
Time is an infinite progression of events in which reality never stops, changes, or gets interrupted. Film directors Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese challenge this concept with their movies Inception and Shutter Island, respectively. In both motion pictures, time is tampered with through the use of dreams. The plots, while confusing at times, are masterworks of complexity that play with conceptions of reality through the use of these dreams. Leonardo DiCaprio, the main character in both films, displays his incredible acting skills as he portrays two different techniques of portraying time and manipulating reality. In Inception, his character Dom Cobb, intentionally dives into dreams while attempting to harbor the reality of his unconscious mind. Teddy Daniels, DiCaprio’s character in Shutter Island, is unaware of the passage of time as well as the implementations of his life. The passage of time and alluded dreams these characters’ experience directly influences their perception of reality. While the influence of time and dreams are depicted differently in both of these films, each motion picture creates complex delusions, that question life and sanity. 

In Inception, Cobb and his team of skilled con-artists enter other people’s dreams in order to extract information from their unconscious minds. Along with his complicated job, Cobb has a complex background. His own wife sabotaged him, taking him away from his kids and after she did, taking her own life- the reasons for which will be discussed later. In the beginning of the movie, however, Cobb is offered a deal. If he can plant an idea in the mind of a corporate business man, rather than extract information, he will be able to return to his kids. While in the beginning this is deemed as an impossible feat, Cobb needs to risk it in order to hold on to a little bit of his reality, and ultimately, his sanity. This leverage is the first thing that indicates Cobb’s dark past. As they go through the task of planting this idea, Cobb’s unconscious becomes more uncontrollable as they progress deeper into their mission. This idea of an unstable, hidden reality is displayed in Shutter Island as well.

 In Shutter Island, the plot centers around Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshal who comes to the island to investigate a supposed missing person. While this case is eventually solved, Daniels continues to search for a man named Andrew Laeddis, who he believes killed his wife. As time passes, Daniel’s begins to display signs of instability- he has a constant migraine and continually dreams about his wife and kids, implying that he is hiding a dark unconscious. In the end, it is revealed that Teddy Daniels himself is the insane Andrew Laeddis. In his real life, his wife drowned their three kids in the lake behind their house and when he learns about this, he kills her. Laeddis created the persona and alternative life as a way to run away from reality. While this deception can be compared in both Inception and Shutter Island, the difference is the use of dreams and how each character confronts reality. 

Dreams are depicted differently in each film. In Inception, dreams can be created and manipulated no matter who the host is. There are particular measures that Cobb and his team have to take in order to enter and exit the dream safely. Five minutes in reality is equivalent to an hour in a dream, so if their physical bodies stay sedated for too long they could be stuck in that particular level of consciousness for years in dream time. In order to exit a dream, a “kick” has to occur. This is when they either die in a dream or the dream comes crashing down. Using their master plan to plant the idea of corruption as an example, they plan three parts to this mission in which they will have to “kick up” in each of them. Each part is a different level of consciousness, a deeper level of dreaming. These “kicks” are based on the construction of the dream and how much time has passed. To have enough time in each level before the “kick” occurs, Cobb and his team have to be sedated for ten hours; this allows them to spend a great amount of time extracting all of the information they need in order to properly plant the idea they created. After planning a ten-hour plane ride in reality and creating each level of consciousness, Cobb and his team enter the first realm of the dream. The beginning of this deception poses a new threat to Cobb himself. As his past holds terrible recollections, these dreams Cobb and his team put themselves in become more unstable the deeper they go, directly comparing to Cobb’s denial of his responsibility for his wife’s suicide. While Inception gives the idea that dreams hold secrets of time and reality, Shutter Island uses dreams to reveal Teddy Daniels’ true identity and his obscuration of reality. However, there is one particular moment in which Shutter Island closely compares to Inception. Daniels suffers from an extreme migraine which puts him into a deep sleep. In his dream, he passes bodies frozen on the ground. He stops at a woman and a young child. Suddenly, the child awakes and says, “You should’ve saved me. You should’ve saved all of us.” This indicates the guilt Daniels feels about not saving his children. The dream changes and Daniels is in the study of the doctors on Shutter Island. There, he encounters his perception of Andrew Laeddis. In this same scene, he comes across Rachel as the woman who he came to Shutter Island to find, accompanied by the same young girl who was frozen on the ground along with two other young boys. They are dead and covered in blood, signifying the crime that took their lives. Daniels’ guilt is concealed by his own deception. After helping Rachel place the dead kids in the lake where they were drowned, Daniels wakes up, similar to the “kick” in Inception. Although he is supposed to be back in reality, his dead wife appears and warns him about Laeddis still being alive and in Shutter Island. Still under the deception that he is not Laeddis, Daniels physically wakes up, finally returning to reality. The “kicks” both characters experience present the passage of time in different ways. In Inception, they represent the time passing within each dream, rather than actual reality, which compares to how long Cobb feels he has been holding the guilt the death of his wife. Even though it has only been a few years in real life, time is mentally longer to him because he has spent most of his time in dreams, therefore his guilt and denial seem endless. Each kick gets him one step closer to confronting this reality. In Shutter Island, the two “kicks” represent how deep Daniels’ self-deception has gone over the past two years. Even though these “kicks” represent something a little different in each film, every “kick” is one step that each character takes, unconsciously getting closer to confronting their pasts. These dreams and conceptions of time allow both characters to discover how they’ve manipulated their realities. Daniels and Cobb are similar in the way that their dark, unconscious problems interfere with their perception of reality. Dreams, whether consciously created or not, hold things that represent reality and cannot be controlled. Time within these dreams influences how deep or complex a deception can be. The perceptions of time, places, people, and things are more than just perceptions. They hold an extensive library of unfathomable, unconscious issues of reality. With the help of these dreams and time, Cobb and Daniels both refuse to accept their true lives and they deceive themselves into a dream-like state of thinking. 

