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[EOA3] Dreamspaces and Mirrorspaces: Life Outside Reality in Act 3 of Homestuck

“So what you’re saying is that when you go to bed in Second Life, at the moment [your avatar] Wendy closes her eyes in this virtual world, you log off the Second Life program on your computer?” “Uh huh,” Wendy replies. “So the actual world is Wendy’s dream, until she wakes up again in Second Life?” I could have sworn a smile passed across Wendy’s avatar’s face as she said, “Yup. Indeed.” - Tom Boellstorff (2008)

I don’t typically remember my dreams, but while working on this essay, one stuck with me. In the dream, my mother – not usually a spontaneous person or a long-haul flier, and someone who recently asked me if my Homestuck blog “is legal” – got on a transatlantic flight and followed me to New York. She sat my best friend and I down in my friend’s living room and informed me she was worried about me, and that for my own health and happiness, I needed to stop the Homestuck project immediately. She wouldn’t leave until I agreed.

Because I don’t remember most dreams, I don’t view dreaming as a major part of my life, and don’t give much weight to the dreams that stick with me; this did not make me doubt my project. Sharing this dream with my friend, their main reaction was surprise at how out of character they’d behaved in my dream – in reality, they’d have been confrontational towards my mother instead of passive – instead of viewing it as prophetic or indicative of an underlying mental state. But to many other people, past and present, real and fictional, dreams are a legitimate source of knowledge, and a form of guidance over waking life. And of all these people, few are more certain about the truth in dreams than Homestuck’s Jade Harley.

This essay is about Jade Harley, forms of consciousness, narcolepsy, lucid dreaming, Prospit, virtual worlds, Pokemon Go, immersive experiences, Sburb, dream interpretation, dunking on Sigmund Freud, architecture, cinema, smart homes, capitalism, Nannasprite, and clowns. It discusses Homestuck Acts 1-3 (pages 1-1153) and does not contain any information or spoilers beyond that point. Page numbers refer to Homestuck unless otherwise stated. I wrote this as a learning exercise to better understand some topics I think are relevant to Homestuck, it is exploring a space more than presenting an argument. It’s around 12,000 words, which is obviously too many, and I definitely encourage just reading the conclusion.

ao3 mirror | bibliography

Thanks to @the-queen-unitato for support and inspiration throughout the writing process. <3

Section 1 – Dreams and Culture

TT: It looks like you were in your father's room recently. EB: yeah. TT: And how did it make you feel to discover what was in there? EB: oh no, i just realized! EB: you are going to psycho-therapify me. EB: well don't bother! (HS p.1023)

If you dream at night and don’t remember it upon waking, does the dream still affect your life? I would argue yes. All of us have uncountable waking memories that we don’t actively recall, particularly from young childhood and prior to birth, and it’s generally accepted that these shape our present and future. Some people have theorized that dreams allow us to process intense emotional experiences, or to restructure our memories, retaining some and discarding others, or to provide different insights into our thoughts that we could not access while awake. We tend to feel differently when we wake up compared to before we went to sleep, whether or not we remember our dreams, and the unconscious activities of our brains surely impact that. The key difference between a forgotten dream and a forgotten memory is that the memory can often be externally verified – I don’t remember my first birthday, but there are photographs of gifts and a cake; I believe that it happened. The content of a dream, once forgotten, can never be recovered. In fact, dreaming might be a universal human experience (and may extend to other species, too), or there could be people who simply don’t dream – our existing technology has no answer.

Throughout human history, dreams have been a source of fascination, a way to move beyond the physical body and commune with the dead and the divine. Under modern science, which is built on a ‘dream’ of complete rational understanding of our physical reality, scientists try to understand the evolutionary and neurological function of dreams, but typically relegate dream interpretation to the realms of esoteric spirituality and pseudoscience. Dream content is rarely taken seriously as a type of knowledge – if it can teach us anything, it is an understanding of our inner self only, not of any broader truth. A person making major decisions based on dreams might be dismissed as foolish, and there’s a Western cultural idea that ‘nobody wants to hear stories from your dreams’.

These impulses collide in Jade Harley – a nuclear physicist and prognosticator who values her dreams equally to her waking life, but only for the concrete and verifiable information contained within.

In ‘The Neurocognitive Theory of Dreaming’, Domhoff (2023) details our current scientific understanding of dreams. He describes dreaming as one among many forms of mental activity, cognitively distinct from daydreaming, hallucinations, night terrors, sleep paralysis and sleeptalking, among others, calling dreams ‘a unique form of spontaneous, internally generated thought’ (emphasis mine). I think Domhoff’s research is valuable, but his biological analysis of dreaming looks for what is broadly common to humans across time, using technical information that is not widely known. While I will discuss a few specific studies throughout this essay, it’s my opinion that cultural understandings and personal experiences of dreaming are more generally relevant to an analysis of fiction.

Introducing their edited volume ‘Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming’, where various writers discuss the understanding of dreams in specific cultures, Shulman and Stroumsa (1999) describe dreaming as a ‘cultural act’ that is ‘at the confluence of theology, cosmology, and anthropology’. A given culture may view dreaming as a uniquely personal act or as a form of shared consciousness, as an omen for the future, or a new understanding of the past. Dreams can be seen as an overlapping experience with the waking world, or an entirely separate domain. Dreams can be seen as a message given directly from the gods, a rite of passage into adulthood, or a source of political decision making. In modern Western culture specifically, our understanding of dreams is overwhelmingly dominated by my personal enemy Sigmund Freud, but his ideas are just one understanding among many throughout history.

Reading Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), I was struck by how much of it reads as self-parody – I hoped that the emphasis on sexuality and the Oedipus complex was overstated in popular culture, but if anything, the opposite is true. Freud considered all dreams to be a form of wish fulfillment, either in an obvious, surface level way (a child dreaming of receiving amazing gifts for their upcoming birthday) or in a way disguised by layers of repression, censorship and distortion (an adult dreaming of being abandoned by a group of birds they were feeding at the park could also be hoping for amazing gifts for their birthday; the birds symbolizing the dreamer’s friends and their fear that their birthday will be forgotten, and the bread symbolizing the previous effort that the dreamer has put into their friendships). In his mind, dreams are governed by two psychic forces – the primary psychic process is present in humans from birth and ‘forms the wish expressed by the dream’, while the secondary process develops as a person moves through life, and ‘exercises a censorship over this dream-wish’.

Freud analyzes many of his own dreams in his book, and seems to arrive at conclusions which are helpful and meaningful to him; I support this effort, but I don’t enjoy the way he tries to universalize his work. He is deeply influenced by nuclear family structures and his own fascination with genitals, and believes in naturalized gender and sex roles (for example, he considers that a dream of flying has a different meaning based on if the dreamer is male or female). Those are all concepts that have majorly shaped the culture Freud lives in, but it feels reductive – even insulting to the human experience – to suggest these can define the entirety of our unconscious.

Freud’s conceit is that he can apply the scientific method to objectively determine the content of dreams; a premise that I disagree with on its face due to the inherent biases of any interpreter. Even if I did accept the premise, there are several contradictions in Freud’s work. He states early on that the same dream may have a different meaning when experienced by a different dreamer, and later revises this to say that certain dreams (of his choosing) actually have fixed and irrefutable meanings. He also says it is fundamental to psychoanalysis to ‘recognize[] no essential distinctions… between the psychic life of the normal person and that of the neurotic’, but elsewhere treats the dreams of the mentally ill as only symbolizing the problem they are being treated for, suggesting a firm distinction between ‘healthy’ and ‘ill’ people and reducing the ill to their conditions, neither of which I agree with.

Freud’s focus on sexuality was extremely controversial at the time of his writing, and many researchers were not willing to engage with his work on dreams when it was first published. However, in the century since, his theories have become foundational for both psychology and media. It’s hard to overstate the impact of Freud’s writing, and the ways his work is still repeated uncritically by academics in a variety of fields as well as people on the street, and it’s this complete adoption into society that troubles me more than any of Freud’s actual theories. I do believe in the concept of the unconscious mind, but if the Oedipus complex is real, I think it might be more of a self fulfilling prophecy due to widespread belief in it than a natural truth.

