Comparison Of Inception And The Allegory Of The Cave

Inception and the Allegory of the Cave The movie “Inception” is a great example of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The idea that through a dream you can achieve a state of enlightenment directly relates to changing a way of thinking. The hero in the movie Cobb has demons to exercise from his former way of thinking In order to achieve his goal of “reality”. His sun or enlightenment is ridding himself of his wife Mal and showing himself the reality with Fisher. Mal represents the old way of thinking while clinging to an old ideal like the people stuck in the shadows of the cave. The cave dwellers like Mal only see a limited scope of the world and have a singular objective. Mal’s only objective is to keep Cobb in the dream like the people
People are a product of their environment and if there is no input into their world or the cave then their scope of the world is limited. The people in Inception are products of how the ones limited view of the world is perceived. If you don’t believe that your mind can be infiltrated by someone in their dreams then a mind does not adapt to the parasite or aberration within the dream. The psyche turns against anything that it deems to be foreign or unexplainable. This is the idea that people cannot change their ideals quickly because they are resistant to those changes. The projections in the dream turn against the dreamer if things don’t seem “real” or change too quickly. This is very similar to those people who are stuck in the cave who cannot accept the new ideas of the enlightened individual. The enlightened individual is plotted to be killed by his peers because the changes being proposed are so drastic and against what the status quo is that death of the individual is the only option. They the dreamer and the cave dweller are imprisoned by the shadows and their
If the hero turns toward his heart’s desire then he will never see the children which are rooted in reality. The illusion of what his wife was is a shell of her former self and not as beautifully complex and interesting as what could happen in reality. The dreamer can rail against the idea of change or go with it to create something much more satisfying. Cobb clings to the idea that he will see his children’s faces one day because he knows in his dream that he never sees their faces. Cobb thinks that his deceased wife is holding him back from achieving all his goals of being with those children. During the dream sequence he realizes that he has created the shell of what his deceased wife was during her life and that she will never be a whole or complete person. If he chooses to say with the projection of what his was is in the dream then the children he leaves behind will never know either of their parents. This is the same way that the cave dweller who returns to the cave tries to enlighten this fellow cave dwellers. They only see a projection of the world rather than all the full nuances of color and depth that is available when the sun illuminates the