I believe that I have watched more movies in the theatre this year than any other in my life. Working on the road has few advantages but having nothing better to do than to take in a noon matinee on Sunday’s has become a welcome distraction.

I started seeing the trailer for Inception months ago and wasn’t too impressed. But once you’ve seen most everything currently playing, the options become considerably narrow and so last week I watched it.

Wow, what a great movie!

Despite it’s strong box office, the critics were none too kind – which just goes to show that most movie critics don’t live in the same dimension as me.

I’ve often noticed that movie reviews and my evaluation of those movies are complete opposites and it never occurred to me to wonder why that was so, at least not until I read, 7 Reasons Why Techies Love Inception. Of course being a geek will lead you to stand in line for the latest Star Trek movie tickets, but Inception wasn’t really promoted as a Sci-Fi thriller. But as Hagel points out, it’s a successful mash-up of multiple genres:

“The movie combines science fiction, espionage, con games and action movie elements, with requisite car chases and gun battles, spiced up by some excellent special effects”

There’s nothing particularly profound to take away from the movie, no deep messaging like with Avatar, though there was one observation that I had never before considered and now I can’t get it out of my head. Without being too much of a spoiler, the movie involves dreaming – and includes the ability for multiple people to share a single dream which leads to frequent uncertainty about what is real and what is a dream.

When Leonardo DiCaprio introduces Ellen Page to the process the two are together somewhere else. When she realizes they are dreaming, and not really standing outside a Parisian café, she asks him how she can know when she’s in a dream. DiCaprio asked her, “how did we get here?” a question she couldn’t answer. Dreams, he told her, always start somewhere but you never know how you got there, the dream picks up from that point in time and moves along. In a vivid dream you may remember being in a baseball stadium with your friends, but you can’t remember waking up that morning, getting dressed, and later driving to the ball park, etc.

In that strange way, dreams are a specific detail without the background to fully understand everything that’s going on around them. It’s little wonder that waking after a particularly heavy dream period leaves us feeling a bit confused and befuddled, at least until we become fully awake.

Now today, I plan on seeing the new movie Salt.

That way, if I do a little dreaming, it might be about Angelina Jolie!