These theories are so ubiquitous that any later work on dreams (or psychoanalysis more broadly) is forced to discuss the topic in relation to Freud. In ‘The Dream and the Underworld’, Hillman (1979) dedicates a whole chapter to discussing Freud before discussing his own thesis. He praises Freud in some aspects, but also claims that ‘the view of rational empiricism[] remained essentially unthreatened by the new Freudian theory of the dream’ as Freud is overall only concerned with what dreams can tell us about our waking lives.

Hillman attempts to decouple the dream world and waking world and to position dreams as significant in themselves, not just in how they can be interpreted. He claims that when these things are linked, the dreamer is to some extent ‘held accountable’ for their dream actions – an inconsistency in dream interpretation is that figures and events in dreams are viewed symbolically, while the dream protagonist is seen as equivalent to the waking person. Dreams should instead be seen as ‘educat[ing] the dreamer into death,’ preparing us for a world we will someday join.

I find Hillman’s attitude towards dreams compelling, although as his book is necessarily written while awake, he falls into a lot of the traps he cautions against (he also makes some extremely racist comments in one section, something that makes me personally more critical of his overall work). I was very interested by his discussion of the carnival as similar to the dreamworld in its inversion of waking life and comparative absurdity. Hillman describes going into a dream as ‘learning what [the clown] teaches’, as a dream ‘turn[s] ordinary objects into amazing images, our public persons into butts of laughter’.

This idea presents an interesting counterpoint to a conversation between John Egbert and Rose Lalonde in Homestuck (p.1022-5). Here, Rose takes a Freudian psychoanalysis perspective, assuming the clown graffiti on John’s walls is an expression of something his unconscious mind has repressed, likely regarding his relationship to his father. We later see that this graffiti is present in John’s dreams, as is an imp doll, and was likely made during his sleep (p.1049). Analyzing this from a Hillman perspective, I could say that John’s graffiti is an expression of his dream self’s desire to fully awaken on Prospit and participate in this other, more exciting life that Jade Harley has long had access to, that differs so dramatically from John’s mundane daily life. While believing his dad to be a clown, John has associated clowns with waking life and therefore been closed off to their role in dreams. After entering his dad’s room, John no longer sees his dad as a clown, and has freed himself up to see the clown mentality as constitutive of a different and more exciting world – a perspective that Rose, who takes Freud’s theories as gospel, does not consider.

Overall, dream interpretation is important when we, as individuals or cultures, give importance to it. Homestuck is likely influenced by Freud’s psychoanalytic theories – Rose Lalonde even has an edited poster of Freud on her wall (p.214) – and so I do give weight to his ideas despite disagreeing with many of them, and turn now to a modern dream interpretation book influenced by his theories.

Section 2 – John & Jade’s Dream Interpreted

John is of course sound asleep. It looks like he is having troubled dreams as usual. (HS p.1049)

Between pages 990 and 1073 of Homestuck, Jade Harley and John Egbert share a dream. Here, Dream Jade consciously watches the eclipse from her tower on Prospit, seeing visions in the Skaian clouds, while John almost wakes up on Prospit, but doesn’t quite. Using The Dream Interpretation Dictionary (J. M. Bord, 2017), I attempted to understand how this dream might be interpreted by a modern spiritualist.

First, Jade and John begin their dreams in bed, in representations of their own bedrooms. A bedroom is a private space that symbolizes someone’s most personal thoughts, and the two of them being alone could indicate loneliness and a desire for close connection. Being in bed represents secrets or aspirations. It can mean a preoccupation with rest and sleep or with cycles of life more broadly, or it can indicate needing to deal with a mess you’ve made. Jade being uncomfortable when she gets into bed (p.995) could suggest something troubling or dissatisfying in her waking life. John sleeping for too long in his dream could be literal, suggesting he’s getting the wrong amount of sleep in the ‘real’ world, or could indicate blissful ignorance and being out of touch with reality.

Jade has a blue package from John in her dream (p.998), and also thinks about the green package she sent to John (p.1050). Sending and receiving letters in a dream indicates communication between different parts of the mind, with dreams as the ‘mailman’ – something that ties in really well with Jade’s system of visions (in dreams) and finger reminders (while awake) to communicate with herself.

Zooming out as Jade leaves her bedroom, a dream of flying suggests discovering capabilities, freedom, escape, progress, or gaining a broader perspective. A castle, like the many on Prospit where Jade’s tower is located, symbolizes ‘a protected space where you rule’, a defensive mentality or a person who separates themself from others who may crave security or have high ideals. A tower, specifically, can represent esoteric or specialized knowledge, or a desire to devote your life to a higher cause or power. Bright yellow, the color of Jade’s dream outfit and Prospit’s entire surface, can mean optimism, alertness, impulsiveness, or strong willpower.

John’s bedroom is dominated by the harlequin doll and glowing clown graffiti over his bed (p.1049). Clowns indicate frivolous behavior, a feeling that someone isn’t taking a situation seriously enough, disguising your true feelings or personality, or, for a dreamer like John who doesn’t like clowns, fear and mistrust. John also sees clouds turn into familiar shapes while asleep (p.651), including food items and reminders of his father. Food symbolizes the things we put into our bodies, which includes information, opinions, and media as well as literal food and water. Dreaming about candy, such as Gushers, can indicate forbidden pleasures, temptations, or rewards. Dreaming about your father has pages and pages of possible meanings, some of which are a preoccupation with masculinity or with shared tendencies between yourself and your father, a need for paternal guidance, an unresolved issue in your relationship, rebellion, expectations, or (for Christians), God the Father.

Jade sees extensive visions in the clouds, which feature her friends’ waking actions in the present or thereabouts, and the history of her own home. A precognitive dream is seen as a ‘weather forecast’, indicating something that will likely happen but isn’t definite. Precognitive dreams tend to be especially vivid and literal instead of symbolic, with strong feelings that this dream is out of the ordinary. Having psychic powers in a dream represents an ability to influence events, or recall waking experiences that can’t be explained conventionally. Interestingly, The Dream Interpretation Dictionary stresses that ‘in yogic tradition, precognition is the first special mental ability to appear, and it’s treated simply as the first rung of the ladder, no big deal’.

Overall, Jade and John’s shared dream could be interpreted as the two of them seeking closeness with each other, but fighting against mental barriers that stop them connecting on a deeper level. Jade sees herself as separate from others due to her precognitive powers, and likes to feel in control of her space (the tower), time (the visions) and relationships (the packages), and is unable to be vulnerable enough to be more honest with John, or even to sleep within her dreams. John is scared of the people immediately around him (the clowns), and needs to work on his relationship with his father, the person most physically present in his life, before he can expand his horizons to other relationships and ‘wake up’ to a deeper friendship with Jade.

This honestly feels pretty accurate – but then again, dream interpretation is designed to be vague and applicable to many situations. It’s also based on (waking) cultural associations with these concepts, as these carry through to our dreams – and to the fiction we create. A fictional dream may often have a more ‘accurate’ interpretation, as its symbols are intentionally placed by a waking author, while the symbols in our dreams are placed by our unknowable sleeping minds. There is a long relationship between fiction and dreams, with some people arguing that film is uniquely placed to represent the feeling of dreams – I’ll return to this in section 6.

Section 3 – Lucid Dreaming

‘People make meaning, they choose to see something in a seemingly random and strange world of dreams... that is not nonsense; that is a real feeling that lucid dreamers take with them into real life.’ (Kitson et al., 2018)

Jade’s consciousness within her dream could be analogous to people’s real world experiences of lucid dreaming, defined as a person being aware they are dreaming and having some control over the dream’s contents or emotional affect. Lucid dreaming is relatively common and has been documented in a wide variety of dream cultures, although I’ve never personally experienced it. Some dreamers train to lucid dream by keeping a dream journal to increase awareness of their own dreams, or by conducting ‘reality checks’ throughout the day, such as regularly checking their watch or counting their fingers, hopefully prompting themself to do this in their dreams too.

