For me, reality is something both subjective and objective. What I mean is that objective reality, say the existence of the physical universe, does not necessarily depend on subjectivity to be real. But then, subjective reality, say the experience of an emotion, impulse or dream, doesn't necessarily depend on objective reality for its existence. The subjective world is as real as the objective world. Both have their own reality. One is not "more real" than the other. But when subjectivity trumps objectivity, or vice-versa, we get into trouble. When hallucinations or delusions, for example, become so real for a person that they overpower and nullify objective reality, we call this dangerous state of mind "psychosis." And when objective reality totally dominates subjective reality, we lose touch with who we really are. Interiority and exteriority are two sides of the same coin we collectively call reality. Interiority is associated with introversion and subjectivity; exteriority with objectivity and extraversion. Too much of either can become pathological. (See my prior posting on C.G. Jung's psychological types.)

Inception pays respect to the powerful reality of dreams. In the film, the main infiltrators of the dreamworld (along with the audience) tend to become so confused between outer and inner reality, dreaming and waking, that one of the only means they have of distinguishing between the two is by carrying with them a "totem": something they can use to tell them whether they are still dreaming or not. For Cobb, Leonardo DiCaprio's character, it is a tiny metal top: if it eventually slows and topples after spinning it, he is presumably awake; if it just kept on turning into perpetuity, he is still asleep. Another problem faced by the "dream team" is how not only to deeply penetrate the dreamer's unconscious, but how to find their way back from the "underworld" to the outer world of waking reality. This is an archetypal motif found in many myths, including that of Theseus venturing into the labyrinth to meet the Minotaur.(See my previous post.) It is no coincidence that DiCaprio's female (Ellen Page) co-star's name is Ariadne: it was Ariadne who, after falling in love with the young Greek hero Theseus, secretly provides him with both a sword and ball of string to help him defeat the Minotaur and find his way back out of the winding, dark, maze-like labyrinth and into the light. Dreams, which Freud famously referred to as the via regia, the royal road into the unconscious, can, like the unconscious itself, be perilous places to dwell too long in, precisely due to their sometimes immensely seductive and convincing reality.

What are dreams? We all dream repeatedly each night, though most tend not to remember much detail about their dreams. Even when we do recall a vivid dream, or some partial dream fragment, we may dismiss it out of hand as meaningless, insignificant or ridiculous. A random misfiring of neurons. Or a "bit of undigested meat," as Ebeneezer Scrooge rationalizes his soon-to-be-life-altering series of dreams on Christmas Eve. (See my prior post.) But dreams have been highly valued and taken seriously for tens of thousands of years by our ancestors as prophetic, cryptic messages sent by spirits, daimons, God or gods. In this sense, the dream world, distinct from the external, material world, is a spiritual, immaterial, irrational reality through which divine, daimonic, transpersonal powers indirectly communicate with us.  Dreams gained modern credibility when Sigmund Freud, in 1900, published his groundbreaking book The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud postulated that dreams indeed do have symbolic psychological (rather than supernatural or spiritual) significance, and are in fact disguised messages sent not by divine or demonic entities but rather by our own personal "unconscious." For Freud, dreams were mainly masked, metaphorical manifestations of wish fulfillment, containing, in deliberately disguised form, those unacceptable instinctual (especially sexual) strivings and impulses that could not be consciously expressed or satisfied. In studying dreams, his own and those of his patients, Freud discovered, explored and mapped a relatively unknown new world: a mysterious, surreal interior realm radically different than outer reality, with radically different rules, laws, language and logic.

Upon first reading Freud's revolutionary publication about dreams, the then twenty-five-year-old Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung was deeply impressed, later seeking Freud out as a mentor and collaborating closely with him for many years on the early development of psychoanalysis. Eventually, Jung came to understand dreams somewhat differently. He came to see them as much more than mere wish fulfillment, though he never denied this partial function. But Jung considered the dream a relatively undisguised attempt on the part of the unconscious to compensate the conscious personality or provide guidance and direction regarding our psychological development or what he termed individuation. For Jung, dreams symbolically convey the vast, collective wisdom of the unconscious rather than merely its frustrated libidinal desires. And the unconscious itself was perceived by Jung as possessing an "objective" reality every bit as powerful, palpable and important as so-called outer reality. Jung once made this conviction unequivocally clear to his incredulous student Marie-Louise von Franz when he asserted that a particular patient of hers who dreamed about going to the moon, really was on the moon. What did Jung mean by insisting on this seeming nonsense?