ABSTRACT
You might recall the movie Inception in which Leonardo De Caprio plays Dom Cobb, a specialist in extracting secrets from peoples’ subconscious mind, by invading their dreams. Cobb accepts a new assignment, this time premised on the reverse of stealing an idea; he has to plant an idea in the subject’s mind. His assignment is summed up as “How to transform a business strategy into an emotion.” His task is to plant the idea of breaking up a corporate empire which the son inherited from the father, but to do it in a way in which the idea seems to his subject to have been originated by himself. To accomplish this task, Cobb and his team need to construct three distinct dreams, at three layers of the subconscious, and skillfully jump from one to the other. We have all experienced this in our state of dreaming: we are in the middle of a dream, with no memory of how we got there, and then we find ourselves in the middle of another dream, again, with no memory of how we got there. And this second dream has absolutely no connection to the first. Each dream has a unique landscape, unique actors, and unique conflict resolutions. No lesson learned in the first dream is applicable in the second.