Spontaneous or untrained lucid dreaming is especially common in people with narcolepsy, like Jade herself. Dodet et al (2015), studying this phenomenon, found that 59% of their participants with narcolepsy were regular lucid dreamers (at least one lucid dream per month) and 77% had experienced lucid dreaming in their lifetime. Among non-narcoleptic controls, 17% were regular lucid dreamers and 49% had experienced a lucid dream. This study also found that people with narcolepsy can move directly from their waking state to REM sleep, which may promote lucid dreaming while the control group needed a transitional state; this too reflects the depiction of Jade’s dreams.

Lucid dreaming has been theorized as a ‘hybrid state’ between waking and dreaming, as certain areas of the brain, such as those needed for ‘waking memory, self-reflective awareness, and insight’ are typically suppressed in sleep, but to some extent activated during lucid dreaming (Voss et al., 2009). Some studies of lucid dreaming brains have found evidence to support this, including brain activity at a 40hz wavelength during lucid dreaming but not during non-lucid dreaming, but not all studies can replicate results (brains are so complex that it’s hard to collect accurate, repeatable data on them, even in a controlled experiment).

The existence of lucid dreaming raises questions about the morality of dreams. Philosophers such as Cowan (2024) make a distinction between what happens in a dream (dream content) and what happens to the body while dreaming (typically, sleeping and lying down). If a person punches their friend in a dream, their body did not physically punch their friend and did not have control over the dream action, so they should not be judged or blamed for the act. However, if that person punches their friend in a lucid dream, the question is different – an intentional act was taken, with a motivation behind it. Was this person doing something they would like to do in real life but fear the consequences of, either expressing anger towards this friend or being violent in general? Or were they testing the limits and possibilities of the dreamspace, or taking out anger specifically within a dream for the purpose of moving past their anger once awake? The physical body still has not taken the action, but when it’s guided by the conscious rather than unconscious mind, it’s an in-between situation more analogous to attacking a benevolent NPC in a video game.

In a particularly interesting article, a researcher and her partner, a woman with narcolepsy who experiences lucid dreams and hallucinations, collaborate to discuss lucid dreaming as ‘a method for living otherwise’ (De la Brena & Schoenmann, 2020). They discuss the agency felt within a lucid dream as a counter-narrative to the pathologization of narcolepsy, an illness that places a lot of restrictions and limitations on what someone can do in the waking world. Lucid dreams are as much a part of Schoenmann’s lived experience as her waking life is, and she describes them as a ‘highly affectual event’ and an ‘affirmative life moment’. The authors especially highlight experiences of care in Schoenmann’s lucid dreams – she has had multiple encounters with an eagle mentor who teaches her (for example) how to fly, and receives advice from witches who act ‘like personal coaches’. Human contact is not possible in her dreams, but she uses her lucidity as a ‘creative tool for collaborative survival’ to find love and belonging from entities in her dreams, even ones that appear scary at first.

These experiences are distinct to an individual, and shouldn’t be generalized to others with narcolepsy or who lucid dream – but they do come closer to representing Jade’s experiences than anything else I found while researching dreams. Jade, too, sees her dreams as inseparable from her waking experience as a part of life, and displays the same ethos of curiosity and openness to encounters that are radically different from those in the waking world.

Section 4 – Digital Realities

‘You will look into a computer screen and see reality. Some part of your world – the town you live in, the company you work for, your school system, the city hospital – will hang there in a sharp color image, abstract but recognizable, moving subtly in a thousand places. This Mirror World you are looking at is fed by a steady rush of new data pouring in through cables. It is infiltrated by your own software creatures, doing your business.’ (Gelernter, 1991)

Comparisons between Jade Harley’s dream and real world dreamers ignore one crucial factor. Real dreams take place in a (presumably) metaphysical space – at least, one that cannot be viewed, accessed, or known while awake. Jade dreams on the planet Prospit, a physical location where someone could presumably travel while waking, or be watched via a fenestrated wall (p.955) or command terminal (p.900). Prospit is within the Incipisphere, the place where John Egbert is transported after beating Sburb’s tutorial level.

So, could it make more sense to see the Incipisphere as a digital world? In his genuinely beautiful book Coming of Age in Second Life, Boellstorff (2008) argues for virtual worlds to be considered places and communities in their own right, pointing out that ‘real’ worlds (he prefers the term ‘actual worlds’, which I also use here) are also constructed by intentional human activity, that activity in virtual worlds can have financial and emotional repercussions in the actual world, and that actual world behavioral norms and desires often carry through to virtual worlds. For example, people may follow an etiquette of personal space when their virtual avatar approaches another virtual avatar, leaving the same distance between people that they would in a physical space.

Virtual worlds can also be games but are not necessarily, and are not inherently goal oriented. Much like the actual world, they can be places where people live their lives, have homes, meet up with friends, go to work or school, fall in love, have sex, find a family, get into arguments, go shopping, protest against people in power, enjoy the landscape, and even go to sleep. People can get attached to specific places in virtual worlds and put in the effort to maintain them, whether that means designing an impossible, magical elven grove on a floating island or recreating suburbia and forming a homeowner’s association with your digital neighbors – and both are common.

Unlike the majority of dreams, inhabitants of virtual worlds are very aware of this virtual world status, and regularly debate it, asking, for example, whether a romantic relationship formed in a virtual world is as meaningful (or more so!) as one in the actual world. Different inhabitants assign different weight to virtual experiences, whether consciously or otherwise. Some people are comfortable with their actual world spouse having a separate spouse in a virtual world (although would not be okay with their spouse having a second actual world relationship), while other people would consider virtual world romance as being unfaithful to an actual world partner.

Virtual worlds are distinct from virtual reality in that virtual reality is a technology that places a physical user inside a computer-generated space, often using a 360 degree view and pose tracking to create an immersive experience. In contrast, virtual worlds are far more based around interactions between people; immersion is caused by seeing yourself as part of a virtual culture. Virtual world inhabitants experience loneliness in quiet areas, and regularly cite the community as the reason they keep coming back – virtual worlds are made possible by technology, but can’t be defined by the technology that enables them. The Incipisphere not being inside a computer (p.421) could be seen as a literalized version of people’s arguments that their virtual world activities are just as meaningful as their actual world ones. John doesn’t call Rose his online friend, just his friend (p.1091), so the virtual is already part of his reality.

Two other related concepts are augmented reality and mirror worlds. Augmented reality is sometimes thought of as a hybrid state between actual and virtual worlds, and allows people to physically interact with digital objects while moving in the actual world. The best known example is Pokemon Go (2016), a game that allows players to collect Pokemon creatures by visiting real world locations such as tourist attractions and shops (I will circle back to this game in section 8).

A mirror world is an accurate and real-time representation of the actual world in digital form, capable of tracking and representing human activities. First theorized in his book Mirror Worlds, or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox… How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean, Gelernter (1991) predicts the smartphone revolution where ‘the thick, dense, busy sub-world that encompasses you is also, now, an object in your hands’ and ‘programs… help you comprehend the powerful, super-techno-glossy, dangerously complicated and basically indifferent man-made environments that enmesh you’. In a more recent paper, Ricci et al. (2015) claim that as smart devices and cloud technologies become more embedded in day to day life, ‘we don’t just live in our “real” world, with a parallel second life in the virtual or simulated world; rather, we will live in both worlds, which together comprise an “augmented” reality’.

In 2025, we interface with mirror worlds regularly. A mobile app that tracks the locations of every public bus in your closest city, updating to reflect traffic, delays and route changes, is a mirror world. A smart watch that tracks heart rate, blood pressure, hours of sleep, and steps walked and ran each day is a mirror world. A network of home security cameras linked to a portable tablet that allows parents to visually monitor their child while they are out of the house is a mirror world. Just as Gelernter predicted, this software is a set of ‘scientific viewing tools… focused… on the human-scale social world of organizations, institutions and machines’ which ‘can mimic the reality’s every move, moment-by-moment’

In Sburb (2009), a server player is able to see the current physical environment of their client player, whether the client player is on their home planet or within the Incipisphere. (As far as we know, if the client player is dreaming, the server player sees their sleeping body instead of their dreaming self). The server player can interact with objects via a digital device, which affects their physical reality; and the client player can interact with objects in their actual world, which changes their representation via the screen. It is a textbook, perfect mirror world, where objects’ physical and digital forms are coupled, and changing either one causes automatic change in the other. A similar effect can be seen when John breaks his physical hammer (p.393), causing a change in the digital representation of his weapon within his strife specibus from ‘hammerkind’ to ‘handlekind’ (p.408).

