The "Inception" Thread

[Alex]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

But the architecture of the dream is not determined by the dreamer;

Yeah, this is the fuzziness I have trouble incorporating. We are shown absolutely nothing about how this happens. How people are put into a shared dream state, how an architecture is imposed on that state (is it something technical or did Ariadne just show each dreamer all the details of a map and since they were constantly dreaming they could use it). How much of what we see was actually fully fleshed out by the architect, how much comes from the dreamer, and how much comes from the other consciousnesses in the dream. Why does only only one person seem to have projections in the dream when their are other "foreigners" in the dream as well? Is it just that they've trained themselves to keep their subconscious out? In the dream with Ariadne when she makes the mirrors, why did Cobb's projections only attack when she tweaked things even though Cobb was entirely aware the whole time that it was just a dream (in other words, what changed that triggered his subconscious to attack)?

Also, since it is shown in that dream that Ariadne can physically change the dream world ad hoc and in situ, why didn't she do this even a little bit at key moments in the movie. Make a medical kit appear for treating Saito, create a tunnel that would lead directly to the safe in the snow level.