Phillipa Cobb – age nine
I took another step up the staircase. Ariadne's staircase; a never ending square of steps. It's just like my pain, the pain I have because of my father. Mom says I shouldn't hurt. He's not really gone, she says. You can see him any time you want, she says. Step. Each step means something, something more than a movement: it's like another hole in my heart or one more flaw in my soul.
I guess Mummy is right, in a way. Dad's not really dead, I guess. He's closer to being ... livingly challenged. He's alive, but not the way we are alive. I can go into his room any time I want, to talk to him and hug him. But I also must go in sometimes when I would rather stay downstairs. I must go in to feed him and change his waste bags. It is like nursing him in a hospital sometimes. It's very scary.
When my parents were young, they went into a shared dream, simply for the pleasure. Well, they ended up falling into Limbo, the deepest dream state. My dad knew that they needed to die in Limbo to wake up here, in the real world. He told my mom, and they killed themselves by lying down under a moving train. When they woke up, my mom knew someone had put them under again, that they were still dreaming. On my parents' anniversary, she jumped out of a hotel window to wake up. My dad didn't jump, he thought he was already awake, and he fell to Limbo again.
My mom was brave regardless. She moved my dad to their bedroom, still hooked to the machine, and there he has remained for the last six years. Mom says he will soon be old enough to die in the dream, and then he will wake up. We all hope so. In the meantime, she's called other people who work in the field of dreams to try and wake my father up. Ariadne is our architect. She designs the dream settings they use in my dad's head. Arthur and Eames, I'm unsure what they do. Mom won't tell me – she says I'd try to learn to be like them. I'm already designing with Ariadne, so Mom's probably right. Yusuf, Saito, and Robert just got here today. Mom says they're going to go into Daddy's dreams and try to wake him up. This time they have a lot of people. It might work, because they're going to try something different. They're going to go in and pretend he'shelping them on a new job, when, really, the job is to insert an idea into his head. Mummy says this is called 'Inception.'