These ‘rules’ of the mirror world, or of augmented reality more generally, are the rules which govern the world of Homestuck. Whether or not they play Sburb, characters and readers alike need to be proficient with the rules of data structures and computer programming, and how these interface with gravity and physical space (for example, p.122). Sburb’s technology can, in theory, mirror any part of the universe or Incipisphere – or at least, anywhere people live – and the entire Incipisphere acts as a surveillance state via the fenestrated walls and commend terminals mentioned above. But the Incipisphere may also classify as a virtual world, as it may be a place where people (in this case, chess constructs) simply live their lives outside of game objectives (for example, p.956, 1031). Combining aspects of different types of digital worlds, the Incipisphere takes a growing technological reality to its ultimate conclusion.

Section 5 – Mirrors

‘[T]here has been the fundamental assumption in Western philosophy that any copy will be a secondary, inferior being of mere resemblance. With the advent of the digital era this ancient scheme is confronted not just with the blurring of the line between virtual and real but with a new fact, an essential lack of difference between original and copy.’ (Haley, 2005)

The world within the mirror has existed for far longer than Gelernter’s digital mirror world. Humans, looking into water, glass or metal, have always seen a virtual space with as much depth as their actual space, but physically inaccessible to them. In his dissertation ‘Mirror as Metasign: Contemporary Culture as Mirror World’, Haley (2005) traces the history of mirrors and their cultural associations. Haley explains that mirrors used to symbolize an inaccurate and falsifying reflection, full of darkness and obscurity, because this was also true of actual mirrors. Prior to industrial technology, mirrors were dark and filled with imperfections, only available to the wealthy. As mirror technology was refined and mirrors became more widespread, mirrors came to represent perfect knowledge (especially self-knowledge), careful consideration, and revealing objective truth.

The ‘perfect’ mirror was developed alongside modern science, and forms part of modern technologies including burning devices, electricity, solar cells, cooking appliances, telescopes, safety and road equipment, lasers, lighthouses, microscopes, holograms, digital screens, space travel, and architecture. Haley believes that increasing interest in (and knowledge of) our own reflections is connected to the rational scientific ethos that led to these inventions, which aims to hold a mirror up to the natural world and discover its innermost workings, turning the world into a ‘mirror of human needs and desires’. He points out that culture is learned by mirroring those around us, and that increased automation and development of technology such as artificial intelligence is about creating machines that mirror human capabilities.

Haley appears pessimistic towards digital technologies and concerned about their becoming embedded in everyday life. He discusses virtual worlds as not necessarily a literal mirror, but a conceptual one. Aspects of the actual world, from buildings to novels to anything made with 3D printing, are made first as computer simulations and then produced physically. In this way the actual world is made to mirror the digital, and the actual construct is judged based on how accurately it copies the digital model, leading Haley to question which one is the mirror world.

The world inside a mirror is flattened and intangible, making it somehow ‘less’ than its original. An object within the mirror is defined by its relationship to its actual world counterpart; the mirror version does not exist if it is removed from the field of view. In a digital world, this is not necessarily the case; an example is Google Earth continuing to show buildings and landmarks that have long since been destroyed. Even when a digital program is updated, it typically retains the data of its previous versions – a mirror world can persist outside ‘the flow of time in [our] universe’ (HS p.421) and be used to show not just a reflection of the world now, but snapshots of how the world looked at a specific point in the past, or even algorithmic predictions about how it will look in the future, like when a digital map uses traffic patterns to predict that a bus will be delayed, even when the bus is still at the depot. The metaphor of the mirror changes as it becomes more than its half of a binary relationship.

Haley sees the mirror as central to art in Western culture, as well as science. The idea that art should present the world ‘as it is’ is relatively recent (and still not universal), dating to around the 18th century. Before this, art was typically symbolic or representational, and even technical drawings (such as maps) were not necessarily to scale. Since then, realism is often seen as a gold standard or ‘natural’ state of art, with other styles described in terms of how they differ from realism. Haley discusses this only in reference to painting and photography, but I believe it applies to other art forms, including novels, video games, and reality television.

Practitioners of subsequent artistic movements like impressionism, surrealism and Dadaism claimed to be reflecting a different, hidden, and truer reality. The convex and concave mirrors found in a carnival’s Hall of Mirrors are distorted only in relation to the ‘perfect’ flat mirror, just as a piece of representational art is abstract only in relation to a photorealistic painting. I personally dislike looking at photorealistic art (though I respect the skill of the artists who make it) as I feel that photorealism often lacks a creative vision, in the same way that the bus tracking app takes skill to design and code, but would generally not be seen as a piece of art. The perfect mirror is not the only way to gain understanding of reality; it may be the best option in the case of bus timings, but a photorealistic self portrait likely represents inner truths about its subject less well than a painting that uses unexpected colors and brushstrokes to illustrate its subject’s personality.

Haley claims this cultural obsession with mirrors and reflections extends to the content of fiction focusing on simulations, alternate dimensions, inversions of normative situations and characters, and doppelgangers – his examples include Face/Off (1997), one of the movie posters on John Egbert’s wall (p.61). He could probably have a field day writing about all the different mirrors present in Homestuck. The introduction of each character in Homestuck mirrors previous introductions as the characters are named, retrieve their arms, introduce their room and contemplate a frivolous action involving bodily fluids (p.1-16, 214-9, 309-15, 760-74). These reflections between characters are assumed and expected to the point that fans predict them in advance and may feel disappointed or like the work is incomplete if a mirror is not present; Jade Harley has still not poetically looked up at the sky and contemplated her dissatisfaction with life like her friends have (p.82, 307, 444) and personally I think about this often.

These mirrors refract in all directions, defining relationships among the beta kids, between beta kids and guardians, between future wasteland explorers and between beta kids and their future counterparts, using color, panel design, specific words (‘ascend’, ‘abscond’, etc), page titles, repeated pesterlogs, objects (home decor and dolls on the couch) and concepts (data structures and government institutions) to reinforce these multiplanar mirrors. Beyond this, Homestuck holds a mirror to 2000s internet culture and reflects the experience of online friendship, long distance communication, video gaming and media consumption among young teenagers; most fans don’t look like a squashed black-and-white sprite character, but many of us still describe Homestuck as accurately reflecting these ideas.

Section 6 – Dreams and Mirrors in Art

“Now, Kitty, let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all[...] You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too!” (Carroll, 1871)

A film can be conceptualized as a mirror of reality, or alternatively, as an actual world representation of dreaming. Rascaroli (2002) discusses the history of this idea, saying that ‘[t]he dream metaphor has a long history in film theory. It begins as early as the birth of cinema, with the famous dispute on the contrast between cinema as a (perfect) system of reproduction of reality on the one hand, and as magic and dream on the other.’ Psychoanalysis (including that of dreams) grew up alongside film theory in the twentieth century, and both psychoanalysis and filmmakers encourage practitioners to narrativize complex, sprawling problems into linear personal journeys of a hero or protagonist. Like dreams (and like mirrors), films are perceived objectively – each viewer sees the same sequence of images and sounds – but their interpretation is entirely subjective. Films, dreams and mirrors all have a physical origin point (screen or projector, brain, glass), but when they are recalled in memory, they are typically remembered as though they were seen in the actual world.

