Exactly like that. It happens in real-life and no doubt that's where they based it from. It happened to me a couple of times already, the deepest I got was 4 levels.
Real-life sleeping > level 1: sleeping > Level 2: sleeping > Level 3: sleeping > level 4: awake
Usually, it was very bad. A form of nightmare. You slowly get aware of it, even to the point that your brain tells you that you are awake. Then when something happens that you want to wake up (for example, you died, or you suddenly got aware you're sleeping), you will indeed wake up, up to the next level.
Once again, your brain will tell you that you are finally awake.
The first experience I had of this was when I was barely a teenager. It was a nightmare within a nightmare within a nightmare within a nightmare. When I got fully aware I was sleeping, that's when I fought, waking up, then waking up, then waking up, then finally waking up to the real world.
Problem was, I was no longer sure if it was the real world I woke up to. To this day, I sometimes think I am still sleeping.
Just like the other ending in Inception. Hence I love that movie. I can relate.
This is a well-known problem in the lucid dreaming community. There are some surprisingly easy ways to check. I find the simplest is to count my fingers out loud. If there are definitely five on each hand, then I'm awake. If there's any problem coming up with a count, then I'm asleep, no matter how much it seems like I'm awake.
(I also have dreams where I wake up over and over and over, only to realize that shit, I'm still dreaming. It's surprisingly disconcerting, there's a kind of physical sense of losing my mind involved.)
In any dream state, you can test the rules of the world around you and see that your brain doesn't quite build the world to completeness. Light switches will not work, text will morph and shift either in front of your eyes or when you look away and turn back, the people around you will spontaneously morph into others, you can breathe through your nose when it's plugged, etc.
What happened to you is referred to as a false awakening. Testing the reality of your situation by checking clocks, breathing through your nose, counting your fingers, etc. will all quickly put you into a more lucid and aware state. From there you either continue or, more commonly, you wake up.
I haven't thought of that. What became my anchor for the past few years have been my schedule or being aware of it.
But there were rare cases when in my dream state, the reality is happening in the dream and that totally puts me off greatly. A good example is when I'm dreaming I woke up, went to work, and got home.
When I woke up, I didn't know until I arrived at the office and learned no day has passed yet.
It's true, if you're too much into lucid dreaming, there are times when you can't tell if you've woken up. Parts of the dream spill overs in the waking world.
It worked for me once and I got really excited. Too excited and woke up :(. Never happened again (not that I've been trying).
On the movie, I think the really interesting part was not the recursive dreaming but rather how our ideas- that we think are novel - are not actually ours. After watching it, me and my wife started observing it on each other. Me or she would come up with something and the other would point out some conversation in the recent past that seeded it. Fun and a bit scary.
And when we notice how our original idea (and we're sure it's the first) is too similar to another who beat us to publication, yet both parties are sure no one copied anyone... well, it gives credence to the idea that there is an alternate space out there... or maybe we can access each other's ideas on some quantum level.
Speaking of quantum level, it might even be possible altogether.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
— Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
I've been trying to figure out how to know I am levels deep but to no avail.
This is pretty neat overview though: http://www.inception-explained.com/
Code running in a container runs slower than in the outside world ;-)
Nolan tends to write really, really, really soft scifi.
$ linux
Locating the bottom of the address space ... do_syscall_stub : ret = -1, offset = 1052680, data = 18ca9008
do_syscall_stub: syscall 192 failed, return value = 0xffffffff, expected return value = 0x1000
syscall parameters: 0x1000 0x1000 0x7 0x11 0x3 0x2449
Failed to flush page for address 0x1000
Killed[1] http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/old/UserModeLinux-HOW...