Rachel York
Reception Paper 2
Inception: A Labyrinth of Dreams
One of the least commonly known myths of the ancient Greeks is the myth of the Minotaur and King Minos of Crete. After his wife, Pasiphae, slept with a bull sent by Zeus and gave birth to a half-man, half-bull Minotaur, King Minos ordered Daedulus to create a labyrinth to keep the Minotaur in. The labyrinth was essentially an impossible maze, one that only the creator and King Mino’s daughter, Ariadne could find her way through. According to certain accounts, King Minos was imprisoning his enemies in the labyrinth so the Minotaur could eat them.
The 2010 film, Inception, a psychological sci-fi action film where the characters are entering into dreams and harvesting ideas into the dreamer’s subconscious, is directly inspired by the Minoan myth of the labyrinth. Through the film’s main event of building a seemingly impossible maze known only by its creator, the “monsters” within the maze, oneand direct mythological counterparts to the two main characters of the main characters carrying the same name as her mythological counterpart, Inception clearly drew inspiration from the labyrinth myth.  One of the leassst commonly known myths of the ancient Greeks is the myth of the Minotaur and King Minos of Crete. 1 After his wife, Pasiphae, slept with a bull sent by Zeus and gave birth to a half-man, half-bull Minotaur, King Minos ordered Daedulus to create a labyrinth to keep the Minotaur in. The labyrinth was essentially an impossible maze, one that only the creator and King Mino’s daughter, Ariadne could find her way through. According to certain accounts, King Minos was imprisoning his enemies in the labyrinth so the Minotaur could eat them.
In the film, a young student named Ariadne was recruited as the architect who designs the dreams, and the only one who know that paths through the dreams. Ariadne shares the exact same name as Princess Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, who happens to be the only other person besides Daedulus who knows the way around the labyrinth. In Inception, the dreams were very complex and represent the mythological labyrinth. The “monsters” within the dream could be the projections of the dreamer’s mind’s subconscious, who would “kill” the intruder and expel them from their mind. Cobb, the main character, and mastermind behind the idea of inception, is the modern counterpart to Greek hero, Theseus. Theseus was the ancient hero who defeated the Minoatur and conquered the labyrinth. In