WARNING, SPOILERS! DON'T READ UNTIL YOU'VE SEEN THE MOVIE
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Because I can't stop thinking about this movie:

Was he awake or dreaming at the end?

Evidence he's awake and in reality (some of these will take a second viewing to confirm )

- Even if he was dreaming the whole time, there were far too many kicks to have woken him up by the end:
1. Kick when Saito’s house crumbles/fills with water
2. Second kick when he’s dunked in the tub
3. Elevator explosion
4. Van/water (even though he “stays” to get Saito)
5. Explosion at snow fortress (?) The details are muddiest for me at the snow fortress. I was distracted by the skiing and there was a lot of this guy here in that dream, that guy there in that dream, the van’s falling, Saito’s dying, the dude finds his dad, etc. so I need to see it again to catch more details from there.

- Some say the kids don't age/are wearing the same clothes so that it seems like he's still dreaming BUT the credits list the kids at two different ages, showing they aged. ALSO, who knows how much real-world time has really gone by so they might not have needed to have aged.

- Some say that while we don't see the top fall, you can hear it fall when the screen goes black. We didn't hear it b/c the audience went "ohhhh!"

- Some have noticed that during what's presented as dream sequences, Cobb is always wearing his wedding ring, but not in "real life." At the end he's not wearing his ring, which shows he's in reality.

- If Mal was right and jumping off the building put her back to reality, she would have "kicked" him afterwards to bring him back to reality as well.

- IF he was still dreaming, why wouldn't he have kept Mal there? It ruins the whole revelation he had about "You're not real, you're only my imagination of my wife so you can never be as good as the real thing, I have to let you go" yet he'd be ok living with "fake" kids in a dream? Doesn't make sense.

The top, when used as an example of dream vs reality, In the dream it always spins, no wobbles...so when you have the wobble at the end...

THANK YOU. I agree. But there's just as many "points" for the people who think he's dreaming. I want Nolan to hold a movie press conference and tell us

I JUST SAW THIS MOVIE

It was hard not to look at this thread beforehand.

I for one think that he is still in the dream, there are two ages mentioned in the credits because two older kids played the two kids he was speaking to on the telephone in the French bedroom, the girl who said "Grandma is shaking her head" is not a four year old. ALSO as he gets his passport stamped the symbol is shown to be the recycle sign with the line through it he drew at the cafe. The top is wobbling because the token is a projection of his subconscious (like a walking dream character) and he is really beginning to believe he is in actual reality, which he doesn't do in association with his children through most of the movie. He wasn't able to dream for himself any longer but now he was being his own architect again in limbo (which he has never left because his wife chooses not to wake him up because she feels that this is his preference since he didn't follow her, or she died long before he ever entered the creative realm, or she never existed except as a projection to begin with, along with the children). Kick number in this case is irrelevant.

Tokens are very, very dumb of course. If any architect knows what your token is they can allow the subconscious information to fill the environment just as building a safe allows private information in. The Inception in this case is his own belief in what he sees. He feels conflict about leaving limbo at which point it seems to me he creates all of these characters and this convoluted story drawing himself deeper into lower levels and bringing himself back up again as a way to address his fear of coming back to the real world without his family (Old and alone?), or risk oblivion or madness by continually killing himself. This is why all of his allies carry game peices and have stupid names like "Areadne", they are projections of his inner drive to come to peace with his life in limbo. Note the movie begins like the dreams, no explanation of how he got to the first infiltration after seeing the elderly Japanese version of his Saito projection.

I personally found the action scenes to be gratuitous, if you can make a rifle into a grenade launcher in dreams you can also make spikes come out of the ground and impale everyone instantly. Every dream level outside of the ice fortress for some reason has to look like downtown Berlin, and a lot of the special effect scenes were not relevant and sidetracked the action as we watched CGI slow motion explosions and mirror tricks that took me out of the story (unlike a movie that did it well, like Avatar). Why wasn't the car performing a 360 degree spin enough of a kick to wrestle people awake? Why wasn't going through the railing a strong enough kick, it shouldn't matter how many levels down you are, this is dumb of course since in the dream world you could create a sedative that worked perfectly for as long as you wanted it to- and that last line from the dying business man to Cilian Murphy was AWFUL. I felt a lot of the plot was explaining obvious things from the first few scenes "Remember when we dumped the main character in the bathtub and called it a kick to wake him up? That is what we call a kick, and we use it to wake people up."

Also inception is ridiculously easy in real life, there are people who plant simple ideas in our mind all of the to effect behavior- we call it marketing. No dream modification required, you can subliminally change people any number of ways without their knowledge, and oh yes, we use ALL OF OUR BRAINS when we are awake, and inventing lucid dream technology would change our society to a greater degree then a few criminals running around Mombassa. Why wouldn't the main character seek therapy for his wife committing suicide? This seems a pretty easy solution to his psychological problem, which instead he risks the 'life' of the Ellen Page projection to ignore.

If Holly's analysis is correct from a therapy standpoint then the figure not appearing in the movie would actually be Nolan, the director. He is the architect of the script execution. I really liked how he began the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio waking up in the waves, it is as if Jack from Titanic or the Shutter Island Protagonist has finally washed ashore (Shutter Island also begins with the sea), and in that way Leonardo Dicaprio is another level of reality. I hope this wasn't a literal "Christianity inception", one of my friends pointed out that when characters are named "Fischer" or "Fisher" the scriptwriter may have a secondary agenda.

This is the extent of my analysis! I might see this movie again some day but probably not while it is still in theaters. That is what they want...

My thought on that was that this again was a subconscious projection, he wasn't really speaking with his children on the phone but part of his brain recognized how they had likely aged if his wife had in fact killed herself, it was his guilt on the phone indirectly criticising him for not living in reality!

Will sez:

I personally found the action scenes to be gratuitous, if you can make a rifle into a grenade launcher in dreams you can also make spikes come out of the ground and impale everyone instantly.

I don't think they did that. One character was trying to shoot back at the sniper with a rifle, the other character pulled out a grenade launcher.

Only the architect of the dream can make the crazy dream stuff happen, everyone else is constrained by those rules. A lot of your points are counter to this.

I was entertained by the movie, even though I did have trouble falling for some of the silly parts, it was good enough for me to suspend my disbelief and have a good time watching it. That's the whole point of fiction, isn't it?

Inception's musical secrets.

I think that was even before the Hollywood master acheivement Dreamscape came out

Brilliant Inception Review on 3quarks