The Home Stuck Dream

Before you read on, you should know that this dream contains some serious spoilers to the beginning of Homestuck. Considering the dream is based on it, I have to discuss the mechanics of how things work, which include some serious referencing to the comic. Unfortunately, my dream repeats a lot of what is in the comic so some silly scenes are about exactly what happens in the comic, just personalized to my house really. I will also be jumping back and forth to say how things were in the comic and then how things worked out in the dream. I imagine this to be a fairly long read, so... you have been warned. I'll be gone for 2-3 days so take your time in reading it if it's too long for you. Or just look at the silly/bad pictures I drew in paint, gives you an idea of what my house is like in some of them. :D

Also, general explanations will be in BOLD, the dream will be in a different font so if you want to skip explanations, you can just try to follow the dream sequence.

This dream involved my friend and I getting into the game called, "Sburb," which is a game that starts the journey in Homestuck. Starting up the game puts one person and their house as the playing field while another can interact with the environment. Homestuck refers this relationship as the Client and Server player respectfully. I will be referencing in a different manner to (hopefully) make sense of it more. The person who's home becomes the playing field I will refer to as the "player" character and the one whom interacts with the player's environment I'll refer to as the "Controller."

In my dream, my best friend, Sierra* and I simply knew Earth was like in doomsday mode. I was on my laptop IMing her links and she was linking me too about reports around the world with meteors striking specific areas and homes. She and I were panicking about it. I don't recall the specific conversations, but a lot of CAPS and exclamation points were used.I decided to check out the latest homestuck for one reason or another, and found a Sburb download. Knowing the comic, I knew this would be a way to save ourselves, and thus linked her to it, urging her to download it!

*Not her real name, just a designated one for easier clarification..

In the comic, launching the game and completing certain tasks would send you and your home to another world, which I suppose is the main part of the game. Also, as far as I can gather, when it comes to the player-controller relationship, they can not do dual duties for the same person. That is, the player can not ALSO take on the controller role for its own controller. For instance, let's say A is the player, and B is taking on the controller role for A. After A gets warped to the other world, he can not then become the controller for B to get him to the world, B would need to find someone to be their controller. Let's say B finds C. Now B remains the controller for A, but is the player for C. This makes C the controller for B, but needs to become a player so they can get warped too right? Well now C can ask A to become the controller for him, and thus the circle is complete. In this case it is A -> B -> C -> A. In the comic, this is not exactly a rule, it just works out this way. My dream follows the above logic

After we downloaded it, which of course was super fast despite what had to be an enormous file size, we installed it (instantly of course) and started it up. It was decided I would be the "player" and Sierra would be the "controller" for me. When I told her about the rule that I can't also be her controller, she got a little distressed, but I told her another friend of ours could take that place in due time. For now we had to set up quickly. Since I knew how homestuck was, I had a general idea of what we needed to do and started IMing Sierra some details on what she could do. As the controller, she could see my whole house, navigating through an interface on her computer. To get an idea of what this looks like, I taken the liberty to yoink this from Homestuck itself:

Obviously, instead of the person you see there, it would be me and my room. Like I previously mentioned she could navigate throughout the house, away from me as she wished. However, her range was limited based on my position. That is to say, she can't go over to my neighbors and poke them or something. In fact, she can't grab me either, but can grab things around me. Which... she did. As I typed to her on my laptop, I saw a green mouse cursor hovering around, going through walls and what not. She must have been exploring around and testing what she could do. I heard a crash and left my room to discover she threw the living room couch out the window. I ran back to my room yelling at her to quit screwing around. Just because she CAN lift things around didn't mean she HAD to. Sierra made the excuse that my house is too crowded anyway, I could live without a couch. 

I started IMing her instructions on what her role as the controller was to do, and even linked her to some info the comic provided (A character in the web series made her own walkthrough, so I just linked her to them. I magically had them bookmarked apparently). Besides moving objects around, she also could expand my house and build things but at a cost of something called building grist. To simplify, just imagine a gauge that goes down as you build or expand the house, as well as uprooting fixtures connected to the house. (The sink would lower the gauge since the pipes are interconnected to the house thus counts as remodeling, but just moving the couch would not cost anything)

In the comic, the controller needs to deploy 3 machines and one special card. These three machines would be what helps the player get warped into the world. ...I started to explain this, but then I realized this is getting overcomplicated as they have a small part in my dream. I'll keep it as simple as I can:
-One machine you have to activate by smashing a button, to which then starts a countdown to let you know how long you have until a meteor smashes your location. It also deploys a blank sprite that follows you around and will act as your guide (will explain more on this later), and a special material needed in other machines.
-The second machine carves the special material you got from the other machine with help from the special card the controller needs to deploy (card acts as a guide for the carving machine).
-The final machine takes the carved material and turns it into the object that you have to do something with (eat it, break it, drink it, hatch it, etc) in order to be warped into the game.

Sierra only skimmed through the guide links I gave her, but generally listened to what i told her. As previously mentioned, my house is extremely crowded, so in order to fit the machines, she had to do some remodeling. She put one machine in the living room where my couch was, expanded MY room so she could put another machine in there, and the third machine was placed in my cellar. This caused problems as I had to run up and down the stairs later. I was about to get up and explore, but didn't want to be lugging around my laptop, so I went to grab my cell phone to text her. That's when the game decided to throw an inventory system at me.