Film theorists have compared the role of the dreamer and the spectator, though inside a dream, the dream self is not passively spectating but actively participating as though they are actor and viewer at once. Additionally, dreaming is an activity beyond our waking control, while seeing a movie is typically a choice, and one the movie industry works hard to encourage. We often begin watching a film with some idea of the story, characters or visuals it depicts, while most of us go to sleep unaware of what we will dream about tonight. In the early days of film theory, the act of going to the movie theater – a darkened room with comfortable seats and no distractions – was compared to the act of sleeping, although this is no longer true, as we mostly watch movies on the go or at home, often simultaneously with other activities. Present day movies often remind us that they are movies by breaking the fourth wall or referencing other popular media, which is less common in dreams.

Even when we know we are watching a film, many viewers care about believability, and are frustrated by plot holes, inconsistent characters, or things that feel like they would not happen in the ‘real world’. This is done selectively – viewers might consider a character having superpowers to be believable within the rules of the film world, but that same character being unaffected by the death of a close friend to be unbelievable, presumably within the rules of the actual world. So in some ways the film is governed by dream logic, where we implicitly accept ideas that would be ridiculous in the actual world, and in other ways the film is governed by mirror logic, where we expect to see our own ideas about humanity reflected back to us.

Looking beyond movies, postmodern art often references and quotes from previous artistic works, or incorporates multiple forms and genres. New mediums are often updated versions of older ones – films and podcasts both take elements of radio plays, but mix them with visual images or with a targeted, on demand format. Haley would describe this as new works and mediums holding a mirror to the old, but this trend can also be likened to a dream’s tendency to reconfigure aspects of our waking lives in new and surprising ways. The phenomenon of ‘interobjects’ happens when the dreaming mind imperfectly combines objects from waking life, leading to ‘new creations derived from partially fused blends of other objects’ (Wikipedia), such as a hammer and a green slime ghost pogo ride (p.634, 1053). An artistic work that loudly points to its influences and medium could be seen this way, too.

Although films are probably the medium most commonly associated with dreams, I personally believe any medium is capable of representing a dreamlike state. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, originally a children’s novel, may be the most famous work about dreaming (or at least, the first one that jumps to my mind), and the act of reading has been compared to dreaming as they both rely on the imagination to conjure visuals. Music genres including psychedelia, dream pop and lo-fi use sound texture to evoke the feeling of dreams, and Bass (2019) proposes that architecture could use filmic techniques such as bright and vivid colors, a lack of clear borders, pulsing lights, sudden cuts, slow pans and zooms, to represent dreaming spatially. The architecture of John’s house at the end of act 3 (p.1150) convinces me of this – it no longer looks like a ‘house’ as we typically understand it. It is no longer designed for use as a living space or with an eye for aesthetics, it’s haphazardly copied and pasted, built for the sake of building and not the end goal of being inside the space.

Dreams are scientifically distinct from hallucinations, fantasies and meditative states, but people continue to compare these experiences, so I think it’s fair to consider dreamlike experiences in Homestuck as well as literal dreams – unreality, fantasy and imagination are scattered throughout Homestuck (and Hussie’s work in general). John Egbert feels a close connection to his favorite media properties to the point of almost inhabiting them in his waking life. The existence of supernatural creatures such as Bec, who can manipulate the fabric of space, is taken for granted, as are many elements of the beta kids’ life inside and outside of Sburb. Dave Strider suspects that Lil Cal, an inanimate puppet, is moving around the apartment of his own accord. Famous quotes and books from our actual world are recreated in the comic, but changed or misattributed without noting this. A character is suddenly instructed to ‘be the other guy’ and is, on some level, aware of this. The Wayward Vagabond is a mayor because he believes that he is one; the power was not conferred on him externally. The right music played on the right bass guitar causes plants to grow. Jade Harley blows up a command terminal several centuries in the future with only her mind. A cat is cloned, mutated, and lives anyway.

Much of Homestuck is governed by rules that can be understood – for example, the captchalogue system, which operates on predictable logic – but just as much comes out of nowhere, could not be predicted based on earlier events, and has to simply be accepted by the reader and characters despite its absurdity. Based on this, I would argue that dream logic and computer logic both play a significant role in the narrative, and that they often blend into one another. The idea that a uranium powered wardrobe can change the design of the shirt you are wearing is absurd, but the randomization and cycling logic of the wardrobifier are familiar to anyone who has ever set a Windows desktop background. Homestuck’s use of the second person present is also a key example; it comes from adventure games (which some people consider the first virtual worlds) but also creates a meditative feeling of being guided along with an increasingly bizarre story.

Section 7 – Three Pole Model

‘Lucid dreams like electricity, the current flies through me and in my fantasies I rise above it. And way up there, I actually love it.’ (Swift, 2024)

So, if an artistic work such as a painting, film, comic or building can analogous to a dream we passively experience, does that mean interactive media such as video games can be likened to a lucid dream? Does that mean that a person who chooses to immerse themself in a virtual world and participate in a society with other virtual inhabitants can be likened to a person who trains themself to lucid dream more often and actively decides to interact with other dream entities? John Egbert beats the tutorial level of Sburb and finds himself transported to the Incipisphere, the same place where Jade Harley awakens after falling asleep on Earth. Their methods of entry were different – one digital, one spiritual – but their destination is the same, and they may meet similar people, and have similar limitations on their actions and on their ability to communicate with Earth.

Kitson et al. (2018) suggest that advanced virtual reality technology could look like lucid dreaming, with therapeutic applications for self-introspection. They found that lucid dreamers commonly cited feelings of empowerment, magic and living out a fantasy and allowing selves to do things that they cannot or would not do while awake, among other themes, and say that it is possible to use a lucid dream or virtual reality to gain confidence, push boundaries, and ‘practice’ for the real world. Lucid dreamers’ experiences could inform development of VR technologies.

These researchers consider presence within a space to be a hallmark of both lucid dreaming and virtual reality. VR often appeals to people who seek total immersion inside a game, and lucid dreaming can provide this without technology. This theme was also picked up by other writers – Younes & Lioret (2017), distinguish between endogeneous environments, which are generated entirely by the mind (dreams and hallucinations) and exogeneous environments, which come from an external medium or stimulus such as a computer, while discussing the three pole model (this is attributed to Biocca (2003) although I haven’t been able to access this source). This three pole model holds that humans experience a sense of presence in three different environments: a physical space (such as a house), a virtual space (such as a video game), and a mental imagery space (such as a dream). These are all distinct types of spaces, but do not have firm definitions or criteria, and some spaces may blur these boundaries as though they were percentages of clay, sand and silt.

Banos et al (2005) experimentally compared virtual and imaginary spaces. In their study, participants went for a walk in the park, either through a virtual reality simulation or by being asked to imagine the experience, and then answered a series of questions. The study found that participants’ sense of presence in the park and sense of having visited somewhere was equal in the virtual and imaginary parks, while participants’ sense of realism was higher in the virtual park. In the imaginary park, participants felt a higher sense of presence early on, which then decreased, while in the virtual park participants took longer to adjust to the space and felt a greater sense of presence as time passed.

The three-pole approach can be represented in Homestuck by Jade Harley, who has an actual world body (wearing her white and blue shirt), a dreamworld body (wearing her yellow dress), and a virtual body piloted from outside itself (her robot). Which of these is the ‘true’ Jade Harley? I was born in the actual world and spend a lot of my time here, and I’m writing this while awake and in a flesh and blood form, so I think there’s a natural bias towards Jade’s actual world body. Homestuck’s narrative agrees with this, as it’s Jade’s actual world body that’s first officially introduced and that forms a pattern with the rest of the kids. But if dream Jade is composing a Pesterchum message, which robot Jade types into her computer and sends it to John Egbert, who interprets the message as coming from ‘actual’ Jade and mentally files this into his understanding of her as a person, it seems like all three Jades together comprise ‘Jade Harley’.

