Dom Cobb is able to use his unique skills to his advantage - he can enter people's minds through their dreams and thereby learn their secrets. He is a thief for hire but Japanese businessman Mr. Saito has a somewhat different proposition for him. He wants Cobb to enter the mind of Robert Fischer Jr., who is about to inherit his father's massive business empire, to plant a simple notion: to break-up his father's conglomerate and sell it off. In return, Saito will make it possible for Cobb to freely return to the US where he is currently wanted by the police. Cobb accepts and assembles his team with a plan to plant the idea deep in Fisher's mind by generating a series of dreams within dreams so that he eventually thinks he came up with the idea himself. As the intended deception grows ever more complex, Cobb has to deal with his own emotions and feelings of guilt, which are projecting themselves into the dreamspace. Cobb has to deal with the eventual question of what is real and what is only a dream.