In the comic, in order to hold onto any object, a person has to use an inventory system (this goes for their entire life btw, but this only activated for me when I started the game). This isn't like Legend of Zelda where you can just take an item and it goes in your inventory or whatever, no no! Each inventory type has specific rules. The only shared rule of inventory systems is you are limited by how many inventory cards you have. Each card holds one item (some exceptions, but not relevant to this). If you fill up those cards and try to pick another item up, one of your held items will be ejected (usually shoots out like a cannon)
-Example of an inventory system: One character has something called a "stack" modus in which his inventory system behaves like a stack of cards. To get a better idea how this works, imagine you have 5 cards stacked in a pile. You can't just grab a card in the middle or else you will end up disassembling the pile. This is how a stack inventory system worked, you could only take from the item on top. The last item you pick up would be on the top. So if you were to first grab a pencil, it would start on the top of the pile, but if you grabbed an eraser, the pencil would be below the eraser and inaccessible until you use the eraser for whatever reason. There are other modes with different functions as well, but I think I'll save you all the reading. here's a visual of a stack modus I so awesomely made in paint.

The green slot would only get ejected if inventory was full of course.

Back to the dream, when I went to grab my cellphone, it simply disappeared. Needless to say, I freaked out a bit, and tried to grab a flashlight which disappeared too. Getting frustrated, I started grabbing things willy nilly, and after grabbing a sixth item, my cell phone went flying against the wall. I started to realize that I was given an inventory system just like the comic. Sierra IMed me asking what the fuck was I doing and I let her know the situation. The things was, I had no idea how to access my inventory. In the comic the characters just magically grab the items out of no where. Sierra somehow managed to figure it out when she hovered her cursor over me. She told me to look down and I saw little holographic cards in two piles around me. I didn't know it at the time, but my inventory system rule had to do something with odds and evens, but behaved like the stack rule mentioned above. I had two piles I could take from though, so I had two items I could have accessible. I think it worked like if an item an an odd number of letters in its name (cellphone = 9 letters = odd), it would be put in the odd pile, and even number of letters (pencil = 6 = even) it would be put in another pile. After I noticed where the cards were, I was able to just tap on an invisible pile and would be given the top card item. Was kind of cool after i got the hang of it. 

More lovely paint art showing how the inventory system appeared to me.

I went to retrieve my cell phone from across the room, but when I did, my flashlight came shooting out and broke against the wall. Bah. Sierra laughed at me via text message, then told me how she positioned the machines. She ended up putting the machine with timer in my living room, the machine with the carving instrument down stairs, and the machine that would create items in my room. I went to my living room and tried smashing the button to start the timer with my fists but no go. I texted Sierra maybe she could grab the tv and smash the button, but there wasn't enough room to maneuver it.Sighing, I went downstairs to grab a sledge hammer from my dad's work area. Of course, I had to maneuver around the carving machine which was in the middle of the room (There is really no room down there, like everywhere else in my house). I have taken the liberty to go paint some more shitty art, this time of my house.

Forgot to label the gray image on basement floor, but its the carving machine. The rooms not mentioned in the dream are so full of crap or messy that putting something in them would be even more ridiculous than the placement these were put in originally. Although in retrospect, the kitchen could have been a useful place for a machine if the table or dishwasher was taken out. Upstairs was inaccessible because I share my home with neighbors and they lock their doors. Anyway, I grabbed the sledgehammer, which was then put into my evens inventory pile and shot out a random object I grabbed previously, and got upstairs. Sara helped me lift the hammer up (just like what happened in the comic), and i smashed down on the timer machine's button. I knocked the ceiling fan in the living room a bit too. Anyway, the timer was starting which was like 8 minutes. Also, as described, out popped the floating guide thing and some material needed for the carving machine. 

Now about the guides... In the comic, they are called kernelsprites, and you can customize them with objects around the house. Usually in the comic someone has a dead being or something somewhat humanoid to become the guide. You can customize it twice, but whatever you customize with it before you get warped to the other world will be the main monster you begin to fight when in the other world. So if I were to customize my guide with a superman action figure, I would end up fighting little supermen in the other world (kind of a bad idea). 

Having read the comic, I knew this guide could also bring back dead ones if you had the ashes around, and so I decided I would bring back my dead dog, Buddy, who's ashes were in the living room. BUT, I knew I wouldn't want to face enemies looking like my dog, so I figured as soon as I warped into the other world, I would customize my guide a second time then so it wouldn't be an enemy. I texted Sierra to find something humanoid in my house and drag it into the guide sprite while I get to work on bringing the material. I wanted something humanoid specifically so that when I do put Buddy's ashes into it, it hopefully could talk to me instead of barking. Sierra searched around, and of course found the thing that used to creep me out when I was younger: an old ventriloquist doll we had buried in the storage. Having that thing follow me muttering nonsense scared the crap out of me. 

The next part was rather rushed in my dream sequence I quickly ran downstairs, Sierra deployed the special card for the carving machine, and I got the special material carved. Then I ran back upstairs, (meanwhile texting to Sierra how pissed I was about the dummy being the thing she chose as my guide, as well as the positioning of the machines), ran back to my room and started the item-making machine. What was created was a green pear, which reminded me of the scene in Homestuck where a player has to eat an Apple. I was about to bite into the pear when I just remembered: None of my family was home (nor neighbors but they really weren't relevant to the story)! i quickly got back on my laptop and IMed Sierra, asking her to please get in contact with them and get them to her house so they could be brought into the world she gets warped into! She said of course she would, but to hurry as there was like 1 minute left. I bit into the pear, and a blinding light came from my windows. After I could see, I ran to the living room window and looked outside. Everything looked eerily the same outside, except no cars were outside and it was very very quiet. I tried to text Sierra but my cell had no signal. Ran back to my room and was able to IM her still. Asked her if it worked, but she ignored me and was typing about a large explosion she heard. 

Then I woke up. Like I said, incredibly long, one of my more detailed dreams. I have them every now and then, and usually have to type them up right away in order to remember such details. In this dream's case, i told three people which helped me remember more details. If you didn't read the whole thing, I can understand, but at least comment about the really bad drawings I made then. :P If you read the whole thing, I appreciate it!