the thing which annoyed me most about this film is that it's taken as "clever" as some great philosophy which can make people think, as in "wow mind blowing a dream within a dream within a dream wow!" and also focuses a bit on lucid dreaming (being aware that you are asleep and able to control your dreams). However I found it annoying throughout the entire film that the ideas behind the film are fundamentally immensely incorrect.

This was the same problem in the film the Matrix, the idea that the unconscious mind is a part of "us" and we can tap into it to control our world. It isn't a part of the individual "us", certainly not one which we have power over. We are our conscious selves, we're influenced by the unconsciousness, but we do not define ourselves by our unconsciousness and can't control it, we simply define ourselves as our conscious selves, our conscious thoughts, our sub-conscious influences our conscious mind. We can attempt to influence our sub-conscious with what we expose our consciousness to, but all of the general philosophy is incorrect in kind of egotistically assuming that "we" are the entirety of our minds including all unconscious aspects. This is the reason why the spoon bending in the matrix cant work in real life, even though many of the concepts of the matrix are correct, for example the idea that our consciousness is living in a world which is created sub-consciously, but we can't consciously manipulate this projected world and bend a spoon in half just for realising this, because it's not a projection of the consciousness but of the sub-conscious, so to try to consciously bend the spoon is out of our control, showing that the sub-conscious projection has superiority over the consciousness, in reality the consciousness can't demand the sub-conscious to change this projection no matter how hard we try. This is a major flaw in a lot of philosophical buddhist existentialism I have encountered. The inability to realise the humbling idea that we are symbiotic life forms, both physically and mentally, and that we consciously are not entirely in control but a fragment of the entirety.

The same error occurs in Inception, the film mentions the unconscious mind frequently, it constantly presents the idea that every aspect of the mind entirely belongs to ourselves (in other words all belongs to the conscious part of the mind), rather than the correct idea that our minds are actually in many different parts, sub-conscious is perhaps a huge generalisation (it actually covers every aspect of the mind which is not our conscious mind we're aware of and have direct control over) and some sub-conscious parts are actually superior over the conscious (in other words superior over "us"). We, consciously, are not completely in power, but there is a higher subconscious mind if you like which dictates our thoughts and which we don't have control over, we are in essence a slave to this. Something the Matrix almost got spot on but got wrong in parts where it showed that you can consciously break out of this mental prison. Something which Inception also got wrong in how it talked about subconsciousness.

And in fact when lucid dreaming you are NOT unconscious, you are in a state of consciousness whilst still asleep, aware that any crossover between your thoughts running wild and being able to think consciously doesn't strictly make sense. You are able to sleep in a state of semi-consciousness, conscious enough to be able to focus on any aspect of the dream to change it how you like.

I did not find this film to be smart, it did not make me think (more than oh it made the same kind of mistake as the matrix philosophy which I'd already previously thought about), did not awe me with philosophy, but it just annoyed me with how juvenile the films take on unconsciousness is and how incorrect I think it is. It probably could have been so much more and explored ideas that could have stunned me, but it fell completely flat. Even in the DVD extras some professor of dreams? Or something, talks about this, and this person too annoyed me with what they said because I think they just don't get it, don't get what subconsciousness and consciousness really is.

That is my take on it, I might sound crazy but, I disagree strongly with any of the fundamental ideas behind the films interpretation of what unconsciousness actually is, every time "unconsciousness" or the "subconscious mind" was mentioned it annoyed me because I disagreed with what was being said, I did not at all find it a clever film with clever concepts and fresh philosophical ideas.