!!!Spoilers!!! Just caught Inception and I'm not left with a bunch of questions

[Shaggy]

First off the show was freakin brilliant but not nearly as confusing as most people were saying it was going to be.
The only question I'm left with, and I put to you who have seen the film is:

Spoiler

At the end of the film, when Cobb spins his totem top, it doesn't stop spinning before the film cuts to black. This would tend to imply that he was dreaming when he finally made it home. Maybe Nolan left it somewhat ambiguous so you can decide if it's a happy ending or a dream.

Spoiler

But if it's a dream how do we know the whole movie wasn't a dream. After all it was sort of bookended with him tracking down Saito in limbo. The entire series of events could have been created in Cobb's dreaming when he was stuck in limbo with Mal.

Spoiler

After all, it was stated that being as heavily sedated as they were and on such a deep level of dreaming, if they were killed they wouldn't wake up in "the real world" they would end up in limbo. So how do we know their is really any way out of limbo at all. Perhaps dying in limbo simply pushes you deeper into limbo.

Or perhaps this is all some psychological sign of my dreary outlook on life.

 

[AD]

Watched it last night and liked it a lot.

Spoiler

I think that the ending is ambiguous because it doesn't matter to Cobb anymore if it's a dream or not. Cobb doesn't even wait to see for himself whether the totem drops or not.

There's a lot to suggest that it's still a dream world - that his dreams have become his reality ("they come here to wake up..."). He finally has let go of Mol, and has his happy ending, so from Cobb's perspective it doesn't matter if it's a dream or not. He's finally let go. His hell becomes his heaven. The only characters in the whole film with any depth beyond what the plot requires are Cobb and Mol. The idea of losing your totem is that you can be tricked into not realizing you're in a dream anymore... but Cobb's totem isn't his. It's his wife's, which he stole from her subconcious. It could be that he never did escape from limbo, and the whole con had nothing to do with Fischer but rather that he was incepting into own mind the idea that he can be happy and the idea that he's awake and not in limbo.

At the same time I'm content with the idea that it really does drop after the screen goes black.