Regarding Jade’s own experiences, she has designed a Lunchtop which projects a three-dimensional hologram of her computer desktop to immerse herself in, placing her actual body in a virtual space in order to communicate digitally with her friends and share information she learned from her dream self, which loops back around to affect the actual world. By designing her own robot to take actions in the actual world following the directions of her dream self, actual Jade puts trust in the different versions of herself to share the same goals and take the same actions that she would, in their position, even though she never experiences ‘being’ either one. Jade has been taught to live her actual world life in a kind of permanent dream state, believing in her dead grandpa’s still being alive, in his dolls on the couch as distinguished houseguests, in the Daughters of Eclectica as her sisters. Jade sees the gaps between her different selves more as puzzles to be overcome – for example, with her actual world finger reminders to better remember what her dream self has learned, or with her installing extra arms and flight capabilities into her robot self to mirror her dream self’s capabilities – than as firm barriers or distinctions. Jade’s different forms have never directly interacted, but she is skilled at moving between them and appears to view them all as parts of herself.

If Jade Harley represents a synthesis of our actual, virtual and dream selves, Skaia is the catalyst that allows this. Jade’s mastery over technology and her ability to create virtual spaces and bodies, and her ability to ‘wake up’ on Prospit and engage with its citizens and the visions is provides, come from her exposure to Skaia’s nearby mystic ruins. A mystic ruin is typically thought of as a place of imagination, transcendence, and connection to something beyond the self, but the ruins on Jade’s island glow green like lines of code programmed into a supercomputer (p.1147).

Skaia and its surrounding planets, too, seem to defy categorization as any one of these three types of spaces. Prospit and its dark counterpart are home to constructed beings, programmed with bar codes and coded to take on additional qualities in response to sprite prototyping. Prospit is also home to at least two dream entities, and the ominous planet to at least one human kidnapped from the actual world. These planets are spaces that can be physically walked around in. Their shining walls are not illusory and cannot be glitched through; they also cannot be overcome with the power of imagination like in a lucid dream, but computers and dreams are currently the only known methods to reach them. Once inside, a person remains subject to physical laws – John Egbert’s body can still be hurt, still sleep, and still obeys gravity – but also follows laws previously restricted to the virtual, such as gathering abstract building materials (grist) and possessing a health bar, and operates under dream logic, such as being able to combine distinct objects into previously unknown ‘interobjects’ and communicate with the dead. Presumably, now inside, John Egbert will be able to wake up while dreaming on Prospit, and integrate his dream self’s and waking self’s actions within the Incipisphere.

Section 8 – Capitalism

‘[Lucid dreams] provide a new worldview of physical reality because it is obvious that it could be entangled with the dream world. In the distant future, this new reality may change or at least influence the daily routines of many people, allowing them to accomplish everyday tasks before getting out of bed.’ (Raduga et al., 2024)

So, what does it mean that the Incipisphere breaks down these boundaries between actual, virtual and dream spaces via its Game of the Year-nominated immersive simulation Sburb? Before answering this I will take one final diversion to talk about capitalism (boo! hiss!).

As an economic system, capitalism is concerned with optimization of profit and worker productivity, unlimited expansionism, and bringing all aspects of life into the economic domain. Even when profit and growth cannot be increased further, the idea of spending time outside a cycle of acquiring and then spending money is antithetical to capitalism, which cares about controlling the people living under it in order to maintain its status. In this way, workers are asked to spend long hours at their jobs even if their assigned work could be completed in half the time, and workers are denied relaxation and holiday time that has been demonstrated to improve overall performance, for the sake of keeping their self worth and identity tied to their position in the economy. When workers are given leisure time – such as weekends – corporations such as tech and media industries work to control how we spend our leisure time.

In a relevant example, Grandinetti & Ecenbarger (2018) describe how the augmented reality video game Pokemon GO, a leisure activity, is a way for a corporation to control public space. By tying game objectives to actual world locations, its developers and investors can incentivize a large player base to visit certain businesses and landmarks, while de-incentivizing others. The game also ties into existing forms of privilege, providing a better gameplay experience for people living in cities, who will be able to access far more content, and for white players, who are far more likely to be safe while behaving ‘strangely’ in public or visiting certain locations. The company also successfully asks players to use their leisure time to generate profit and data to feed an algorithm.

The researchers argue that the ‘liberating potential of desire’ used to be revolutionary, but that capitalism has now incorporated all our desires and expects us to have infinite mental energy to engage in them. Resistance to capitalism now needs to involve an understanding of bodily limitations, such as exhaustion and sleep. I agree with this currently, but it seems like corporations are already working on overcoming these, too.

Plenty of jobs force control over their workers’ sleep schedules – in the US, junior doctors regularly work shifts of up to 28 hours and may only have 8 hour breaks between shifts, while shift work in hotels often requires alternating day, evening and night shifts, with schedules changed at the last minute. Some workers in fields from snowplow driving to laboratory staff are ‘on call’ while they sleep, and may be woken at any time and asked to come to work immediately. So far, no corporation has figured out how to keep workers actively working while we sleep, but plenty are interested, and the links between lucid dreaming and virtual reality are inspiring this technology.

Chia (2019) discusses the ethics of ‘dream hacking’ technologies by reporting on a 2015 ‘Dream Tech’ conference held in California, where researchers attempting to harness the processing power of the mind gathered to share ideas. Technology that aims to influence dreams is not new – 1959’s Dreamachine was a flickering lightbox designed to play on a turntable and alter the frequency of brainwaves when observed with closed eyes to induce a hallucinatory state between waking and dreaming, while the 1990s NovaDreamer measures eye movements during sleep and flashes lights when REM sleep is detected to induce a lucid dream by ‘reminding’ the dreamer that they are dreaming. These devices have remained fairly niche, confined to the realms of art and spirituality.

With a fantasy of complete knowledge and control over their populations, governments and corporations would like to bring dreams into both the world of capitalism and the world of rational science. Modern technologies, like those discussed at the Dream Tech conference, are designed to collect data from users for the sake of customizability. Using electrodes on each side of the head, these devices record the brain activity of wearers, potentially using an algorithm to ‘design’ a dream for the user and deliver it to their brain via electric currents. A developer of the LucidCatcher, which was successfully crowdfunded in 2017, claimed that ‘with enough data, the company will be able to program brain waveforms for specific kinds of content’.

Many people are skeptical that these devices actually work (including me), but in one 2024 laboratory study, regular lucid dreamers were trained while awake to control an avatar of a virtual car by tensing and releasing certain muscles. After falling into REM sleep, they were given visual, auditory and vibrational signals to indicate obstacles in the road, prompting them to make the same muscle movements to control the car from within their dreams. Most participants were able to drive in a straight line and make controlled turns while asleep at least some of the time, although they usually woke quickly in response to the researchers’ stimuli (Raduga et al, 2024).

These researchers suggest that the same technology used to prompt dreamers to drive a car could be integrated into a smart home, allowing people to ‘switch[...] lights, coffee machines, and other appliances on and off’ while asleep. In this way, we could circumvent the need to sleep by increasing our productivity in our sleeping hours as well as our media consumption, viewing the mind as an optimizable computer screen that can be programmed to overcome the physical limitations of its hardware, the body. What we see in dreams will be more immersive and more realistic than any form of media before now, and when a device links to our mind and can anticipate our wants and needs, it takes less active effort to make decisions and accomplish tasks. We could even, in theory, connect to each other in dreams via cloud-based technologies. The mad science possibilities are compelling, but our current society is not well placed to explore them.

Healey (2018) also discusses the ethics of dream technologies, seeing tech companies and dreaming as antithetical to each other. He states that ‘tech employees mindfully create platforms which undermine the mindfulness of users’ by flattening users into one-dimensional identities who can be marketed to, while dreaming has the capability to expand the mind. In a dream, limitations are illusory, while they can be firmly coded into technology. It is in corporations’ financial interests to place advertisements and paywalls directly into users’ minds, and has the possibility to subtly influence behavior and mental health by altering dream content – studies such as Gauchat et al. (2021) show that recurrent and disturbing dreams are correlated with poor mental health in both adolescents and adults, although the causality is unknown.

Healey points out that technology is just barely beginning to develop capabilities that dreams have had for millennia, and suggests taking advice from much older practitioners. In Buddhist dream yoga, for example, dreaming is used to ‘distinguish unspoken assumptions about reality, understand the limitations they impose, and move beyond them with imagination’. Healey takes a primary ethical principle of dream yoga, the Principle of Lucidity, and updates it to apply to modern technology as follows.

