It's kinda the point of the whole thing. You need to find your own meaning to it, and live with the bit of doubt as well.
As far as I have seen, the most common opinion is that the wobble the top makes just before the screen cuts to black means it's reality, though another logical solution would be that he has been in a dream world since testing the better anaesthetic.
Personally, I don't particularly care. I do think it's reality, but even if it isn't, it won't matter to Cobb, because he has finally found peace. He's with his kids again, everything is alright and he doesn't doubt it himself. He leaves the spinning top, because it truly does not matter to him any more. If it's a dream, it's a dream he would rather be in than reality, and if it's reality, there will never be a dream as pleasant. And, to me, that is what matters more in this case.
But, you probably ought to make your own mind to this. After all, it does change the movie quite a bit, depending on which ending you believe in.
That movie was complicated enough as it was for a cliff-hanger ending. Anyhow, Cen pretty much what needed to be said: Interpret it the way you want to.
Anyway, to give this post some meaning, INCEPTION IN MATH.
I prefer to believe that the spinning top topples over. I've even read that some people hear it fall over in the credits, but I think they are just hearing what they want to.
Well, one other thing to take into account is that totems might not work in your own dreams, where you are the one in control. After all, that is the point of making a totem completely personal to you. You are the one who knows how it works, what it does to show reality and what it doesn't. If you are in your dream, alone, no one having manipulated or created the surroundings, no one in there with you, technically it should show everything as reality, since you are the one creating the dream. Still calls for some kind of acceptance from Cobb, which might be bittersweet to the viewer, but might be the better of the results outside of it being reality.
Wait, when did they say that? I can't remember anyone being inside their own dream without someone else being cognitive on their own free will with them.
I believe they explain it when introducing Ariadne to the whole concept. I will look it up in the movie in a moment when I go for another cup of tea, but until then, well, doesn't it make sense? If it's your dream, made in your own head, how is the characteristics of your totem going to be wrong from what you know? It's not like you forget such things just because you are dreaming. Like Saito, when he falls on the carpet, and it doesn't feel right.
The purpose of the totem is to determine you are not in someone else's dream. As quoted from Arthur: "That way, when you look at your totem, you know beyond a doubt that you're not in someone else's dream." So, for all we know, Cobb could be caught in his own dream, and just doesn't care anyway.
Which reminds me, I believe Limbo might work differently, since it's on such a deep level of dreaming that it has become some kind of collective sublevel of subconsciousness, that you are not in your own dreamscape any more, but in the entire human population's dreamscape, but that is just theory.
But, you probably ought to make your own mind to this.
I have now the reasonings are simple now that I think of it.
my theory is that he is in a dream but his totem doesn't work because it is his dream and he controls the gravity of things. thus explaining the toppling over but on the other hand he doesn't care because he is with his children. some other people might say that if he was in dream his wife would be there. what I think is that he finally back with his children making his mind at peace with her death. also at the beginning he is in limbo with the asian guy (sorry can't remember his name). this means that the movie ended in a dream and he had died some way in the dream. thus when he died in limbo it is just like nothing had happened because of the time span in the dream he was in. you see in the last dream in which he had died a life time was like one minute in the real world. so he was in a dream the whole time until he finally woke up on the plane and went home to his children.
just in case you are back tracking that yes I did change my solution in the end.
some other people might say that if he was in dream his wife would be there. what I think is that he finally back with his children making his mind at peace with her death.
Actually, this is shown when he kills her in Limbo. He has finally come to an acceptance of her death and his own part in it, and she would not return in his dreams again like she had done at any other time (unless, presumably, if he was revisiting memories). She would be - dead, and would not haunt his dreams any more.
Big problem I have with this movie...since its release people have been calling things that are within themselves "Inception"
I do agree with this, it's kinda stupid. People keep considering the "dream within a dream" the inception, when it in fact is what they are set out to do, that is the inception. Inserting the idea of Fischer's father wanting him to make his own firm and live his own life is what the movie is about, not going deeper or being within something. That is simply the method they have to use, the same way they also used several dreamscapes in their extraction of Saito's information. They even describe it in the movie...
Big problem I have with this movie...since its release people have been calling things that are within themselves "Inception"
I totally agree! Arthur even explained that inception was the idea of placing an idea in somebody's without them being able to tell the origin of the thought.
