You make a number of excellent observations.

Attack 4: Shoot yourself in the head if anything strange happens to indicate you're "dreaming" because thats what you do when things feel strange and it is important to be "awake" for some reason. DiCaprio nearly shoots himself in the head based on only a spinning top that spins a little longer than usual.

I got a little chill when I read that.

And:

Attack 7: "Dreams feel real while we are in them, right?" causing agreement with the statement "It is only after we "wake up" (connected with suicide) that we realize something was strange." "You can't remember the beginning of a dream, you end up in the middle, so how did we end up here?" This suggests that if you can't remember something, the beginning, or how you got where you are you are dreaming and need to "wake up".

It reads exactly like the sort of suggestion they'd implant in a mind controlled assasin.



My whole life I've had a recurring dream of standing on my 16th floor windowsill and getting ready to jump. Sometimes I I can fly off the ledge, but a lot of times its so real I can't tell whether its a lucid dream or the real thing and I hesitate...

The movie scared me for all the reasons you mentioned. Especially the part where Marianne Cotillard was getting ready to jump and her reasoning. I have also thought this. I believe some of it was designed to mess with programmed people and trigger their suicide programs