Yea Cobb goes to the chemist and requests he tweak the usual drug mix for time dilation, the risk being that if they fall into limbo while under the influence limbo will stretch on for what seems like eternity.
I honestly don’t remember the exact details of the custom drugs myself compared to the usual ones, but they still don’t die in reality. It just seems like a hundred years have passed, they still wake up at the usual time in reality.
There is a scene where Cobb explains that the military created the dream machine for training soldiers, a group of soldiers could enter a specially designed level and play war games against each other and learn and wake up without stab wounds or bullet holes. It sounds like some kind of virtual reality machine in truth, not a dream machine. In fact this is very similar to another movie called Existenz that explores the idea of getting lost in a VR game.
Very similar to a couple of movies, actually. eXistenZ is one of Cronenberg’s lesser movies (or one of his greater failures, YMMV) but really the concept (in films) at least goes back to 1984’s (much better executed IMO) Dreamscape.
I say this as someone who has watched Dreamscape in the past week, in no way is it a superior film to Inception. It is badly paced and has not held up well at all(I had fond memories of this movie). It has a few cool sequences but they can’t save it as a whole.
And I’m willing to accept that for some technobabbly-bordering-on-mystical reason, that somehow works, but it also means I’m less inclined to take the movie seriously. At that point, it’s more like a cartoon than anything else.
On further review, I see you’re right, though when a character gets wounded in a dream, they sure took it seriously, as I recall. No doubt I was conflating this with The Matrix somewhat.