How is it that Robert Fisher could have been killed by his own projections?

Question

In the movie Inception, Robert Fisher had an army of militarized projections presumably meant to protect him against extraction. However, during the street battle at the first level of the inception, Fisher's projections are indiscriminately blasting away at the taxi in which Fisher is riding. Eames even had to check to see that Fisher was unharmed.

So the question is how is it that Fisher could have been killed by his own projections? Also, the answer can't be that had he been killed he would have woken up because of the deep level of sedation.

Answer 1

Fischer's subconscious is trained to resist extraction (by simulating armed gunmen) but it's unaware that they have him sedated with drugs that will cause him to drop into limbo if he's killed.

Under normal circumstances his training makes perfect sense. If someone is killed by their own projections this would simply result in them waking up. Even if the dream extractors have him tied up, he'd a) have an unexpected opportunity to escape and b) would be useless to them since they wouldn't be able to make him tell them anything useful regardless of the number of attempts. Either they'd get killed and keep waking up or he'd get killed and keep waking up.

Eames : What do you mean, it won't wake him? When you die in a dream you wake up.

Yusuf : Not from this. We're too heavily sedated to wake up that way.

Eames looks at Yusuf, then to Cobb.

Eames : So what happens if one of us dies?

Cobb : That person doesn't wake up. Their mind drops into Limbo.