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The Theory

It was Mal's idea, the totems. She was brilliant, poetic and elegant like that. They thought she chose the spinning top as her totem, but she didn't.

She took it to her grave, but she had always felt that the top had chosen her.

Little did she know that she would not be the only dreamer to feel this way and, just like her, none of the others in the shared-dreaming business would ever get the courage to express this theory aloud because it sounded like nonsense.

The totem chooses the dreamer;it was like fairy tale stuff, a theory that couldn't hold its own water…

But that didn't stop the dreamers from feeling like it was true.

The Die

Arthur was not even in his twenties when he was tapped by higher powers to participate in experimental dreaming. He and other rookie soldiers slipped into dreams and learned how to kill each other without dying, learned how to keep a level head in a hellish simulated war-zone without actually leaving their chairs. It was fascinating technology and he happily left the service to join Mr. and Mrs. Cobb in exploring other applications of it.

When Mal developed the idea of a totem, and Arthur had to find one of his own, he did so carefully. He was aware that whatever he picked was going to be on his person for the rest of his life, and he didn't want it to be just any old thing.

Dom recommended looking into game pieces, and so Arthur started visiting toyshops and things. He found that the world was full of games with pieces that were little enough for a kid to swallow which was just the right size for a dreamer to conceal on his person… However, he couldn't just pick one. He wanted it to having meaning, or something, be a kind of reflection of himself.

Arthur was a man who had to have a plan.

And a back-up plan.

And a few worst-scenarios.

His focus to detail, the way he planned for everything, made him the best point man in the business. (Always prepared, that was Arthur.) He believed that, like secrets, surprises could be gotten the better of with just a little strategy. Strategy.

Like chess.

So he had been thinking along the lines of a rook or something from a chess set. He had absolutely no idea, when he came across a bag of plastic dice in a toyshop, why he stopped to think about them as totems.

The dice were all different colors and he plucked a blue one out, then instantly discarded it for a red one. He rolled it on a nearby counter several times and watched it land on the six every time. He grinned.

Loaded dice was gambling without the gambling. He liked the sound of that; it was how he felt in the dreamscape, in a world where he risked being killed, but not really, since dying in a dream was just waking up.

He held his palm flat and looked at the little red plastic cube sitting in the center of it. It felt right in his hand, which was weird, since dice games and gambling had never appealed to him before.

He pocketed the red die without paying for it, because to do that he'd have to buy the whole bag and he wasn't interested in the other dice, just his little red one. As he discreetly slid his totem out of sight, he couldn't help but grin at how perfectly it fit into the little watch pocket on his suit vest.

The Bishop

Ariadne hardly ever planned ahead because she liked to improvise too much. In her calling as an architect, she found that initial plans often evolved far beyond the original concept anyway, so there was no point. She'd just sit down at a sketch pad with nothing but an idea on where to start and then let it find a place to stop on its own.

In other words, surprises happened and she was eager to adapt to them.

She couldn't get enough of it: discovery, true inspiration. It was a feeling like she was it (the whole world) inside and out and the best she could do was try to keep up as she mapped it all out. It was her constant search for that feeling that kept her working all hours, that kept her lying to friends when they told her she should take a break now and then. It was her dark, ugly secret, like a gambling addiction.

Then she was pulled into shared-dreaming and things only got worse. In a dream, she could do anything—absolutely anything. She couldn't help it as she made the impossible possible all around her. But with an angry mob out to rip her face off and a knife plunging into her gut, she quickly learned that such reckless abandon had some pretty gruesome consequences.

Okay, so a few rules and some planning in a dream was necessary in order to stay sane, but she didn't care, she was still hooked.

When Arthur explained to her about totems, the first thing that came to mind was a coin, but apparently that wasn't good enough. (She would later learn that a coin was a perfectly acceptable totem, it was just a boring and overused one and the young man in a three-piece suit had simply wanted to ensure that she at least picked something with a little bit more style.)

Going home that night, she was wondering about the top hat piece from Monopoly and how she could alter it to make it a totem when her eye fell on the expensive chess set in the corner.

She played chess occasionally, but preferred other things. She'd always felt that the ancient game was too structured and kinda stuffy with no real risks like poker or Monopoly, but she'd always loved the look of a chess set, which was why she kept one set up in the corner.

Drifting over to it, she ignored the pawns completely, because no one ever cared about them, and reached for the Bishop, because it had always been her favorite.

