Now let’s make things even more complicated. Melodies play more quickly or more slowly according to their tempo. Tempo measures the number of beats played per minute. One of Nolan and music director Hans Zimmer’s more clever ideas was to slow down the song “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” and use it as the theme for the movie. That low, rumbling horn blast, which has become one of the signature elements of the film, is in fact just the first notes to Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” played at a much slower tempo. In fact, as Zimmer explained:
all the music in the score is subdivisions and multiplications of the tempo of the Edith Piaf track. So I could slip into halftime; I could slip into a third of a time. Anything could go anywhere. At any moment I could drop into a different level of time. Now ask yourself: If the melody has a rate or tempo, does the experience of that melody also have a rate? If so, and if a melody can be played more quickly or more slowly, can consciousness play more quickly or more slowly? A melody plays more quickly if more beats are packed into a minute. Might consciousness similarly slow down or speed up? Might consciousness play, as it were, to a faster beat? Might those around you experience time differently, so that what you experience as a day seems like a year to them? Inception suggests that, indeed, conscious experience can speed up or slow down. A week in the van level corresponds to six months on the hotel level, which corresponds to ten years on the snow fortress level. Does this mean that dreamers on the snow fortress level dream faster than dreamers on the van level?
142 PHILOSOPHY OF TIME