Inception, Poe, Physics, and the Kingdom of God
(Warning: SPOILERS)
“As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness;
when I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness.”
—David (Psalm 17:15
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
—Edgar Allan Poe
“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”
—Eames, Inception (2010)
When Christopher Nolan’s Inception hit theaters in 2010, it was praised as a cerebral thriller—a visually mind-bending film about shared dreams, subconscious manipulation, and a heist performed not in a vault, but in the architecture of the human mind. But it was far more than just a stylish movie. Inception asked a question older than philosophy: What is reality, and how can we be sure we’re not dreaming right now? That theme struck a personal chord for me. Edgar Allan Poe has long been one of my favorite American writers, and during my years working in film, I even wrote a screenplay inspired by his life and work. Like Inception, Poe’s writings often dissolve the boundaries between dream and waking, sanity and madness, fiction and memory. And both invite us to wrestle with a haunting possibility—that what we call reality might itself be a dream within a dream.
This is not a gimmick. It’s a deep and unsettling inquiry that has rattled thinkers from Plato to Poe, Descartes to David Chalmers, and more recently, physicists like Brian Greene and Roger Penrose. The film’s central premise—that dreams can be nested within dreams, and that time and perception are malleable—touches something primal in us all. We’ve all had dreams that seemed real. We’ve all woken up unsure of where we are or even who we are for a moment. And that disorientation hints at something even deeper: reality might not be as stable as we think.
And if that’s true, then maybe the Bible is saying something we’ve too often dismissed as mere metaphor: This world is not ultimate reality. Maybe eternity isn’t just a distant hope—it’s the real country, and this life is the shadow.
Let’s explore how Inception sets the stage, how Poe and physics join the conversation, and how Scripture may, astonishingly, point to the deepest truth of all: what we call “life” may be the dream before we awaken into glory.
Inception and the Architecture of Dreams
The film’s protagonist, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), is an extractor—someone who enters people’s dreams to steal secrets from their subconscious. But Cobb is haunted by his own memories, particularly those of his late wife, Mal. As the film progresses, Cobb leads a team into a dream within a dream within a dream. The deeper they go, the slower time moves, and the harder it becomes to distinguish between reality and illusion. A central image throughout is Cobb’s spinning top—his totem—which he uses to determine whether he’s dreaming. If it falls, he’s awake. If it spins indefinitely, he’s still inside a dream.
“Consciousness is not just an emergent property of the brain. It may involve non-computable processes that are fundamental to the structure of reality.”
—Roger Penrose, Mathematical Physicist (The Emperor’s New Mind)
But the final scene famously offers no resolution. Cobb returns to his children—but the camera lingers on the spinning top. It wobbles slightly. Then: cut to black.
We are left asking: Was it all a dream?
More profoundly, we’re left asking ourselves: Is this all a dream?
Another unforgettable concept in the film is “limbo”—a dream state so deep that one loses all sense of time and self. In limbo, identity disintegrates, and memory no longer anchors reality. This is where Cobb and Mal spent what felt like decades, building and inhabiting entire worlds. Yet in the end, they forgot what was real. This parallels the biblical idea of spiritual death—being lost in self-constructed illusions without God, unable to wake into truth. Without revelation, we are all stuck in limbo—creating temporary heavens that become personal hells.
Edgar Allan Poe and the Dream Within the Dream
Christopher Nolan wasn’t the first to ask this question. Edgar Allan Poe, the master of the macabre and the metaphysical, famously wrote in his 1849 poem A Dream Within a Dream:
All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream.
Poe’s haunting words echo the fragility of human perception. He is not merely waxing poetic—he is mourning the fleeting nature of what we call “real.” Our experiences, our relationships, our achievements… can we be sure any of it has substance beyond our subjective awareness?
Even as Poe walked the borderlands between fiction and madness, he grasped something most of us prefer to ignore: Reality might be recursive. A dream within a dream within a dream. The illusion of control, the illusion of permanence, the illusion of “realness.”
