One of my friends is a very clever physicist. I don’t pretend to understand what he does, apart from that he works in different dimensions, not your usual one, two, or three, but dozens at a time.

He once explained how we, living in three dimensions, might comprehend a fourth, thus: Imagine if you will, somebody who lives on a flat surface and whose world is in two dimensions. If we in the three dimensional world drop a ball towards this flat surface, we will see the three-dimensional sphere, but the people living in two dimensions will only see the three-dimensional sphere through their two-dimensional eyes. So they will see a circle growing progrssively larger and then progressively smaller as the sphere passes through the flat surface, while we see a ball moving through three dimensions.

That is a very rudimentary way of viewing the possibility of a fourth dimension and what it would be like. In the same way as comprehending the possibility of different dimensions, the complicated world created by Inception works in layers, but rather than different dimensions, this film has different layers of reality.

Do not talk to anybody about this film before first seeing it, then talk about it loads. And try, like me attempting to understand my clever physicist friend, to understand what an astonishing visual and cerebral feast you have just witnessed.

Inception is currently showing in cinemas across Bristol.