I believe the whole dream mechanic works as such:"Ariadne: What’ll we do? I could try all that fancy building shifting stuff I pulled out when my character was first introduced and then never used again. On second thought… no."
(SPOILER)You have one 'main' dreamer, everyone else is a 'shared' dreamer. Thats pretty well backed up since throughout the movie they say "we're going to go into 'such and such's' dream". The main dreamer (with training) have complete control over the dream environment (at the begining when Ariadne was bending buildings she was the main dreamer and had a knack for it), the shared dreamers can also manipulate the dream but the main dreamer has priority control. However sometimes if one of the shared dreamers has an extremely powerful subconcious emotion it can come out and trump the main dreamer, like how Moll appears out of no where on the bridge during the girl's training dream and kills her. This dream trumping can also be done by training mental defenses as Fischer had done. When the plan was put into action Ariadne was not able to use her powerful manipulation abilities for two reasons i can think of
1- She was not the main dreamer, why? because the main dreamer had to be the one to stay behind and enter the rest of the shared dreamers into the next level, she had to follow Cobb all the way as she was the one who knew about his crazy subconcious
2- Everything Cobb said in the begining about how the more crazy things you do in the dream the more likely it is that the person you're trying to fool will figure out and all the subconcious onlookers will attack you.
Also I feel a lot of the people (not anyone in particular) saying "the ending is a dream" are only saying that because it's the edgy ending. I cant think of any reason the ending couldnt be reality, that it couldnt just be a straight foward story with a straight foward happy ending. I think people say "it's a dream" because they want it to be a dream and then they go on to reject the theory that it's reality as unrealistic becuase it's the "happy ending" when really they themselves seek the "sad ending" because thats the ending theyve gotten use to in past years and it makes them happy to think that way.
Im not argueing for or against either theory, I accept both possibilities
edit: though i didnt notice the ring thing, that would be a clear indicator but i dont know if he's wearing the ring or not because i wasnt paying attention to it
edit: More relating to my previous post about totems
(SPOILER)Now that I think about it Cobb's totem does make quite abit of sense. If he is really the 'best' extractor there is then he would be able to manipulate it to spin forever regardless of the 'main' dreamers manipulation. (in my previous post when i said "someone elses dream" i was refering to a main dreamer)
Something I dont think they covered:
(SPOILER)How and why did Cobb and Mal go into the first limbo? What were they doing at the time? It only shows them waking up on the floor, there is no one else around that they were trying to extract information from and no one to operate the machine. If there isnt an answer it begs the golden question presented in the film "How did they get there". This seems to support the "the entire movie is a dream" theory
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