This poetic intuition, centuries old, now finds a strange ally—not in mysticism, but in modern physics.
Brian Greene, Black Holes, and the Question of Reality
Brian Greene, the Columbia University physicist and string theory advocate, writes in The Hidden Reality and Until the End of Time about the perplexing nature of space, time, and information. One idea that Greene discusses—backed by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind—is the holographic principle. Here’s the short version: according to this theory, everything we experience might be a projection of information stored on a distant boundary, like the event horizon of a black hole.
“The universe is a product of mind… selected by a kind of rationality that looks suspiciously like intelligence.”
—Paul Davies, Physicist (The Mind of God)
If that’s true, then what we perceive as a 3D universe could be a kind of elaborate playback—a shadow of the real information, a simulation of depth encoded on a 2D surface. Think of it like a cosmic movie projected onto a screen. We see characters, colors, and stories. But behind the scenes is only light, math, and memory.
It’s not just metaphysics anymore. Quantum mechanics—the branch of science dealing with the smallest particles—already shows that particles do not have definite properties until they’re observed. Reality, at its core, seems contingent upon measurement, observation, awareness. In short: reality needs a witness.
“It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”
—Eugene Wigner, Theoretical Physicist (“Remarks on the Mind-Body Question” in The Scientist Speculates)
Greene puts it like this: “It may turn out that space and time are not fundamental… They may emerge from something deeper.” In other words, we might be real—or we might be echoes. We might be awake—or we might be dreaming in the mind of something far greater than ourselves.
This aligns disturbingly well with Dom Cobb’s line in Inception:
“Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.”
The Power of Ideas and the War of Belief
Cobb explains at one point, “An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. And even the smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.” This is more than a throwaway line. It touches the heart of both neuroscience and theology.
In Scripture, Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed—tiny at first, but growing to overshadow all else (Matthew 13:31–32). Faith begins as an idea—but it becomes an identity. The same is true of lies. Cobb’s false memory of Mal grew so powerful that it shaped his world. Likewise, a lie believed can alter a life. This is spiritual warfare, not fiction.
Biblical Echoes: Is This Life the Shadow?
Here’s where this becomes more than just heady speculation.
The Bible—far from ignoring these questions—seems to anticipate them.
In the Psalms, David writes:
“When I awake, I will be satisfied with your likeness.” (Psalm 17:15)
He is not speaking of physical waking, but of resurrection—awakening into ultimate reality.
Paul says something nearly identical in 1 Corinthians 13:12:
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face…”
The idea is not new to Christianity. This world is not the end. It’s not even the beginning. It’s the prelude. It’s the shadowlands.
C.S. Lewis, who was captivated by the concept of true reality lying beyond the material, said in The Great Divorce that heaven is “more solid” than earth—that it is more real than the life we currently experience. In fact, the reason earthly joys fade is not because they are unimportant—but because they are whispers of a truer world to come.
Ariadne the Architect and the Illusion of Control
Ariadne, the brilliant dream architect, learns how to build entire cities, shape gravity, and manipulate perception. She plays the role of creator. But even her best designs can’t withstand the instability of a mind haunted by guilt. When Cobb’s subconscious bleeds into the dreamscape, no architecture can hold.
This is us. We build lives, stories, careers—but we are not the ultimate architects. We live within a construct, and that construct eventually collapses under the weight of our sin, pain, and mortality. The only structure that stands is the one not made by human hands.
Time Dilation and the Eternal Now
One of the most mind-bending mechanics in Inception is time dilation. In the deepest layers of the dream, seconds stretch into years. Cobb and Mal lived what seemed like a lifetime in limbo. Yet it all occurred in moments of real-world time.
This concept is not just science fiction—it’s real science. Einstein’s theory of relativity reveals that time is relative to gravity and motion. And Scripture echoes it too: “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years . . . ” (2 Peter 3:8). When we die, we do not enter a linear timeline—we step into eternity, where God does not live in sequence but in fullness.
