Chris and I just got back from seeing Inception, the latest Hollywood foray into lucid dreaming. The twist here is in planting an idea by hacking into some else’s mind and manipulating their dream state.

My dream state is pretty tame compared to all the machine guns, car chases and explosions that go on in Hollywood’s sleep. “Chris,” I said, “are your dreams like this?” Apparently they are. Is this a guy thing? Mine are less like Playstation games and more like Alice in Wonderland. I am too female and too old to enjoy car chases and machine guns.

The plot was convoluted. Ellen Page, the spunky tiny teen of Juno fame, played her latest spunky tiny post-teen rather poorly. She was there simply as a prop to restate the complex plot to the confused viewer – “So, tell me again what you are planning to do?”

There were two things that I pulled from the movie that I found interesting. The first is when the dying rich father says to his son – “no, you are wrong I wasn’t disappointed that you weren’t like me, I was disappointed that you tried to be.” That was decently deep for an action film.

The other nugget that perked me up was the repeated comment that if you think people are staring at you (paranoia) you are actually in a dream state. The script claimed that you can get a better handle on knowing which state you are in by carrying with you a talisman. If you check and it’s there, you know you aren’t dreaming. (Can anyone out there in bloggerland validate this idea?)

Since Chris earlier today claimed that people were staring at him for some trivial way he wore his belt, I simply reminisced with him about the comment from the movie and left it at that. I am learning to plant ideas with someone else and slowly let them germinate. In the past, particularly in relation to Chris’s crisis, I was inclined to immediately take up a point, discuss it and use it as a jumping off point for broader lessons in life. Now I prefer to keep my mouth shut and let ideas grow.