WARNINGS: (1) more “Inception” spoilers (2) more incoherent, meandering blog posts

It occurs to me that I only watched “Inception” last weekend, but I feel like it’s been occupying vast areas of my brain for much longer than that. It’s probably because I’ve always been fascinated by dreams, especially lucid dreaming. I could totally relate to the idea of building cities in your dreams. For a while, I kept having recurrent dreams set in the same unreal city, a weird amalgam of tattered memories from L.A., NYC, Chicago, Las Vegas, San Diego, and even Banff National Park in Alberta and the California Central Coast, all stitched together in Frankenstein-like fashion. I’ve even drawn maps of this imaginary place, everything so eerily familiar but so bizarrely off. But isn’t that the very essence of dreaming?

But the aspect of the movie I started thinking about was the team. The Architect. The Forger. The Point Man. The Chemist. The Extractor (or Inceptor, or maybe Inceptionist?) Even the Tourist. And the Mark. There have been interpretations based on how such a dream team mimics the core team required to make a movie: the screenwriter, the actor, the producer, the technical expert, the director, the studio chief, the audience.

Then I think of the teams I’ve been part of. A team at a teaching hospital is comprised of the Attending, the Resident, 1-2 Interns, an occasional subintern, and 1-3 medical students. A code team consists of the team leader, the bagger, the chest compressor, the meds pusher, and occasionally, a shocker. (Usually this is, respectively, a physician, a respiratory therapist, a nurse, and a pharmacist, and sometimes another nurse, but you can’t always be picky when someone decides to die unexpectedly. And now that I think about it, I have never led a code where (1) the patient hadn’t been predicted to die hours before they coded and (2) where we had to bust out the electricity. But I digress.)

In the OR, there’s the surgeon, the assistant, the anesthesiologist, the scrub nurse, and the circulating nurse. In the peds ER, when you’re doing a procedure, you’re usually going to need at least a holder, a hander-of-things, and the guy/gal with the needle and/or knife.

There are more baroque team compositions (like what’s required in “Ocean’s Eleven”) There are much simpler team combinations (bad cop, good cop)

But the team structure that I find infiltrating my thoughts with disturbing frequency is a MMORPG team. The simplest division of duties (as all you WoW players would know) is tank, DPS, heals, but there are a lot more roles than that, you just don’t usually need them to run 5-man instances where everyone is overgeared. There are specialist roles like crowd control, buffer, debuffer (although these tend to be secondary to the primary division of duties.) And then there are subclasses of the primary divisions—single-target tank, AoE tank, melee DPS, ranged DPS, single-target heals, group heals, etc.

I find myself applying these divisions of duties to extremely disparate situations. During the NBA playoffs, I was trying to shoehorn player positions into MMORPG division of duties. To what do centers, point guards, shooting guards, power forwards, and small forwards map to?

But back to the dream team. There are a lot of ways that dreaming in “Inception” doesn’t really fit dreaming IRL. For one thing, I think starting shallow then going deeper is rather rare. It’s far more common to start deep, then go shallow, via the phenomenon of false awakening. Still, I do know that people have—in their dreams—gone to sleep and dreamt while in their dream, so it’s not like it never happens. And I also wonder how multiple consciousnesses interact with one another.

Clinical dream studies rely on the ability of the dreamer to accept outside output, so this isn’t that far-fetched. There are studies where the researcher has trained their subjects to dream lucidly, so that the dreamer can not only receive input from the researcher, they can send data back to the researcher via eye movements and other subtle motions.

But I kind of wonder: does a group dream sort of work like an MMORPG instance? The host dreamer is obviously analogous to the game server, but do all the other dreamers actually instantiate within the host themselves, or do they merely run the equivalent of a game client in their own subconsciousness, and relay bits and pieces of information via the Dream Machine to the host? If it’s the former (everyone runs on the same machine, so to speak), then how do the interpolated dreamers manage to control what they look like to the host? If it’s the latter (the host coordinates all the players, but each player is running in on an independent machine)—and this seems more likely, given that Cobb’s own subconsciousness tends to go out of control from time to time—then how do they keep their manifestations synchronized, especially when they go up and down levels?

What I mean is, when a dreamer sleeps in one level, thereby passing their consciousness on to a deeper level, while another dreamer stays in that one level, how does the dreamer who stayed behind manage to keep the scene stable?

More specifically, once you go to sleep, what prevents my subconsciousness (or maybe even the host’s subconsciousness) from taking hold of your projection on one level while your consciousness is a level deeper?

In other words, how does the software deal with zombie toons, I guess?