My use of the word "apparent" is key.
One of the most common, and unfortunately most prosaic, and ironically least imaginitive, criticisms of Inception boils down to it not being surreal enough. People wandered in to the film expecting that Nolan would use all the CGI at his command, or at the command of his wizards, to outdo or at least try to match all the surrealist filmakers such as Bunuel. That we would have random, free association transforming images thrown at us and not be greeted with the hard-edged sense of reality that the film actually does have.
However, the movie actually is quite surreal. Granted, we are not given certain images which we know from our own dreams, such as that, while speaking to someone, they turn into a puppet version of themselves. But here's the thing. In life, if we were speaking to someone and they suddenly turned into a puppet, we would be more than surprised, to say the least. But when such an event happens in a dream, usually we are not surprised because our dreaming selves know why it's happening or at least provide an explanation so fast that it is not surprising to us.
A statement the film implicitly makes is that when we are having dreams, their reality is hard edged. A dream is not surreal while we are having it. While in the dream, we do not perceive them as strange, as the main character Dom Cobb says while he and Ariadne are are sitting at the cafe. This is partly a sort of "tell" to the audience from Nolan why it is we are not being given random weird images. It is probably no accident that we are, shortly after that, given one of the most overtly strange images of the film, which is when Ariadne, portrayed by Ellen Page, now aware she is dreaming, begins to mentally fold the city they are in on itself. Here's what does not happen: Cobb and Ariadne do not flee in terror. Instead, Cobb stands there very calmly talking to her about it. This is supposed to happen, just as in a dream, when something odd happens, it is supposed to happen. In this way, Nolan has triumphed in one way over the surrealists. While they may show us bits of their dreams, Nolan has made the film like having our own dream because, just like Cobb and Ariadne, we accept that it is going on. We realize that within the film, Ariadne is in a dream and that Cobb is teaching her how to manipulate it, or at least supervising. And in the larger sense we as the audience, who are having this shared dream of watching the film, know that they do it with effects. No one is really saying, "My God, how can that possibly happen? Did they actually fold a city over itself like a building buritto?" And so we have accepted an image which, a hundred years ago, would have been impossible to produce in a moving form.
There are many interpretations of the film; whether or not Cobb is dreaming the entire time, if it becomes, at some point, a dream, if he is still dreaming at the end, etc. But for the sake of this particular post, let's go with the interpretation that the entire thing is a dream, as we know them, until we see Cobb wake up in the plane, and looks around at passengers in a flight who may or may not be known to him, that he has cast in this dream he just had as we often cast people we know or don't know well into roles in our dreams that seem strange when we wake up but which we accept completely while within the dream. This is one version of the story that simply makes it easier to discuss, but I believe Cobb could still be dreaming, because Nolan is playing with the fact that a movie is not real. And I also believe that Cobb actually is an extractor, and that such things can happen - but only in the same way that I believe a flux capacitor can make time travel possible and that the Millenium Falcon possesses a hyper drive to travel through space.
But for this theory, we can look at the fact there is little dialogue after the wake-up, not much more than the immigration official who approves Dom's passport, which is a partly scripted exchange in real life, and so there is nothing to take away from the sense of the natural in this sequence after the final wake-up, as Nolan knows that movie characters will always speak in a slightly different way that we do in our real lives.
All right, so Dom is just a guy waking up on a flight to Los Angeles, almost certainly from Japan. I still glean several things about who he might really be from his dream. This version of Dom is an architectural engineer. Thus the incredible concern with buildings and the stability of structures, the repetition of earthquake imagery that is always given a different explanation for why it's happening, the frequent appearances of bridges, and the recurrent theme of precision and coordination. This also provides an explanation of why Dom carried a top. It is an exercise among engineering students to design a top for what it can teach them. Spinning a top on a surface is also a good quick way to tell if it is level. We might surmise then, that "Dom the Architect" carried this souvenir of his younger days possibly to remind him of what is was once all about, and maybe to have a quick way of checking if a surface is level, and in his dream has managed to give it an incredible significance. He has also probably taken a sedative to help him sleep on the flight, contributing then to the intensity of the dream and the frequent mentions of sedative in the dream, and its effects.