‘Principle of Lucidity (digital variant): Always aim to catalyze users’ ability to distinguish a constructed environment as such, and to maximize users’ agency in the ongoing co-construction of emerging environments.’

I personally avoid using the terms ‘reality’ and ‘real world’ where possible, because I do consider virtual and dream worlds to be sites of real experiences – but seeing an environment as ‘real’ does make us more susceptible to internalizing messages and believing information we find inside them. When a virtual or dream space is owned or controlled by a specific external force, they will likely act in their own interests. Boellstorff (2008) discusses total corporate control in relation to virtual worlds, saying that ‘an actual-world government could ban slot machine gambling, but a virtual-world government could, in theory, disable all random-number generating scripts in the virtual world, an act for which there is no true actual-world parallel’. This is true – but if a government or corporation controls dreams, they could, in theory, deliver messages that attempt to subliminally influence users not to gamble.

Once again, the morality of dreams is relevant, but from an entirely different perspective. If we take an action in a dream, guided by a brain waveform programmed by a corporation, are we responsible for that action, and is there any way to prove that it was programmed into us? Corporations are broadly uninterested in the wellbeing of anyone besides themselves and their senior staff (source: living in the 2020s), and virtual world inhabitants are often aware of this. Complaining about moderators’ or developers’ decisions is a popular pastime in every virtual world or other internet space I’ve been a part of, sometimes to the point of strikes, protests, and other targeted collective action. This is sometimes effective, as users generally have the option of leaving a virtual world if its drawbacks outweigh its benefits. In actual worlds and dream worlds, this is less likely to be the case. And if – completely hypothetically – one entity was to have control over all three types of spaces, its control would be absolute and inescapable.

Section 9 – Skaia(Net Systems)

EB: since i got here i feel compelled to do these weird things i don't really want to do. EB: by some kind of voice that i can't really even hear. i don't know, it is hard to explain. (HS p.268)

By the start of Homestuck’s Act 3, we know that Skaianet Systems is not an in-universe video game developer or corporation – it’s something far more totalizing. Skaia, is a clouded blue planet with a chessboard and spirograph at its center that ‘exists as a dormant crucible of unlimited creative potential’ (p.422). Positioned at the center of the Incipisphere, Skaia is the equivalent of the sun in our actual solar system, around which all other planets orbit. It also has knowledge of Earth at all points along its timeline, and its clouds display snapshots of events on Earth, chosen by uncertain criteria.

Skaia’s motivations are unknown; it could be a conscious entity directly manipulating events, a tool used by a specific external entity, or a powerful force affecting the universe without intent. As such, its nature is inscrutable, but we can judge it based on its effects.

Skaianet keeps a laboratory in upstate New York (where this essay was written!), which acts as a facility for ectobiological experimentation, monitoring thousands of Sburb sessions and meteor impacts, and maintaining an extensive power network. The laboratory contains a countdown to its own destruction by meteor, further asserting Skaia’s knowledge of Earth time. Skaia also constructed a mystic ruin – an ancient stone building topped with a giant frog’s head, surrounded by orb-capped pillars – on a remote Pacific island. This contains hieroglyphics with no known translation, and a time capsule counting down to its own opening.

Sburb, the game apparently ‘released’ by Skaianet, also uses countdown timers. It has a steep learning curve, asking players to succeed its tutorial level on the first try, or lose both the game and their actual lives. It asks players to build, to fight, and to create – to succeed at Sburb’s combat, a player needs to upgrade their weapons by combining them with other household items, so imagination is required to craft effective combat gear. John’s remote ghost gauntlets (p.1059-60), which allow him to quadruple-wield weapons and to lift a weapon too heavy for his actual hands, are a great example of creative thinking allowing for much easier gameplay. To me, this suggests that Skaia wants players to think for themselves and solve problems that have multiple possible solutions, but only in service of specifically determined goals, which are to build to defined locations and slaughter ominous planet citizens, who ‘covet [Skaia’s] destruction’ (p.422).

Sburb encourages teamwork between the server and client player, as some tasks require both actual and virtual inputs to complete. Success at Sburb may not require knowledge from dreams, but it certainly helps – Jade Harley was able to tell Rose Lalonde in advance that their friend group would play a game, and provide cryptic hints towards success (p.838). Our two main sources of information about Sburb are Jade and Nannasprite, who is intended by the game as a benevolent guide for John (Jaspersprite will likely play the same role for Rose). Both of them speak cryptically, and are careful not to dispense too much information, Jade hinting and Nannasprite outright stating that they know more than they are sharing.

As previously discussed, Jade has three separate bodies, her actual, virtual and dream selves. Nannasprite has a singular form that blends elements of all three – John’s living grandma from the actual world, the Kernelsprite from the virtual world, and a spiritual form due to Nanna’s being dead before prototyping. This will be true for all sprites prototyped with a dead creature, and a desire to combine these three modes of existence could explain why John’s sprite was resistant to prototyping with a Betty Crocker cake mix or a Colonel Sassacre book, but receptive to Nanna’s ashes (p.275-81). John Egbert, who dreams on Prospit despite being unaware of it, and who has entered the Incipisphere via Sburb, is also part of all three realms at once. The same may be true of a character like the Peregrine Mendicant, a virtual construct who lives on Prospit amongst dreamers, and later travels to Earth. However, a character like Rose Lalonde – who has not been shown dreaming on Prospit – may yet be protected from some of Skaia’s influence.

When Skaia exerts its influence over a person, like Nannasprite or Jade, it makes that person more like itself. Skaia has unimaginable knowledge and potential power, but dispenses limited amounts at once. It could, in theory, shpw the entirety of human history in its clouds or allow Sburb players to begin the game with unlimited build grist, but instead chooses what to show and to give as a method of controlling its players and NPCs.

At its heart, Skaia represents total control over the humans, constructs, and even worlds who interact with it. Skaia exerts control in the actual world via technology, including appearification, sendification, transportalization, ectobiology and alchemy, which make it capable of physically influencing Earth in ways far beyond most humans. Using meteors, Skaia also holds the powers to destroy a planet at any moment across time if it chooses. Skaia exerts control in the virtual world using video game rules, including level up mechanics, health bars and limited amounts of abstract currency and building materials, which allow it to ‘gate’ progression through Sburb and the Incipisphere, and lock inhabitants into predetermined paths. Skaia exerts control in the dream world by choosing the visions its Prospit dreamers see (and possibly deciding if and when their dream selves wake), by allowing resurrection of the dead only in a form directly under Skaia’s control, and by directly placing thoughts and commands into the minds of players, affecting their mental states and therefore the content and understanding of their own dreams.

Once a player installs Sburb (p.137), they are brought under Skaia’s complete control. There is no opportunity to log out of Sburb, quit the game, or even take a break. Players are able to sleep (p.644), but sleep and dreams do not provide an escape from Skaia. And due to Skaia’s temporal awareness, if a player will install Sburb at some point in their life, this retroactively gives Skaia power over their life prior to that point (in the same way that we as readers retroactively learn that we’ve been talking to Jade’s dream self). As such, the clowns that John Egbert scribbles over his actual world and dream world walls are just as likely to be Skaia’s influence – possibly creating the circumstance where John would prototype his sprite with the harlequin doll – as they are to be a sign of John’s difficult relationship with his dad.

