Big post, so if you want a clearer explaination, just go here and read the plot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InceptionName: Jack McGregor
Totem: A 6 sided dice that always lands on a single value
Role: One man assault squad
Bio: Daniel was always somewhat of a thug, a man of many talents in the illegal markets and back alley deals. An ex-special forces trooper with a focus in assault and field medical work, he was discharged after punching an officer after recieving an order that he didn't like and after that decided to put his talents and knowledge to good use in black market dealings and illegal ventures. One day, he found out from a contact of his about the concept of inception, that one could literally steal the secrets and ideas from anothers mind through the medium of dreams. After contacting a team of extractors with an offer of his services in exchange for a price, he decided that this was more his style of work.
Bacically, if you don't know about the movie inception (which is great by the way, you should watch it), the basic premise is like this:
Some how, people found a way to enter the dreams of another person using certain drugs and syncronised deep sleeping from certain sedatives. What's more, a properly creative and trained person, known as an architect, can create, and even manipulate in wierd and twisted ways, a world inside the mind of the original dreamer, and this world is populated by the the person who is dreaming with their thoughts, secrets and ideas. The people that you see in these worlds are called projections, they are the very being of the dreamers mind and at first they totally ignore the intruding team, but as the team and the architect make more and more of an inpact in the dream world, they begin to get noticed by the projections and the dreamers mind starts to realise something is wrong. This is very bad, since after enough pushing from the team, the projections start coming after you to kill you.
Futhermore, it is possible, for a team of trained men and women, to encounter the dreamer themselves in this world of his own making and trick him into forgetting something inside his own mind, or for the team to find a certain idea and steal it. This is difficult and very hard to do, and it requires careful planning and execution, namely going to sleep using the sleeping drugs INSIDE the dream, namely a dream inside a dream. This forms "layers" of dream worlds and the deeper you go, the easier it is to get the information you are looking for, which is called extraction and is typically done on a 2 layer dream state, or to get the subject to change his mind about something or to implant a thought into their mind. This is called inception, and both are quite illegal.
The purpose of the totem is simple, only you know what it does, and it only does one certain thing, like a coin always landing heads up or a dice always showing 4 on the top. This is to show you that you are infact awake and are NOT in a dream, since the dreamer or architect doesn't know what the totem would show or do.
The only ways to get out of these dreams is two ways, die or experience a falling sensation somehow in your dreaming body. This is known as a "kick" and has to be performed by the person who is left behind in the layer before. However, when performing inception, if you die, you will NOT wake up since you get stuck in limbo or raw subconcious due to the powerful sedative required to perform inception in the first place, and if you get sent into limbo, you will stay trapped there forever, so the only way to go back "up" a layer is to experience a falling sensation, for example, when you a leaning back on a chair and someone kicks the front legs of the chair up, that feeling you get when trying to balance on the chair is what will wake you up. To add to this, time is slower inside a dream, basically in real life when five minutes pass, an hour has passed in the dream. This also compounds on itself as you go down layers, so while five minutes pass on the real world, it would take something like 2 years on the 4th layer.
To make matters worse, what happens to your sleeping body in the dream can have an effect on the immediate layer down, such as falling off a bridge in a van while asleep makes the gravity in the layer immediately below that become nothing, ie you start floating in the air, or if that same van is on two wheels going around a corner, then if the dreamer is asleep in the van, then gravity in the layer down tilts with the van.
Finally, some people know of inception and have taken measures to protect themselves from it. Teams performing inception on such a target encounter "security" created by the subjects militarized subconcious or basically, people with guns out after you. You can kill these automations, but they will keep coming, despite what layer you are on. This is why it is handy to have people who know how to shoot things in a inception team.