Inception Explained – HTML + CSS Experiment

I'd be curious what other myths you spotted, because the reference to Ariadne is certainly an allusion to the Greek myth you mention. Just as her namesake there guided Theseus from the labyrinth, Ariadne's role in Inception is guiding Cobb out of the maze that is the mortal world. This why we get casual dialogue about characters "getting lost" in limbo and "spending a lifetime" down there. According to the logic of the film, life is a dream and all dreams are mazes.

More neat things about Ariadne's character: she is a gift from his father ("ask and ye shall receive") and one of the first things she does is the very symbolic act of shattering a pair of mirrors which trap Cobb in another maze of sorts. Also, considering her thematic purpose, it is interesting to note that she is the single character who accompanies Cobb to the gates of immigration, wearing a sweater that appears to be made of red yarn.

On the Christian front, I was raised as a soft Anglican so I hope I know enough not to be wildly wrong. That said, the first thing that clicked for me watching the film was the secular symbolism. When Nolan pointed his camera at the ocean while the narrator intoned about "the shores of our subconscious" it jolted me to attention as water is a common symbol for the subconscious in a great deal of English literature and film, and Nolan uses it in this very conventional way throughout Inception. The Christian references are omnipresent but subtle ("leap of faith", "goddamn beach", etc.) and the sandcastle bit didn't fall into place until much later, when I caught James' line of dialogue thanks to watching the film in a theater with subtitles, and then made the connection to the collapsing buildings of limbo and the sandcastles after the fact.