INCEPTION: Hostile Dream Characters. (Warning: spoilers)

I just saw the movie Inception and had to come see what others here had to say about it. I thought the movie’s treatment of DC was fascinating. I already mentioned in another thread about my first lucid dream. I “woke up” inside my dream, up in the balcony of a theatre, where actors were playing on the stage. I watched for awhile, knew this was not reality, and at some point started clapping and telling the actors how great they were. The moment they noticed me clapping, they said, Hey, what’s she doing in here? She’s not allowed in here! And then I was kicked out, and woke up. I had lots of other lucid dreams after that, but then I was on the stage with the other actors. I tried to get them to do what I wanted them to do, but they would argue with me. I said, this is MY dream, and I will decide what the story is…and they didn’t believe me until I started making them disappear by snapping my fingers! LOL After awhile, the DC seemed to stop fighting me and let me pretty much run the show. Then I started dreaming I was in a place called Dreamland, a recurring place, and I thought maybe some of the many people around might also be real, not like the characters on the stage on the first few dreams. I wanted to move there!

the same things happen to me like 5 mins after i teleported from the place i became lucid there were like hoardes of DC attacking me, but i just thoung of it as a nazi zombie game on Call of Duty black ops and my SC made my best friend apper and we started playing nazi zombies.

wow, this is a very interesting theory. I have never actually had hostile dream characters when lucid and also never had one “kick” me out of the dream. The only thing that was even close to this was when a dream character refused to do what I told them to do. It was just until I made it loud and clear that It was my dream and I’m the boss of it, then the dream gave in and did what I said without questioning.
So I’ve experienced stubborn DC’s but not hostile ones…

Hey, wait! You cannot escape! Never run away from the dream police, you will not survive!
youtube.com/watch?v=i0Zr_C74DQU

(Sorry couldn’t resist)

Anywho, contrary to your theory of it being someone else’s dream. If these took place AFTER you saw Inception. You may have been thinking about hostile dream characters, which then spurred your SC into action, interpreting this into your dreams. If not, it may be some sort of real life issues making certain characters or authority figures in your dreams appear hostile.

This is really interesting. I’ve been kicked out of LD by DC but I’ve never got much beyond that point as I didnt even consider that I could change that part. I’ll give it a try after reading this as it would pretty much alter my whole LD experience. Ive never heard of DC backing off and letting you take control like that. I wonder if anyone else has experienced this?

I’ve never had any trouble with my DC’s in my LD’s, until I read this topic a couple of days ago. I now seriously which I hadn’t read it. Now two nights in a row I got lucid and one time I got police cars, helicopters chasing me, because I had been flying and tonight I even got arrested and was put in some lucid dreamers prison with special impenetrably glass…that really just showed me that these ‘hostile DC’s’ aren’t real or part of somebody else’s dream, but are just a result of our own fears. You’ll only get those DC’s that are trying to kick you out of a LD as a result of your own fear of the LD being ended. With other words, you can simply control them as well like any other DC and you must realize that you don’t have to let them turn your LD into just another chase dream.

I believe that hostile dc´s are projections of the parts of our psyches that wants to maintain status quo. Like the demons that attacked the Buddha as he sat and meditated.
Lucid dreaming is a powerful tool for psychological growth, but there are parts of our psyche that doesnt want healing/self-realisation. These parts can in dreams take the form of hostile dc´s.

While I have always been a natural lucid dreamer, I also have always dealt with hostile DC, usually close family members but they act completely unlike in real life. They can be somewhat conniving all the way to using violence, but my subconscious always pushes me to wake within a dream to forget I am dreaming. I never feared it would happen it just always has.

I am novice , and my lucid experience is very short.I don’t know when i will see lucid dreams.But still , i’m curious about this subject.After i read it , i understood this : When i’m lucid to protect this situation , i shouldn’t do anything suspicious or i will be kicked from the dream.Is that right ?

I’m not sure what you mean by “suspicious,” but not necessarily. If hostile DCs always kicked us when we were lucid and aiming to do things, I doubt you’d ever be able to have battles in dreams, but people have battles in dreams and stay in there. Also, what would be the point of LDs if you weren’t able to do things against the dream? The dream can kick you sometimes, hostile DCs or not. Once my subconscious kicked me from a dream to make a point. Also, remember what Qu said. She mentioned that most of her encounters with DCs are not hostile encounters, but such hostile encounters that kicked her out of the dream have happened a few times.

All in all, I’m just trying to say that this isn’t necessarily the case. I may not always be so successful dealing with hostile DCs, but I’m only kicked if they kill me, and those usually aren’t lucid dreams, so it’s not really interfering with the dream.

Uhm… did that make any sense at all?

I mean isn’t anything to do for not being hostile ? Simply prevent it.If you do something suspicious (for subconscious) of course it will kick you out.But if you don’t do anything like that , you live that dream like it is real , then maybe you won’t be hostile with DCs because of not drawing attention…

Sometimes we live dreams like they’re real, sometimes we don’t. I wouldn’t work on LDing if I wanted to live all my dreams like they were real. I had nightmares when I was little and I still have nightmares now that have hostile DCs without any suspicious activity from me. DCs don’t always appear and act like they did in Inception. It’s not like they’re constantly trying to kick you out when you’re lucid because you’re lucid. My DCs even help me sometimes when I’m attempting to do things in my dreams.

I’m not quite sure what your question is, since the grammar’s hard to understand in the question itself, but I hope that answers it.