I will probably expound more later on what I think this Dom is like, but the main purpose here is to address the seeming lack of surrealism in Inception. Dom the architect-engineer is probably a very precise, and literal minded man - we are not being made privy to the dreams of a fantasy novelist. At most, he probably likes to watch action movies, and probably has seen a lot of movies in general, and has soaked them up for his sleeping mind to plunder for imagery. Things get weirder as the dream goes further, even as Dom loses his inhibitions, surrendering to deeper and deeper states of consciousness.
Imagine if you will that you are Dom, the architect-engineer who has finally gotten home after the long flight and you are trying to describe the dream to someone. Since he would not have total recall, most of it being gone by the time he gets to Michael Caine, he might say, "I had the weirdest dream. I just remember I was with a girl that was on my flight and somehow she was able to make a city fold up on itself, she was doing it and I was very calmly watching it with her, almost like I was teaching her how to do it. Then I saw she somehow made a bridge out of thin air, and I warned her about something...for some reason she shouldn't do it...then another guy who was on my flight, it was like we were old friends, even working together, he was fighting a guy in mid-air, but it was like it was expected for him to be doing that...and then I saw him with a bunch of people strapped together, all piled on top of each other and he was pulling them floating down a hall way, because he had to do something, I forget, it was very important...we were also all sleeping in the back of a van that was going off a bridge but in slow motion - I just knew it was supposed to be happening...But it was also like we were in the mountans, and there was a fortress we were supposed to attack...the rich guy I taked to on my flight, who was kind of rude to me, it was extremely important he be brought into it, and we all knew something he didn't...then he was going into a vault that he had to open and there was a guy in a hospital bed in the vault that he talked to, and then he was crying because he found a pinwheel in a safe by the bed...later there were a bunch of houses built into the water almost like Venice, but it wasn't Venice, and I remember seeing one, and suddenly there was a doll house, and I was opening up a safe in the doll house and my top was inside...I started to spin the top, and it was really bad that I did that but I don't remember why...and then I closed it into the safe, which is so strange. Later on I was talking to a woman I kept seeing that in the dream I thought was my wife, but I don't know who she was, and she and I were talking fairly calmly, like she was pleading with me, but suddenly she jumped up and stabbed me, and the girl who was on my flight was on the balcony, even though it was our house which doesn't have a balcony, and when she shot the lady who was my wife I jumped up and asked her what she was doing, and she said 'improvising', and then she kicked the rich kid - he was tied up on the balcony - and I saw him falling, then a building behind her was being blown away by the wind, and then I saw her jump off the balcony. Then I was suddenly in Japan and talking to the guy sitting sort of across from me in the plane, only he was incredibly old, and I had to ask him something, and he had my top and a gun...and then I woke up after that...I might have been talking in my sleep because people were looking at me strangely."
It is unlikely, of course, that a dreamer would even remember that much. But it's a bunch of seemingly random, surreal imagery, only we do not interpret it as such because it is all given context and explanation, even though it the context only works within a film, and so the sort of thing we trust in the shared dream of movie watching.
Going back to Bunuel, he is of course known for Un Chien Andalou in which famously a woman's eye is cut in one of the surreal images thrown at us.
This likely influenced the scene in Terminator in which we see Arnold cut his eye open. Only, we don't interpret that scene as being surreal because we are given the context that this is a robot from the future who has to repair himself. The bold statement that Inception makes is that dreams are like straightforward story movies like Terminator, and vice versa, because we are given an explanation for the surreality - just not one we remember later. However, even with Bunuel we have the explanation that were are watching a movie, even if we have not been show events leading up to the eye-cutting, so we watch it calmly, because we know what it is we are watching.
Up above I placed a picture of Arnold in Terminator. But it's not really Arnold, is it? No, it's the animatronic puppet used for the eye cutting effect, which is fairly obvious to us. But again, we do not act with surprise that he has turned into a puppet, because we have the context of knowing how effects and editing work.
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