The PASIV Device can be found in the 2010 film "Inception", a science-fiction action thriller film written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan.

Inception was first developed based on the notion of "exploring the idea of people sharing a dream space - entering a dream space and sharing a dream. That gives you the ability to access somebody's unconscious mind. What would that be used and abused for?"

Furthermore, he thought "being able to extract information from somebody's brain would be the obvious use of that because obviously any other system where it's computers or physical media, whatever - things that exist outside the mind - they can all be stolen ... up until this point, or up until this movie, the idea that you could actually steal something from somebody's head was impossible.

He had thought about these ideas on and off since he was 16 years old, intrigued by how he would wake up and then, while falling back into a lighter sleep, hold on to the awareness that he was dreaming, a lucid dream. He also became aware of the feeling that he could study the place and alter the events of the dream. He said, "I tried to work that idea of manipulation and management of a conscious dream being a skill that these people have. Really the script is based on those common, very basic experiences and concepts, and where can those take you? And the only outlandish idea that the film presents, really, is the existence of a technology that allows you to enter and share the same dream as someone else".