A chess piece. She could easily alter its weight and make it acceptable for a totem. It could be a hint of rigid rules and structure that she would always carry with her through the dreamscape, reminding her not to go over the edge… She squeezed it in her palm and frowned. Why did it feel… so right?

The Secret in the Theory

Secretly, nearly every dreamer thought it was odd that he or she chose their particular totem, but that theory that totems somehow chose their dreamers never came to them until they fell in love. It came then because most of them noticed the similar characteristics between their totems and their lovers.

A top had chosen Mal.

Dom was brilliant, but dizzy with ambitious ideas and so eager to push the boundaries, that upon meeting him, the first thing she had thought was that he was handsome but very nearly unbalanced. Not quiet, but nearly. Though wobbly, he succeeded in his ambitions, usually the kinds of things that seemed to defy the rules, which was just like what a little hunk of metal standing upright on one end seemed to do.

Originally, a little compass had chosen Dom. (It pointed north in the real world, and in a dream its needle spun around and around with no direction.) Dom had loved it, as all dreamers secretly loved their totems. He never bothered to wonder why, or else he might have put it together that he loved a compass for his totem because his Mal, from the moment he met her, had always been the thing leading him down out of his dizzy dreams and back home to reality.

Then one day she was convinced her world was not real and it was during that time that his compass stopped giving him any kind of solace… and then he found her totem amid the debris of a trashed hotel room and from then on, the little metal top was his, because it just felt right.

If he bothered to think about it, it was because the woman he loved had become unbalanced by then and nothing like a compass at all.

A Young Dreamer Finds the Theory

Working with Ariadne, Arthur first learned she was passionate and creative, and then he learned she was without rules. She somehow got satisfaction out of having no clue what was ahead or how she would handle it. Her plan was the same every time, to just wing it.

For God's sake, she plunged straight in to Limbo with absolutely no other plan than "we'll find Fischer and somehow formulate a kick of our own." Cobb had told Arthur all about it, and the point man still couldn't believe it. He'd never heard something so stupid.

Ariadne was happy to take on the big gambles—and she never lost. In Arthur's carefully planned day that was a breath of fresh air. She was fun. She was exciting. But she was constant, and reliable, too. Pursuing her was like a gamble but not really, not when she looked at him like she did when she thought no one else could see.

The first time he took her hand in his for no other reason than just to hold it, he reveled in how her slender fingers seemed made to be between his. The first time he drew her up against him, he lost his breath because it felt so right to tuck her head under his chin as her arms tightened around him. The first time she gave herself to him, he lost more than his breath; he lost all things that made him Arthur, becoming this other thing, this piece of something else.

After, when she had fallen asleep beside him, he checked his totem just because it couldn't be real. He knew it was, but he had never felt like this before and couldn't believe it was happening.

The die landed soundly on the six three times in a row, proving that this was reality, like he'd already known it was. Looking at it and dwelling on the source of his happiness, he realized that Ariadne was a lot like his totem. With that, he caught up to the many dreamers before him and thought for the briefest moment that perhaps his totem was a reflection of himself after all (like he'd originally wanted it to be) a reflection of his better half… It couldn't be a coincidence he'd picked a totem so like Ariadne before even meeting her…

His musing were interrupted and he gave a start at her touch, a soft hand on his bare shoulder blade. It was late, so late it was early again, and so he'd assumed she was asleep, but that was rather absent-minded of him. As dreamers, they spent large portions of their day asleep in chairs as they worked, making sleeping at night difficult.

He allowed her to tug him down to the mattress beside her, deeply embarrassed to be caught checking his totem like a romantic fool or something.

"It's not stupid," she said. Maybe because she truly knew him so well, or maybe because she felt his blush having fit herself against him like one of his suits. She chuckled, "I was going to check mine, too, but then I decided I didn't care." She held him tight, "I'm staying here no matter what it is."

"It's real," he murmured into her hair with a chuckle, voice as deep and reassuring as ever.

"You know, you've always reminded me of my totem," she admitted. He opened his eyes back onto the darkness of the room at that. He did not ask her to explain, because he did not need her to. He understood perfectly.

Had it been daylight, he never would have thought the thought that he thought next, but he was hidden in the dark with the woman he loved and so a most fanciful idea slipped in and he didn't destroy it on principle like he did other flights of fancy.

Perhaps the totem chooses the dreamer.