have to give them the idea constantly, over and over again, and in order to control them and force them to do what you want, you have to constantly control them 24 hours a day. You can't just inspire them to have some idea and then let them go on their own. If they take an idea that easily it means they were already going that direction themselves.

Then again, reading a book can change MY mind for a long time afterwards. But it doesn't really change me unless I am being attacked. Most of the things that happen to me after a book result from being attacked and controlled. I know this because 'they' constantly replay words that I've read recently and bombard me with whatever I've been reading. Some of the change in beliefs is real, and some of it is from being attacked constantly.

This movie also reminds me of how people who have used hallucinogenic drugs can come out of the experience feeling as though normal life isn't amazing enough anymore. (Or any drug, not just hallucinogenic drugs.) Some people commit suicide after using drugs, but that's a direct effect of the drugs - it isn't psychological, it isn't because 'life isn't good enough anymore,' it's because the drug itself, and the withdrawal, mess you up so badly that you become suicidal, and it is a direct effect of the drug and it has nothing to do with psychology.

That's different from this movie because in the movie Mal committed suicide after she had lived about 50 years in a dream world, and when she woke up, something was wrong and life wasn't what it used to be anymore. In the movie it was portrayed as 'psychological,' although actually if they were using drugs they could have been drug effects. If this were happening in real life I would be asking what drugs they had been using and I would assume the suicide was the result of drug use, not 'psychological beliefs.'

I worry a little bit when I write blogs like this because I'm talking about ideas that are not yet finished or not yet accurate. I'm just blurting out whatever I think of. I don't want anyone to take this as my final position or my final opinion forever and ever.

I have really enjoyed trying to learn how to use the other Jungian functions. 'Thinking' is what I would use to clarify my ideas.

Today I stopped at Barnes & Noble and picked up a magazine about eastern religions. I don't remember what it was called. I was reading about Dharma. Dharma is an abstract concept. Abstract religious ideas like dharma are the type of ideas that come from using intuition with feeling. The whole article I read was one abstract concept after another. It was about good and bad, about our place in the universe, about our unique identities. Normally I wouldn't even read an article like that. I would skim it, look for pretty pictures, see if anything in it was even remotely useful to me, and then dismiss it. Today I still didn't feel that it was 'useful,' but I read it to learn what it felt like to use abstraction with good/bad feeling evaluation.

I was wondering last night what the N-F functions would imagine. They might ask questions like, What is good? What is bad? Can people 'like' something that's 'bad?' If they do, are they bad people, or are their souls corrupted? And so on. That's the beginning of what the N-F functions would think about in childhood.

***
Something that I don't like about this movie, or any other movie for that matter, is that they make it seem like everything that you do with your mind is 'psychological.' That's more interesting in a movie than the real truth. The real truth is that most of the things that go wrong with your mind are physical. They are caused by drugs, chemicals, viruses, or any other physical injury.

non je ne regrette rien - that's the name of the song they play. I want to find out what that means. Regret? Guilt? I'll look up the translation.

When I first started getting attacked, I went through a series of 'beliefs' about what was happening to me. One of the 'beliefs' that they tried on me first was the belief that I was psychic, and in my dreams, I was wandering out of my body and going and attacking other dreamers and forcing them to do things in their dreams. I knew about lucid dreaming and they were trying to make me believe that dreams were 'psychic' and that it was 'my fault' that I was doing bad things to other people in their dreams, hurting them and torturing them.

I knew that wasn't true. I decided that every aspect of the dreams was fake, that somebody else was doing it to me, that it was completely artificial and I had no control over any of it at all, that shared dreaming was not possible. I thought that psychic powers might possibly exist but they had no resemblance to what I was experiencing. If they ever existed in the world before radio was invented, they would have felt very different from the 'psychic powers' we experience today.

This is getting longer and going nowhere, so I should just post it and get on with it. I'm supposed to be asleep. I took a nap after work and they woke me up after only a couple hours. I need to sleep more but I don't feel like I can fall asleep.

Anyway the idea was that you can't hurt other people by attacking them in your dreams. If you experience lucid dreaming, it's fake, and you don't really control it. If another lucid dreamer tells you that they dreamed about you, that's fake too. It wasn't really you and you're not to blame. It's not some part of your subconscious getting out of control or doing things you don't want it to do. It's totally artificial and the dreams were not created by you. They were created by the attackers.