It’s a confusing but interesting film.
It’s not Cobb’s totem, it’s Poll’s dream of her totem which she kept hidden in a dream safe. Poll lost her sense of being in a dream, it became real for her: Limbo. Cobb replaced her dream totem with his own permanently spinning dream of the totem to incept the idea that they weren’t in reality (to persuade her to leave Limbo). So I think the totem Cobb uses is not real and behaves how Cobb expects it to behave.
In “reality”, he’s constantly chased and escapes in Mobassa in a maze. The situation where his kids are stuck in America is just plain weird. It’s as if he’s architecting someone else’s dream, probably Poll’s original dream. He half-suspects this anyway because his projection of Poll discusses this with him in the dream hotel room.
He tries Yousef’s deep sedatives and “awakes” apparently without having dreamed. While washing his face he sees his wife and is disturbed by Saito before checking the totem. If he’s dreaming at this point, it’s not clear if he ever truly wakes.
These points seem contradictory! So one theory is that Cobb is irretrievably stuck in Limbo after Poll escaped (by jumping out the window). That Saito, and maybe Michael Cane’s character, enter his dream to incept the idea of the inception heist as a way of getting Cobb’s mind to return “home”, look at his kid’s faces and accept that reality (whether it’s real or not) – to be at peace.
Alternatively, it’s not meant to make sense and the director is just playing with us 🙂
