Yeoh Siew Hoon wonders whether she has been incepted.
It’s a sign of a brilliant movie that weeks after I watched it, I am still thinking about it. In fact, I am even dreaming about it.
This morning, I woke up from a dream (or thought I did) and stayed within it and with my conscious mind (or thought I did), analysed and organized the task that had been handed to me in the dream.
Here’s the dream. I had been called in by a company which wanted to turn a disused tin mine area into a viable and sustainable business. (And no, the company is not called Banyan Tree or is it Indigo Pearl? I am confused, remember I was only dreaming.)
Their plan was to create something around the history and adventure of tin and they wanted their staff to come up with ideas on how to do this.
And so I was called in and I organised the workshop into three groups. One group would deal with product concepts – tin jewellery, for example; another would work on the marketing plan; and the third would look at community outreach programmes.
I had to almost physically shake myself out from the dream because frankly, it was becoming very hard work. And who wants to work while you sleep – although you could argue many people do that anyway.
I told my dream to a friend who told me it wasn’t about the tin – thank goodness, who wants to obsess about Zn – but it was about my need to orchestrate and control things.
"You’re probably thinking about the events you have to organise," he says. "The tin is just a metaphor. Perhaps the tin represents the people around you and you wish they could be as malleable as tin."
I don’t know much about tin but I did some research and found out he’s right. "Metallic tin is soft and malleable. It slowly dissolves in dilute nonoxidizing acids or more readily in hot concentrated HCl."
I wonder though whether it’s possible that I have been incepted? Has someone like the character played by Leonardo Di Caprio in the movie "Inception" come into my head to plant the idea?
When you think about it though, people are always planting ideas in our heads all the time. These people are called marketers.
They tell us that when you ride a Harley Davidson, you become a rebel. They tell us when you smoke a cigarette, you can ride a horse and not fall. They tell us that even tin can be romantic.
And they embed subliminal messages in our heads so that even when we are asleep, we are thinking of the next item to consume. In my case, obviously Zn.
Which is why the next movie I want to catch is "The Joneses". It’s supposed to be a dark satire about a perfect family that moves into a neighbourhood.
Only thing is, they aren’t actually a real family, but a "corporate selling unit, put together by a company looking to have a family sell to the richest yuppies, young and middle-aged or old, in the area, by creating envy and, ultimately, mass consumption".
Now where’s that bottle of HCl I bought right after lunch? Man, the sashimi I had was sure soft and malleable.
