Dom Cobb and his wife Mal might have spent decades in limbo, but that’s equal to less than a day in the waking world, according to the rules of Inception. The mind-bending Christopher Nolan movie raises a lot of questions about the nature of time and space, but one of the biggest is about how many hours pass in reality as opposed to in a dream. As Cobb explains to Ariadne, time stretches in a dream; seconds turn to minutes, minutes turn to days, and days turn to years.

During Inception, Cobb and his team of dreamers use several different compounds to create lucid dreams. At the start of the movie, Cobb and Arthur use a version of Somnacin that turns five minutes in reality into about an hour of dreamtime – making the dream 12 times longer than reality. Later in the film, however, Cobb and his team use a specialized compound to complete inception. That drug turns 10 hours on the surface into about a week of dreamtime – 20 times as long.

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As Cobb explains, the amount of time spent in a dream is compounded with each level. On the first level, a 10-hour job is about a week. On the second level, it’s six months; and on the third, it’s 10 years. Limbo, the purgatory of dreamspace, is the rarely seen fourth level, a place where time stretches out for eternity. It’s on this level that Cobb and Mal were trapped in for 50 years, eventually reawakening to find themselves young again.

The thing is, Cobb’s calculations in the movie are a little imprecise. Using the 1:20 ratio, 10 hours of reality actually equals 8.3 days of dreaming on the first level, 5.47 months on the second, and 9.1 years on the third. Therefore, Cobb and Saito would have been trapped in limbo for 182 years if they hadn’t been kicked out of the dream. It’s tempting to also use the 1:20 ratio to calculate how much time might have passed for Cobb and Mal on the surface when they were trapped in limbo. But according to the timeline of the film, the lovers became trapped before Yusuf’s specialized Somnacin was ever developed or used. The first time the dreamers ever use the sedative-laced compound is during the events of Inception.

Cobb says he and Mal were experimenting with dreaming when they got lost, so it’s possible he was also experimenting with Somnacin. If Cobb did use a similar compound with the 1:20 ratio, he and Mal would have been asleep for only 2.7 hours as 50 years passed in limbo. What’s more likely, however, is that Cobb and Mal were using the standard compound with a 1:12 ratio and experimenting with the depth of dreams. Using that math, Cobb and Mal would have been asleep for 21 hours as they grew old together.

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Jasmine Gallup
(115 Articles Published)

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Jasmine Gallup is a writer for ScreenRant, covering fantasy, science fiction and superheroes. She’s worked as a freelance reporter since 2018.

By day, Jasmine writes for a small North Carolina newspaper near her hometown of Cary. By night, she explores the depths of film and television alongside her twin sister.

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