In their dreams, the wives of Cobb and Daniels lead them to think that everything in their lives is fine. In both cases, however, this is far from the truth. In Inception, Cobb harbors his unconscious perception of his wife. Cobb and his wife used to explore how far they could go within levels of dreams. They ended up stuck in their own created world for 50 years. Within the dream, they killed themselves in order to get back to reality. His wife, however, believed she was still in a dream. Through her insanity, she thought their kids were perceptions and urged Cobb to commit suicide in order to “kick up” once again. Ultimately, her own deception overcame her; she made it so Cobb could no longer see their kids in an attempt to get him to join her while she jumped off a building, ending her own life. Cobb blames himself for her inception of insanity. He was the reason she was exposed to the dream-state for so long. He was not able to confront this guilt, so he tucked it away in his unconscious mind, hiding his wife in a place deep within him. 

Cobb’s deception of reality is different from Daniels’ in that he is aware of his inability to cope with his life. Daniels’ identity, however, was hidden from himself. He had no idea he was actually Andrew Laeddis. Laeddis’ wife, Rachel, ironically the name of the inmate he was sent there to find, was a manic depressive. As mentioned before, the day he came home to find that she had drowned their three children, he killed her. Over a period of two years, he is sent to Shutter Island and convinces himself that he is a U.S. Marshal named Teddy Daniels. The whole scheme of Teddy Daniels’ being sent to Shutter Island was one last attempt at bringing Laeddis back to reality. While Cobb eventually confronts his perception of his wife and forgives himself for her death, Laeddis/Daniels has a different way of accepting his reality. At the end of the movie he says, “Which would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man?” This implies that he is aware of what has happened to him but would rather accept the fate of insanity- death. Both of these films insinuate that dreams influence perceptions of reality. The more time spent in dreams or the more in depth they go, the harder it is to keep a grasp on sanity. 

While time, dreams, and perception of reality are the main themes in each of these films, they are each portrayed differently with high levels of complexity. Each of the dreams in Inception represent a different period of time in the mission to plant the idea as well as times in Cobb’s life. Just like in real life, the dreams are related to the events that occur over time. These dreams, however, can influence perceptions of time and reality. By questioning what dreams mean and exploring how time has effected what is dreamt about, it is easy to get lost outside of reality. Like Andrew Laeddis, dreams can push someone further from sanity and convince them that the horrors in their life are not their own. There is a moment in Laeddis’ dream in which the smoke of the cigarette he has between his lips goes backwards into the stick of narcotic. This particular scene represents the passage of time within the dreams of both Inception and Shutter Island. Even though time moves forward in the realities Cobb and Daniels created for themselves, they are actually confronting their past. The genius concepts presented throughout both of these films provide insight into how time within real life and within dreams can influence the mind’s perception of reality. Perhaps reality isn’t what people think it is. Perhaps it is simply a dream. 