The Legend of Zelda: Inception

The other day, I finally got round to watching the critically acclaimed film Inception. If you have not seen the film, and you intend to watch it sometime, then stop reading now! Assuming you have seen the film, you will know about it's fairly complex plot about dreams, dreams within dreams, and the human subconscious. After watching the film, I started to think about the one Legend of Zelda game that is based on dreams - that is, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.

After all, the island of Koholint is not actually real. It's a dream world that Link must battle his way through in order to stop the Nightmare bosses and wake the Wind Fish. Drawing upon the concepts we find in Inception, there are some interesting things we can infer about Link's Awakening. This is not to say that those inferences are actually necessarily true. Inception is, obviously, extremely different to Link's Awakening. Link doesn't have access to any special dreaming technology, and he presumably does not even know he is dreaming . However, I think it would be quite fun to explore these themes regardless!

Inception is all about dreams and, bizarrely, dreams within dreams. The film gets increasingly more complex, and clever, as the characters engage in more and more layers of dreams and sub-dreams. And this practise is evident in Link's Awakening! Obviously, Link is within one single dream in his adventures in Koholint, but the exception to this is the mysterious Dream Shrine. Inside the small hut in Mabe Village, Link jumps into a bed and is sent into another dream in a ritualistic fashion. Even more interesting is the relationship exhibited by the sub-dream of the Dream Shrine and the first dream: Link obtained the Ocarina in the Dream Shrine, and he still has it when he wakes up in Koholint.

Another interesting idea in Inception is that if you die during your dream, you will wake up. But you actually have to die - even being severely injured is not enough to wake up. Similarly in Link's Awakening, whether it be a pinch from a Toronbo Shores crab or sword slash from a Moblin, physical damage will not wake up Link if it merely hurts him, though we don't see what happens after Link dies either (there is no game over ending where Link wakes up after dying in Koholint to find the Nightmares reigning supreme). Though it is also apparently possible to drop into a deep state of unconsciousness when you are killed in a dream, a state of 'limbo' which you cannot awaken from for at least a long time - perhaps this is what happens in Link's Awakening.

In Inception, time also flows differently in dreams. Because the mind is working more efficiently when you dream, a seemingly long time spent in a dream actually translates to a comparatively much shorter time in the real world. This is consistent with Link's Awakening, since Link has loads of stuff to do in Koholint, and surely if he spent ages unconscious floating in the sea, he would risk death by drowning, starvation or dehydration, being eaten by a sea creature, and so on.

The special technology in Inception allows you to enter the dreams of other people. When Link was dreaming about Koholint, was he actually in his own dream, or was he an intruder in the dream of the Wind Fish? Or was there simply one whole dream 'world'?  Also,  Inception's main theme is about an idea of the same name. To achieve 'inception', an idea must be planted into somebody's mind in a fashion that makes the subject believe the idea was their own. Essentially, it is creating a false illusion of inspiration. On the other hand, in Link's Awakening, reality and the dream world are not separate. As Link awakens at the end of the game, he not only sees the Wind Fish, but if you got the special ending, it is implied that Marin somehow escaped the dream world and came into reality.

This (somewhat crude) comparison between Inception and Link's Awakening might be a bit mad, but I would like to remind you that it has been more for fun than anything else. Besides, perhaps looking at how dreams 'work' can, if anything, open up new possibilities for Zelda theorists to bicker over.