Character Analysis
Sweet Dreams, or Sweet Reality?
Yusuf doesn't really do a whole lot except drive for about half the movie. Honestly, a large part of his absence in the film is because someone must stay at the highest dream level to maintain it… and you don't really want to develop a character if you're just going to strand him in a slow-mo shot of his falling off of a bridge for an hour.
However, just because Yusuf doesn't have a ton of lines doesn't mean he's not important to the film. In fact, Yusuf is critical for a deeper understanding of the significance of dreams and their relationship to reality.
When Eames, Saito, and Cobb show up at Yusuf's, he is intrigued by their proposal. At first he says that going three levels deep is impossible; it's too unstable, but very quickly he becomes pulled into their scheme and already has a sedative in mind. He then does something curious. He picks up a very large and archaic looking set of keys and heads off to his basement where we see he has a bunch of people using the same sedative to dream together.
Given the location and the general aesthetic (it looks like a normal, unfurnished basement) we're guessing Yusuf might be doing some things that are not exactly legal, but there are bigger questions in play than whether Yusuf possesses a dream sharing warrant.
Yusuf let's these people dream because they live through their dreams, which have, as the elderly man randomly in the basement describes, "become their reality." Yusuf is our gateway into this other realm of dream machine possibilities.
It's not all about planting or extracting information—experiences themselves can be the object of dream sharing. And you thought Yusuf was just a bad driver!
Yusuf's Timeline