Just read it.
It's a ridiculous urban legend, Arthur. No idiot could believe it exists.
They say that everything's warm there, in that fabled place. Or chilly, depending on your preferences. Maybe it's hot as Florida sun on white sand.
They say that people are kind there. Whispers of the loving sort seem to generate from the believers when the place is mentioned. Cobb scoffs and tells Arthur and the rest of his team it's a stupid fantasy, one of those idealizations that couldn't be possible. Put it out of your minds, he says, lest it fever you.
It's called by many names, none of them "Heaven." But Arthur is simple, and just calls it the name that he likes in his head. It's Solla Sollew to him, and those eleven letters seem to wrap around him, even define him. They seem to thrum through the beat as he pounds out notes on an old piano with yellow keys, and as he realizes that he is no longer capable of fortissimo.
It was an old man with cloudy eyes that first told Arthur about Solla Sollew, a place where anyone can dream. A place where even people like Arthur, people who haven't been able to dream for the longest time, can fall asleep and have familiar images designed only by your own mind play out lazily, at your mind's own pace. You can go to places where you can think in bright colors, and see birds with red tails and raucous singing voices, elephants with pink clovers.
The old man was wearing an army uniform, a camouflaged rag of a thing with an old medal hanging by two threads off the chest. He grabbed Arthur's arms and pulled him close—his breath smelled of meat and dead things. He talked to everyone and no one, telling the dust specks the wild things of a place much like Heaven, a faraway land somewhere over the horizon and behind an old grandfather oak tree, whose branches span the stars.
Dear Ariadne and Eames. The words rap around Arthur's head when he's travelling away from the team for a few days. Dear Ariadne and Eames, and Cobb and Mal, I'm thinking of you. And I'm wishing we all were in Solla Sollew.
Arthur wants to wake up.
He wants to wake up and be in his Solla Sollew, his place where he can fall back asleep and create his own dreams, with no interference from people that aren't himself while needles slowly riddle the veins in his wrist into nothing less than Swiss cheese.
Arthur tries to explain this notion to Cobb, his long-time friend. The extractor's forehead wrinkles noticeably, and he's making connections, Arthur can tell. You're awake, Arthur. See? Your die is on the two. It always is, and always will be.
Arthur nods without listening.
And he takes to sitting in a worn lawn chair in the workshop, long past when Eames has bid him a good night. With just one small, white-light lamp to shine down on the tabletop, Arthur throws his totem again and again, watching as the twos add up. But however many times it dictates that he's sitting in reality, Arthur's still dancing around his place, his Solla Sollew that has to be the only reality. And it's so clear to him...why isn't it to everyone else?
The totem shows him reality once more. Arthur throws it to the corners to collect cobwebs. It's lying to him.
Words, as words often do, play in Arthur's head as he sits silent. Lyrics from songs he doesn't know and piano notes he can't put letters to. He composes his picture of Solla Sollew, with a waterfall of dreams that he can drink from and save himself from the unbroken blackness that is the only way he sleeps in this cruel shade of reality. He thinks that he might be able to find it, if only it wouldn't disappear when he tries to reach for the paradise he waits for.
He reads John Milton in an effort to learn something about regaining Solla Sollew, as if he has ever had it in the first place.
The face of a Frenchwoman presents itself in Arthur's head, and he smiles as he greets her warmly, though she doesn't answer. She was a believer, Arthur now knows, though she must have kept it a great secret from her husband and friends. She must have been one of the first enlightened ones, one of the first to look at her spinning top of a totem and disregard the ruling given to her. Arthur thinks it's a shame that Cobb had meddled. Mal could have been waiting for him in Solla Sollew, offering him her hand in friendship and a smile that plainly tells him that she's glad he believes.
At least he would not be alone.
He hears snatches of conversation, words that are directed at him and yet told to someone else. They tell of how his eyes look as if bruised, and how he has slept no more than a handful of hours in the past weeks. How he rarely speaks. They accuse him of losing his grasp on reality. Arthur smiles without letting it reach his lips. He's not losing his grasp on reality. He's losing his grasp on the dream, and he'll wake up soon. Lying in a field of white flowers with black thorns, looking up at the blue skies of his Solla Sollew.
He does not notice that when he plays the piano, only faint hisses come from the keys, though in his head plays the tunes of Solla Sollew, simple note progressions that are fit to be played 15ma. Maybe on the harp. Ariadne plays harp, but Arthur selfishly keeps his note progressions to himself and taps them out on the baby grand instead. No mezzo-forte is possible, and even a pianissimo is rare.
If he could find it, all would be well, Arthur says. He tries to write in a journal, but as his mind wanders pictures of his waterfall and clouds shaped like hope take residence on the pages. He doesn't notice when Cobb takes away and unloads Arthur's gun, replacing it in the desk drawer ten minutes later, sans death-dealing bullets.
It may be a good deed he does, because Arthur fingers his gun often. He wonders if you can get to Solla Sollew by such crude methods. Mal, after all, ended up somewhere between heaven and hell, not limbo and not reality and not a dream but not really anything, and she ended her life herself. Solla Sollew seems like a sacred place, one that will not take you if you rush yourself along to it.
Arthur waits to wake up, and he travels trying to find Solla Sollew in the meantime. After all, sometimes you can't tell the difference between a dream and reality; maybe he's already woken up and Solla Sollew is waiting for him to find it. If it takes him miles, if it takes him years, he will find his Solla Sollew, the place where he can be home with you.
Who "you" is, though, he's not quite sure.
Dark alleyways mix with buttery sunlight, sometimes separated and sometimes thrown together in some sort of manner that hurts Arthur's eyes. He doesn't wear his sunglasses, though, for fear of anything blocking his first sight of Solla Sollew.
He returns once to the base, smiling at Eames, who looks at Arthur with empty eyes, eyes devoid of emotion that once resided there. He speaks two words, only two words, and then he strokes all eighty-eight keys of his piano once before he disappears forever.
Ariadne finds his totem a year later, covered in delicate filaments, the products of spider's wombs, the die come to rest forever on two small black dots. She picks it up and sighs, and two words cross her mind. She's not sure where they come from, but they seem to mean something that she can't quite reach. Someone she once knew might have said them, or maybe no one did at all.
"Solla Sollew," she whispers out loud, and her eyes glint once before she tucks Arthur's totem gently into the pocket of her scarlet jacket.
Inspired by Seussical.