digging up the heart

dream technology was developed by the military "so soldiers could practice shooting, stabbing and strangling each other". the only way to escape a dream before it ends is by killing yourself or convincing someone to kill you. you can live entire lifetimes in a dream, only to wake up to the disorientation of realising that only hours have passed in the waking world. prolonged exposure to dream-sharing tech carries the high risk of inducing psychosis to the point that you can no longer tell the difference between dreams and reality. you can carry a "totem" that behaves differently in a dream to counter this, but if anyone else gets their hands on it and figures out how it works, it's game over. dreaming is so addictive that some people sacrifice their waking lives to keep dreaming for longer. people can be hired to break into your mind and take anything they want from it, down to your most intimate parts, and sell them for profit. if that's not paranoia-inducing enough, entering someone else's mind carries the risk of being hunted down and torn to pieces by manifestations of their own psyche in a subconscious act of self-defence that cannot be controlled, because what you are doing is invasive and violent. the premise of the film rests on a superrich man hiring a group of people to fundamentally alter a man's identity because inheriting his father's corporation has the potential to make him a BUSINESS COMPETITOR. the leader of said heist team is so haunted by the suicide of his wife that he (unintentionally) caused by violating her mind to the point of madness that he locks the rest of them into a labyrinth of his own guilt, stalked by the minotaur her vengeful ghost. oh, and on the right cocktail of drugs, you can't wake up from a nightmare, and will instead end up in pure unconstructed unreality, surrounded only by decaying structures built by those who inhabited it before you, whose intentions and regrets might still haunt the landscape like a malevolent physical presence.