How ‘Inception’ was inspired by the free breakfasts at Christopher Nolan’s university
Picture the scene: you’re a university student stumbling back to your room after a long night on the sauce. In the wee hours of the morning, as your drunken head hits the pillow, you’re exhausted – but not too exhausted to remember that you’ve got an appointment in the morning. Thankfully, it’s nothing trivial like a lecture or a meeting with a professor. Instead, you’ve got a regular rendezvous in the university cafeteria at 8am for the institution’s lifesaving free breakfasts. This was the exact scenario that Christopher Nolan faced countless times during his days at University College London – and, bizarrely, it helped him develop the idea for Inception.
In 2018, James Cameron presented a six-part docuseries on AMC entitled Story of Science Fiction. In it, the Avatar director took viewers on a journey of discovery through sci-fi history, chatting with many of his peers from Hollywood along the way. In addition to chatting with luminaries like Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Keanu Reeves, and his old mucker Arnold Schwarzenegger, Cameron also spoke to Nolan, whose contributions to the sci-fi canon include Interstellar and Inception.
When the two A-list directors began chatting about Nolan’s iconic blockbuster, though, Nolan revealed the unusual inspiration for his epic vision of dream realities and the people who can enter and control them. He admitted, “A lot of the inspiration for Inception was from a period of my life when I was in university and didn’t have much money and breakfast was free.”
Nolan explained that he would routinely stay up until three or four in the morning but would set his alarm to ensure he could crawl out of bed to get breakfast. He would then slope back to his room and fall back asleep – only this time, the sleep wouldn’t be as deep as it was before. The future Hollywood legend soon began to realise that he was lucid dreaming at times.
“You’re in this sleep state where it becomes possible to be very aware of the fact that you’re dreaming,” explained Nolan. “I would experiment with trying to control the dream and trying to make something.” It wasn’t easy to get his subconscious to start constructing things within his dream, but when he was successful, he felt an incredible sense of possibility. As he told a nodding Cameron, “That’s the superpower.”
Nolan’s dreams would often find him standing on a beach. When he picked up a handful of sand and watched the grains slide between his fingers, he would somehow become aware that his mind was creating these grains in all their infinite glory. Then, he’d think about that on a wider scale, telling Empire in 2010, “We all do this every night when we dream. Our minds create and perceive the world simultaneously. The mind is infinitely expansive and infinitesimal.”
Inspired by these breakfast-assisted lucid dreams, Nolan began formulating what would eventually become Inception. He wrote an 80-page treatment for what he envisioned as a horror movie, but it soon wound up going into a drawer as he worked on kickstarting his career. When he returned to the concept as an experienced filmmaker, though, he realised that a $30million horror movie didn’t do it justice.
“That never worked for me,” Nolan explained. “It took me a long time to figure out why, but what I realised is incredibly simple: as soon as you say this film is about dreams, it has to be on the grandest scale possible or you’re not addressing it correctly. Because what’s fascinating about the potential of the human mind is that it’s infinite.”
