"Your mind is the scene of the crime."
Inception - Easter Eggs & Hidden Details
Easter Eggs
The first letters of the main characters' names—Dom, Robert, Eames, Arthur, Mal, and Saito—spell out the word 'DREAMS'.
This acronym serves as a clever nod to the film's central subject matter. Some fans extend this by including Peter (Browning), Ariadne, and Yusuf to spell 'DREAMS PAY,' reflecting the characters' profession of profiting from dream infiltration.
Cobb's wedding ring appears on his finger only when he is in a dream.
This is a subtle but consistent visual clue for the audience to distinguish between dream and reality. Many viewers believe the ring, not the spinning top, is Cobb's true totem. In the final scene, he is not wearing the ring, suggesting he has made it back to the real world.
License plates on cars in the first dream level have the motto 'The Alternate State.'
This small detail in the production design reinforces the idea that the characters are in an altered reality, a different state of consciousness, rather than the real world.
The number on the front of the freight train that crashes through the street is 3502.
The number is the reverse of the number on the taxi the team uses (2053) and is also the number of the hotel room Robert Fischer is in. This interconnectedness of numbers across different scenes and dream layers subtly reinforces the constructed nature of the dream world.