Really Reality?

Movies and I have a love/hate relationship.

I guess you could say that I'm picky or hard to please, but that's not exactly the way I choose to see it. I prefer to think of myself as an optimist, a firm believer in the grand possibilities of film which apparently very few [and I mean verrrrry few] directors have been able to grasp [Marc Webb, don't worry, you're not included in this.]

However, this past weekend I went and saw Inception merely because it was all over the Internet as "the movie" to see. I wasn't fazed by the craze. I don't usually agree with most movie critiques [otherwise I'd be nominating Eclipse as movie of the year], however, I insisted that Grahm and I pay the $9 fee [well actually he paid] to see what all the fuss was about [and well, let's face it, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was in it. An automatic win.]

I wasn't disappointed, but I wasn't exactly enthralled either.

Regardless of my feelings, I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion afterward.I had so many questions when Grahm and I were walking out of Hollywood Theaters. My head was throbbing so hard, I thought my brain might fall out of my butt from over thinking.

Questions, questions, questions flooded my mind. How do I know this world is real? Am I merely someone else's projection? How do ideas pop into our heads, anyway? Can inspiration always be traced back to another source, the inception of another?

And of course, this posed the much larger, deeper question:

Is reality, really, what we think it is?

The most interesting part [in my grand opinion] from this crazy, bizarrely over-complicated movie was all the men who came together every day to dream. They had become addicted to the escape, so much so that dreaming had become their only reality.

"They come here to wake up."

So I'm wondering, do we all have it backwards? Did those men have it right? Is dreaming our reality, and living simply the stage in between?

After all, everything in our dreams is better, bigger, more real than, well, real life. The colors are more vivid, the danger more intense, the memories more tangible. No wonder these men chose to live their lives in "escape" mode, fleeing from the boundaries of this world and boldly singing "I Dreamed a Dream" with as much vibrato as Susan Boyle.

Folks, what if we lived the way we dream? What if we weren't afraid of the consequences, unswayed by the possibility of failure? In essence, that's what I enjoyed most about this movie. Not only are the dreamers allowed to conjure up fantastical worlds, they were also able to do the impossible, what the rest of the world can only "dream" about.

And that, dear friends, is a pretty excellent way to live.