I was watching a Christmas Carol with my family the other night (the Patrick Stewart version for those curious) and I came across an interesting realization: Scrooge is experiencing Inception. Let's suspend our disbelief for a second.

Requirements for Inception - As the movie states, the dreamer must be three layers deep for Inception to work. This requirement is met if one considers each ghost of Christmas it's own layer (past, present, future). Of course, this requires a particular level of sedation. Scrooge complains of indigestion, so his food could easily have been drugged. By whom? Marley, of course. His ghostly face appeared on the knocker of Scrooge's house, so we know he'd already been there.

The time required - At the end of the story, Scrooge is surprised that the spirits managed to do everything in one night. He easily satisfies that thought with a "Oh, they're spirits. They can do whatever they like." Inception tells us that a dream is several times faster than real time and each level of dream adds to that. This allows for an exponential amount of time especially as Scrooge was three layers in.

The setup - Everything up till now is good, but here's where things get tricky. One would think that the layers of dreaming would go in the order presented in the story: past, preset, future. However, careful observation of the time each layer tells us that the opposite is true. Past takes the longest, so it has to be the last level of dream with present and future going up the chain. There is a complication that this brings: in future (first layer of dream) Scrooge remembers present and past. There are two possible explanations:

1. Most probable - Scrooge, upon entering the future, is immediately put to sleep. Upon entering in present, the same happens. This kicks him automatically to the third layer where everything can play out working backwards.

2. Scrooge is actually experiencing all three dreams at the same time, each layer's experiences adding to the previous in real time. Since the bottom layers play out much faster then the previous, all the information required would be in place for the story to play out as seen.

Whodunnit? - Given we assume all of the above is true, who is the person that started the whole thing? Who is the architect. A simple question - Jacob Marley. He's already a ghost, let's face it, but his closeness to Scrooge puts him at an advantage to know all the key points to hit upon.

So, there you have it. It seems Christopher Nolan's seemingly original idea was actually conceived by literary genius Charles Dickens in the 19th century.

Or perhaps I just have too much time on my hands...