No Hisar, I disagree, you can be suspicious by the SC and not kicked out, its not that it always try to kick you out, once I faced the lucid police for doing “dream crimes” and managed to escape from them, its more when I tried to iduce SD that I got kicked out of the dream :tongue:

Very interesting… I have had similar experiences, although for me it normally only occurs with the DC representations of family members, particularly my mother. Nearly every single time I have become lucid near my DC mom, she suddenly takes on a very sinister air and does everything in her power to ruin my dream.

I remember reading once about this girl who had become quite adept at lucid dreaming. She said that everything was great for a while, but one night she felt that she’d crossed a line or “opened a gate” that couldn’t be shut. She claimed that some sort of dream authority captured her because of her lucidity, and every night since then she was forced to work like a slave in this “dream factory.” It sounds crazy, of course, but it got me to thinking. What if there really are things in our dreams that DON’T want us to become lucid? And to what extent will they eventually go to stop us? It is pretty interesting that the majority of these hostile DCs are portrayed as some authority figure, like a cop or, in my case, a parent.

That’s not to say it has to be some weird sci-fi entity residing in the dream plane (although I think that would be awesome). It could be something along the lines of squarepusher’s theory; mere manifestations of our psyche that are afraid of any significant resolutions that we might come across. Either way, it’s not something that should deter us from trying to become lucid. Like any obstacle, it just needs to be overcome.

I think that dream characters generally behave in the way you expect them to. If they are hostile, it’s probably because the dreamer expects the hostility. It might be difficult to do, but if you can train yourself to expect better behaviour from your dream characters, then they should be less hostile. As someone posted earlier, if you remind yourself (and the characters, if necessary) that it’s YOUR dream and that YOU are in control of it, you might be able to turn the situation around.

I rarely encounter hostility from dream characters and I must admit I’ve never had them try to kick me out of a dream before. I don’t get chased, but if I ever get into a fight with them, I can always beat them easily (despite being small and not very physically strong in reality). I expect to win the fight, because it’s my dream; and therefore, I do win.

As I see, what you are mostly discussing here, is “Shared Dreams”. I must tell you, that such thing is not scientifically possible. Our brains are not some sort of connection cards which connect us to a LAN network of dreams or something. It is not physically possible, as that would be telephacy.
The dreams you’re talking about are 100% yours. They are created by your subconscious and they are controlled by your subconscious. If you become lucid, you may control them as well, however, major part of the dream, the dream characters would still be under the control of your subconscious. Therefore, there is a lot of possibilities, how those characters could act like. They can be angry and threatening, as you say, or friendly. Most of their actions depend on your expectations. If you expect them to act like DC’s in the “Inception” movie, they will do that, and possibly, make you wake up. So, the reason, in my opinion, is that you are looking too serious at movies like “Inception”. Remember, that’s just a movie, full of fantasies, just like our dreams. If you look serious at such things, they will happen in your dreams. Dreams are controlled by our minds and therefore, you should make sure that your mind is clean of such nonsense as Dream hackers, Shared dreams etc. That’s my opinion, yours may be different.

I’m definitely going to keep an eye out for this once I get a long lucid dream…when that happen’s if it happens soon i’ll be sure to let you know. But I believe you are right when you talk about it being your fear of the dream being ended - I think you just have to get confidence in your ability’s to have them multiple times a week so you won’t have that fear, no?

I agree and disgree with most of you :razz:
DCs are a projection of your schemas and expectations - You can call it your SC (partly)
If you expect the DC to be hostile when you try to LD , then he will be hostile.
My moto - “Expect the best and think positive”.
About those “being kicked out” - same here, it is built from your expectations - You expected to wake up since you logically thought that the cop/ security guard is kicking you out, but from what? the dream.
There are 2 problems with that assumption:

  1. Logic in Dream?
  2. You let the DC control your dream.

Conclusion: Remember that:

  1. This is YOUR dream.
  2. Expect the best.
  3. Think positively (“I will fly” is better than “I won’t fall” etc…)

3 nights ago I had this annoying DC in my lucid dream that kept stalking and bugging me, making it impossible to do stuff. She was a lucid dreamer as well, so if I flew away she just followed me. :grrr:

Sooooo, if any of you lucid dreamers was lucid 3 days ago, running around in a red/yellow superwoman suit and found it funny to bug another lucid dreamer…it wasn’t funny! :wink:

I think that in your case the reason that characters become hostile when you become lucid is because when a person becomes lucid in a dream, certain parts and areas of the brain become more active… That is why a lot of the time a person will wake up soon after realizing that they are dreaming, because they have become more conscious and a lot of the time conscious enough to wake up. Your hostile characters might just be a representation of the fact that your dreamworld is breaking down or breaking apart because you are waking up or have become too conscious to the fact that you are dreaming. Basically the rules of the dreamworld no longer apply to you, so the rules of the dreamworld no longer apply to the dream characters as well. In a lot of ways I think that you probably have hostile characters because deep down you know that you shouldn’t be able to be doing what you are doing while lucid, kind of a voyeuristic feeling but instead of looking at something you shouldn’t, you are experiencing something that normally you shouldn’t, that you are taking control of a dream that you were meant to just experience the way that your subconscious created it and deep down you know that, so the hostile characters are your knowledge of the fact that you are breaking the rules of dreams and so they come at you or get mad at you or send you away because of that/because you are waking up. Just what I think, maybe I am wrong, but still a very interesting article none the less. Thanks for posting!

Dream Adventurously,

  • Dreamscape Adventurer