Near Death Experiences and the Weight of Glory
Many who’ve had near-death experiences (NDEs) report something remarkable: the world they momentarily entered seemed more real than this one. They often describe colors they’ve never seen, a sense of timelessness, and a clarity of thought that far surpasses normal consciousness. Some even say they didn’t want to return—because what they saw or experienced carried a weight and beauty that made this life seem pale by comparison.
This lines up with what Paul says in Philippians 1:23, when he writes, “I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far.”
Could it be, then, that this life—beautiful though it may be—is the dream? A fragile, flickering projection? That when we die, we don’t fall asleep, but finally wake up?
Poe sensed this. Nolan played with it. Greene hints at it. And the Bible proclaims it.
(For more on NDEs see my blog series: Do NDEs Point To God?)
The Philosophical Core: Descartes, Plato, and the Simulation Problem
René Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, famously wondered if everything he experienced could be a deception—a dream. In his Meditations, he posed the idea of an evil demon feeding him false perceptions. How could he be sure of anything? His only certainty was this: Cogito, ergo sum—”I think, therefore I am.”
But Plato was there long before Descartes. In the Allegory of the Cave, he described prisoners who had only ever seen shadows on the wall. For them, the shadows were reality. Only when one escaped the cave and saw the light of the sun did he realize the truth.
Today, some modern philosophers, like Nick Bostrom, have taken this a step further and argue that we could be living in a simulation created by a post-human civilization. Elon Musk, for instance, has said the odds that we are in base reality are “one in billions.”
“Our universe may be a simulation… everything we see and feel [could be] the product of information-processing on some gigantic computer.”
—John D. Barrow, Cosmologist (The Infinite Book)
Whether it’s a demon, a shadow, or a code, the conclusion is the same: we have no guaranteed way to prove that the world around us is ultimate reality.
But what if, rather than that being a threat—it’s an invitation?
“The assumption that physical reality is all there is—has not been proven. There may well be a deeper, non-physical level to reality.”
—George F. R. Ellis, Cosmologist (“Does the Multiverse Really Exist?” Scientific American)
The Real Totem
In Inception, Cobb’s spinning top is the symbol of certainty. He watches it to tell if he’s awake or still dreaming. We long for something similar. Some kind of spiritual “totem” to tell us whether this life is the real thing, or just a lower level of existence.
But Christianity doesn’t offer a spinning top—it offers a Person.
Jesus Christ is not just a moral teacher or ancient prophet—He is the only human in history who entered death, and came back with the keys (Revelation 1:18). He claims not only to show the truth, but to be the truth (John 14:6). He is not merely telling us what’s real—He is what’s real.
He says, in essence, “This life is not the end. Wake up. Follow Me, and I will show you the real world.”
Why This Matters
Inception ends with the totem spinning—and the audience never knowing for sure if Cobb is in the real world. But the Bible doesn’t leave us spinning. It tells us plainly: this is not all there is. There is a greater reality. A deeper truth. A dream that ends in awakening.
So why does this matter?
Because if this life is the dream before dawn, then every moral choice matters more, not less. If heaven is the real country, then our afflictions here truly are, as Paul says, “light and momentary” (2 Corinthians 4:17). If we are asleep to God now, then the Gospel is our alarm clock.
And if the deepest truths of modern physics hint that we may not be able to trust our perceptions… then maybe faith is not foolish, but necessary. Maybe the kingdom of God is more real than atoms. Maybe, when we finally see Jesus face to face, we’ll say:
“Now I understand. That life—was only the dream.”
Endnotes
John A. Wheeler, quoted in Paul Davies and John Gribbin, The Matter Myth: Dramatic Discoveries That Challenge Our Understanding of Physical Reality (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020).
Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003).
Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (New York: Little, Brown, 2008).
Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017).
David Chalmers, Reality: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022).
Tom's Theology Blog 
Leave a comment