Perceptions from Brisbane: what does inception have to do with Tolstoi?

Montesquieu considered that the weather and location of a city had an impact on its citizens, determining to a certain extent their attitude. Likewise, there is an intuition that just as there is chemistry between persons persons have more affinity with certain places than with others. This being the case for me, I find myself quite inspired and at ease in a city I would not mind at all to call my own: Brisbane is such a nice place that one forgets that rudeness and exclusion prevail and predominate in some corners of this country Earth.
This being said, I recently saw the very interesting Inception movie, one of whose themes, as considered by the critics, is the fact that our perception determines our life. For some, whether DiCaprio's character lived in his dreams or in real-reality in the end is not relevant, but that he regarded his experiences and perceptions and real. Yet, as DiCaprio himself mentioned once during his performance, that would not eliminate the fact that his real children would miss their father in real-reality, and thus they would suffer and be deprived of his dad. This reminds me of the risks of escapism: being a fan of role-playing myself, I cannot ignore that even though his work was influenced by his religious beliefs to a great extent, the creation of a world dettached from ours and with no apparent links, unlike the lands imagined by his friend C.S. Lewis, living a life unconnected with ours engenders the risk of losing oneself and not doing one's part in the life we are given and the opportunities we have.
In any case, returning to perceptions, whether DiCaprio's character perceives something in one way or the other does not change the fact that what is interpreted by him has an entity, a meaning and existence independent of his perceptions. That is to say, regardless of his reaction to an object or being according to his conceptions, that object or being is independent and thus his reality could be grasped eventually. That argument is the one that counters the prevailing relativistic society we live in, which is akin to the context and opinions of Sophists, opposed by Plato and Aristotle precisely because of the sophistic relativistic attitude.
And returning to perceptions, it is interesting how true is the idea that books are written by many: by its author and by those who read and interpret it, writing it in their mind. Yet, one's interpretation may say a lot more about oneself than the author for that very reason, and it is proven in one interesting book: Anna Karenina. A very Christian person, Tolstoi strongly dissaproved of Anna's unfaithful relationship and compared her actions to those of Levin in parallel, showing how much hurt she caused because of ideas she convinced herself of, quite opposed to those previously held by her. However, many regard her as a heroine, something surprising given the hints given by Tolstoi as to her unfair perceptions of others. Probably because of these wrong attitudes Tolstoi later seemed to regret somehow writing the book, or to consider it not an example of good art.