Inception - How do you Learn to Dream?

My dreams, head full of Tourette medication and restless sleep patterns, often have outbreaks of craziness. Most dreams you barely remember, flickers of images that are burnt out the moment you open you eyes and the sandman drops you back off in the land of consciousness. Others are burnt into the gallery of your memory with a laser.

They come and go. In my super stressed university days, every dream I had was a) lucid and 2) involved flying. I was aware I was dreaming so often, in a REM world little different from ours.

Until I decided to lift off the ground like an airship made of feathers, and drift around like a sky manatee. No propulsion was necessary, no awful flapping. Just ease of movement by the power of thought in a world where no harm could come.

Paradoxical movement. Inception. Niever since have I been able to control my dreams as well as they do in Christopher Nolan's other masterpiece - after The Prestige.

The dream machines in inception are never quite explained to us. We see a suitcase with a metallic case, centred with a large button used to kick the dreams off. The use of sedatives is implied, but none are seen being introduced into the machine, although it looks as if there are places for them to be placed.

The tubes that network the dreamers to the machine don't appear to be IVs, you never see any of the cast introducing them into their veins; they just seem to be strapped around the wrist. Likewise, there seems to be no connection from the brain to the machine, this must be being served by the tube on the arm.

And then, how do they get such control over the environments; the architecture, clothing, and weapons. Eames (how I want to be him) produces a huge gun when the team are trapped in the warehouse, but gives no idea as to where it comes from other than saying, movie stealingly "You should dream a little bigger, darling." - so, do you imagine your own gear coming in, or is their some kind of central dream server you gear up in, akin to The Construct in "The Matrix."

Also, how do they dream with such utter clarity...no fuzziness, changing faces, suddenly changing locales? Is it in the militarily developed software or hardware, or are only certain people good enough at dreaming to work in this alpha waved mindscape?

I wish I was that good. And I wish I was Tom bloody Hardy.