While recounting the detail of one’s own dreams is invariably fascinating, the minutiae of other people’s can be unbearably dull. This is presumably why psychoanalysts are paid handsome sums to appear interested in their clients’ rambles.

It also explains some of the difficulties I experienced with Christopher Nolan’s Inception, a thriller that embarks on a headlong chase through dreamland, often pursuing an interesting idea through patches of frantic and confusing tedium.

The central conceit is that a clutch of highly trained professionals can climb into the minds of their sleeping targets, and extract thoughts. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is one such operative and his skills are greatly sought after in the game of global psychological espionage.

No sooner does he dip into a stranger’s lively subconscious, however, than he tends to come up against the elegant but furious figure of the late Mrs Cobb, Mal (Marion Cotillard), a perpetual ‘projection’ of his own. Mystery shrouds the nature of their relationship, and its untimely end is at the heart of the film.

Cobb, exiled from America for an undisclosed reason, longs to return to see his two small children and thus accepts the time-honoured ‘last big job’. His customer is a Japanese magnate, Saito (Ken Watanabe), who is powerful enough to make Cobb’s legal problems vanish and who wishes him to do something even more radical than thought theft: thought planting, or ‘inception’.

This is a near-impossible art because – as we are portentously told – ‘the subject’s mind always knows the genesis of an idea’.

I can think of several cases in which the subject clean forgot the genesis of an idea, but then this kind of bogus jabberwocky is a hallmark of the script. Cobb is required to seed the notion in the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), a business rival of Saito’s, that he must split up the business empire inherited from his father (Pete Postlethwaite).

There are a few explanations to fob off any embryonic queries about how we got here, but the writer-director Nolan (Memento, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight) is mainly concerned with getting Cobb and his crack team of specialists inside a drugged Fischer’s heavily policed subconscious, from whence they descend into a perilous helter-skelter of dreams within dreams.

I have heard it said that fans will return to Inception for further viewings in a bid to extract more meanings from its layers. Good luck to them – I’m not sure they’ll find much. Nolan’s modus operandi here is to present a muddle at such a breakneck pace that it gets mistaken for profundity.

There are simultaneous dreams about skiing across frozen wastes, running around hotel rooms and plummeting in trucks, and when Cobb’s junior sidekick Ariadne (Ellen Page) looks up in desperation and yells, ‘Whose subconscious are we in exactly?’, I knew just how she felt.

Although buildings reliably bend and explode, there are very few moments of real magic or feeling. Even the encounters between Cobb and his late wife are shorn of poignancy, since we scarcely get to meet the real woman, only his embittered ‘projection’ of her. When cinema plunges into metaphysics, I would much rather find myself in the company of Mr Spielberg, who at least takes the time to make himself clear.

Inception isn’t a dud but nor is it a masterpiece. It’s like a very ambitious, overlong potboiler: visually beautiful, ingenious in parts and dragging in others. Its talented cast have little time to display their acting skills, because they’re thrust into perpetual motion.

I wish I could recommend it more enthusiastically, but in truth there were too many times when I yearned to close my eyes and drift off into something more compelling.