The truly twisted aspect of Inception that is completely ignored is the concept of concepts. What are ideas? Where do they come from? Are they parthenogenic? That is, can they spawn themselves from nothing? Ex nobo? The movie presents two points of view : Arthur claims that the source of any idea can be traced, even subconsciously; Dom claims it is possible to place an idea into someone's mind and that they think it was their own (i.e. parthenogenesis). If Arthur is correct, then we have to ask the question : where do ideas come from in the first place? If we get ideas from other sources, then what is the mother of all ideas? What is the matrix concept? There had to be a point where there were no ideas (i.e. before the occurrence of life on this planet), so some ideas had to arise autonomously. Dom illustrates that the source is probably hidden, but someone else is planting it there to seem autonomously spawned; a sort of Jacobian control in Abram's Lost. This is the idea that the mother source of ideas has given you an idea, as if it was your own. Dom's point of view is the very same idea the Greeks had of the Muses, or what the Romans called the genius.
What is of more concern in this concept of parthenogenic ideas is that they do spawn autonomous. And one does not even need to be dreaming for it to occur, or someone to plant it there, or for someone to say "Don't think about elephants" (in which we will think about elephants). Our minds spawn ideas ex nobo constantly in our waking life. It's called intrusive thoughts. I have talked about this before, because it is of grave concern to me.
Like Dom says, ideas are like a virus that can spread and infect everything, and eventually change an entire human being. Intrusive thoughts do this to us in our wake hours. An autonomously spawned thought will flutter through the brain and set off a chain of thoughts that completely change how we function and perceive the world. A married woman may be working at her computer and suddenly a thought of her having sex with another man flutters by. Immediately she may question why she had this thought. She may think this means she has a desire to sleep with someone else (and that she should, for some reason). Then that turns into her believing she's dissatisfied with her husband. Next she's thinking she's unhappy in her marriage. Next she's contemplating divorce, and pretty soon she's divorced. (Thanks Scott for the example). All of this because she had a thought that she had no control over. A thought that completely spawned itself, which spread like an infectious disease, and caused so much change in her life (that and probably some serious misunderstanding of Freud's theories in her high school psychology class).
One can only imagine how infectious intrusive thoughts can be. Especial when we consider persons with low confidence, depression, anorexia, unhappy marriages, persons thinking they are latent serial killers, fathers walking out on their families for no reason, cheating husbands and wives, suicidal bosses, homophobic TV preachers, et cetera.
Want to contemplate twisted things based on Inception? Just consider how your own brain, acting like a second mind (bicamerality) can change your very constitution of being by a parthenogenic, intrusive thought. And then question how much more different your life would be had you ignored it (i.e. rejecting an autonomous inception). Talk about paradox : an autonomous implanting of an idea into your mind that is not of your conscious control, but planted there by your very own mind itself. Now that right there itches my brain for the next few hours.
"I get weirder things than you in my breakfast cereal."
~Hal Sparks
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