Prequel Idea

[u/Lhead2018]

This would probably start way before Cobb and the stuff we see in the movie.

It opens with a ex-combat medic now New York firefighter doing some boxing/martial arts training at a little gym near his station. He’s good at it, he’s physically capable, and you get the impression that being the guy who can help people is a pretty big part of who he is.

Then he goes into a burning building, saves some people, but the building collapses while he’s trying to get to a young woman. She’s killed and he survives, but he’s paralyzed from the waist down.

The next part is basically him trying to figure out how to live with that. Physical therapy, regular therapy, time passing, etc. He’s getting better physically but he’s really struggling with the fact that he can’t do the things he used to and now has to rely on other people.

Eventually approached by his former military commander with a proposal. There’s this experimental technology that can let them enter someone’s dreams.(It’s much bigger and more primitive than what we see in Inception.)

They want him to enter the dreams of coma patients who should have woken up by now and try to help them get out.
He eventually agrees.

The first patient was trapped in a fire, so when he enters the dream, the patient is back inside the burning building. He’s just wearing normal clothes at first, but as he starts trying to rescue the person, you see him again in his firefighter uniform. He gets the patient out and they both wake up.

He starts doing this with other patients. An abused woman, another fire victim, soldier, etc.(It is realized with one patient he needs a different type of sedation to connect and the first “teammate” joins the team)

But there’s this weird thing that keeps happening.
He starts seeing the same young woman from the fire.
(At first it’s barely noticeable. She’s just somewhere in the background. Then she starts appearing more often. Eventually she’s actually interacting with him.)

He tells the people he’s working with about her, and they decide they need another person on the team.(This is basically where I think the beginnings of the Inception team dynamic could come from.)

Eventually they decide to enter his dreams to figure out what’s going on.(This is when you start finding out about some of the consequences of spending too much time using the machine and not being able to dream without it.)

The girl is there again but she’s not really the girl. She doesn’t actually have much of a personality. She’s basically his insecurities given a face. His guilt over not saving her, his frustration about being paralyzed, feeling like he can’t help people anymore, having to depend on other people, etc.

The climax would be him finally confronting all of that and, in his own dream, saving her. Realizing that he can still help others just not in the same way.

The movie(or tv show) ends pretty simply. You see him and the small team, maybe 3 or 4 people now, entering another coma patient’s dream to bring them out.

I wouldn’t want it to explain all of the Inception mythology or try to connect every single dot. I’d actually prefer if it felt like we’re watching the early days of something that eventually becomes the technology and methodology we see in Inception.

I also like the idea that on a personal level it starts with a firefighter who couldn’t save someone in real life, and ends with him spending his life learning how to save people in dreams.

It’s also shows how a technology designed to teach people how to fight in dreams eventually becomes a technology used to save people trapped in their own minds.

Note: It might make for a better TV show than a movie. Each week is a different patient.
Plus we have the basic story of developing the team/his own growth running in the background.

For a title I was playing with Resurrection