Skaianet Systems is not literally a corporation in-universe, but it definitely behaves via corporate logic. Skaia has succeeded where real world corporations have (as yet) failed, gaining direct control over people’s minds and dreams, as well as every waking and sleeping moment of their time. It can instantaneously transport players between planets, such that there is never any time lost in their carrying out Skaia’s plans, and it uses countdown timers and imminent danger to instill a permanent sense of urgency into players. It is not beholden to laws or restrictions on its behavior, limitations on its own resources, or a need to pay its workers; it generates what it needs to function, no more and no less. In many ways it is the perfect machine, able to convert abstract grist to physical materials and back with no loss, unconcerned by human traits such as sickness and emotions as it is able to perfectly predict and plan for these, if not overcome them entirely with a form of mind control. Skaia even controls its own enemies, placing the dark agents who covet its destruction throughout its lands, allowing these chess constructs to continue being produced and powered up while also tasking Sburb players with their destruction – this is not dissimilar from how capitalism incorporates critiques of itself, allowing (for example) movies that explicitly critique capitalism to be marketed, franchised and sold. Now trapped inside its fused world, John Egbert and his friends will have an extremely difficult time resisting or escaping Skaia in any form.

Section 10 – Conclusion

‘You take a moment to gather your thoughts after your dream. While you are asleep it can get very confusing figuring out what is really happening and what isn't.’ (HS p.1075)

In conclusion: everything in the world is about Homestuck, except for Homestuck, which is about the totalizing power of neurocapitalism. I personally read Acts 1 and 2 of Homestuck as setting up a dichotomy between actual and virtual worlds, one that is increasingly relevant to people’s real lives in 2009, even people who would not generally describe themselves as Internet users or virtual world inhabitants. Via its real world captchalogue and strife mechanics and its use of Sburb as a ‘mirror world’ that digitally represents the client player’s actual environment on the server player’s virtual interface, Homestuck questions what would happen if the boundaries between actual and virtual worlds were even more permeable than they had already become.

In Act 3, Homestuck expands this theme by introducing a dream world, and establishing that the dream world was always already there. We learn that several early conversations with Jade Harley were specifically with dream Jade, while others could be with either dream Jade or actual Jade, and as readers, we have to reconcile these two versions of Jade as they are not always distinct. Jade and John Egbert both have a dream self who is physically distinct from their waking body, and when they dream, their dream selves appear on the planet Prospit.

In the culture Homestuck was produced in, our understanding of dreams comes primarily from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic tradition, and it’s possible to analyze the comic through this framework – Rose Lalonde does this in-universe. However, dreams were defined by Domhoff (2023) as ‘a unique form of spontaneous, internally generated thought’, and the three-pole model of presence distinguishes between the exogeneous environments of actual and virtual worlds, and the endogeneous environments of dream or imaginary spaces. In our reality, the gaps between these spaces are a continuum – for example, going to the theater combines actual and dream worlds, augmented reality combines actual and virtual worlds, and making electronic music can combine virtual and dream worlds. In Homestuck, the distinctions between these spaces break down entirely as characters enter the Incipisphere and everything, including thoughts and dreams, is trademark and copyright of Skaianet Systems – so the psychoanalytic tradition makes little sense, as John and Jade’s shared dream represents visions from Skaia instead of their own unconscious minds.

Even though Homestuck’s literal dreams are distinct from our actual dreams, Homestuck represents dream logic in other ways, through its second person present tense, sudden transitions, and absurdist plot elements that are treated as ordinary by characters. This combined with the adventure game, interactive page and reader command elements show that the dreamworld and virtual world elements also coexist at the structural level. The mirror world, a specific subset of virtual worlds, shows up in the mirror logic of repeated character introductions and multidimensional associations between characters.

It’s possible to read Skaia as a metaphor for a government or corporation taking total control over its workers’ work time, leisure time and even sleep time. By ensuring that dreams take place on Prospit, immediately below the watchful eye of Skaia, that communication with family members including dead family members is only possible in Skaia’s domain and as part of game constructs, and that waking actions are motivated by Sburb – a program originally marketed as entertainment, yet which clearly operates to carry out some kind of work on Skaia’s behalf – through its game mechanics, level progression, and constant mobs of enemies that prevent players from even considering other options, Skaia is able to monopolize all domains of its players’ lives via perfect immersion in a game. In this way, Homestuck does not only ask what it looks like when the actual, virtual and dream worlds collapse into a singular world, but warns against this possible future in our world.

#eoa3 #milestone #analysis #homestuck #jade harley #cannot believe i finished this. what a fuckin. eldritch monster of a post.#an absolute fluthlu.#well. finished or got to the point where i could not improve w my current skill level and amt of free time #but i did enjoy the process very much!#chrono

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justforbooks · 5 months ago

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Dame Maggie Smith

A distinguished, double Oscar-winning actor whose roles ranged from Shakespeare to Harry Potter

Not many actors have made their names in revue, given definitive performances in Shakespeare and Ibsen, won two Oscars and countless theatre awards, and remained a certified box-office star for more than 60 years. But then few have been as exceptionally talented as Maggie Smith, who has died aged 89.

She was a performer whose range encompassed the high style of Restoration comedy and the sadder, suburban creations of Alan Bennett. Whatever she played, she did so with an amusing, often corrosive, edge of humour. Her comedy was fuelled by anxiety, and her instinct for the correct gesture was infallible.

The first of her Oscars came for an iconic performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). Miss Brodie’s pupils are the “crème de la crème”, and her dictatorial aphorisms – “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life” – disguise her intent of inculcating enthusiasm in her charges for the men she most admires, Mussolini and Franco.

But Smith’s pre-eminence became truly global with two projects towards the end of her career. She was Professor Minerva McGonagall in the eight films of the Harry Potter franchise (she referred to the role as Miss Brodie in a wizard’s hat) between 2001 and 2011. Between 2010 and 2015, in the six series of Downton Abbey on ITV television (sold to 250 territories around the world), she played the formidable and acid-tongued Dowager Countess of Grantham, Lady Violet, a woman whose heart of seeming stone was mitigated by a moral humanity and an old-fashioned, if sometimes overzealous, sense of social propriety.

Early on, one critic described Smith as having witty elbows. Another, the US director and writer Harold Clurman, said that she “thinks funny”. When Robin Phillips directed her as Rosalind in As You Like It in 1977 in Stratford, Ontario, he said that “she can respond to something that perhaps only squirrels would sense in the air. And I think that comedy, travelling around in the atmosphere, finds her.” Like Edith Evans, her great predecessor as a stylist, Smith came late to Rosalind. Bernard Levin was convinced that it was a definitive performance, and was deeply affected by the last speech: “She spoke the epilogue like a chime of golden bells. But what she looked like as she did so, I cannot tell you; for I saw it through eyes curtained with tears of joy.”

She was more taut and tuned than any other actor of her day, and this reliance on her instinct to create a performance made her reluctant to talk about acting, although she had a forensic attitude to preparation. With no time for the celebrity game, she rarely went on television chat shows – her appearance on Graham Norton’s BBC TV show in 2015 was her first such in 42 years – or gave newspaper interviews.

Her life she summed up thus: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act and one’s still acting.” That was it. She first went “public”, according to her father, when, attired in pumps and tutu after a ballet lesson, she regaled a small crowd on an Oxford pavement with one of Arthur Askey’s ditties: “I’m a little fairy flower, growing wilder by the hour.”

Unlike her great friend and contemporary Judi Dench, Smith was a transatlantic star early in her career, making her Broadway debut in 1956 and joining Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre as one of the 12 original contract artists in 1963.

In 1969, after repeatedly stealing other people’s movies, with Miss Brodie she became a star in her own right. She was claiming her just place in the elite, for she had already worked with Olivier, Orson Welles and Noël Coward in the theatre, not to mention her great friend and fellow miserabilist Kenneth Williams, in West End revue. She had also created an international stir in two movies, Anthony Asquith’s The VIPs (1963) – she didn’t just steal her big scene with him, Richard Burton complained, “she committed grand larceny” – and Jack Clayton’s The Pumpkin Eater (1964), scripted by Harold Pinter from the novel by Penelope Mortimer.

Before Harry Potter, audiences associated Smith most readily with her lovelorn, heartbreaking parishioner Susan in Bed Among the Lentils, one of six television monologues in Bennett’s Talking Heads (1988). Susan was a character seething with sexual anger; the first line nearly said it all – “Geoffrey’s bad enough, but I’m glad I wasn’t married to Jesus.”

And the funniest moment in Robert Altman’s upstairs/downstairs movie Gosford Park (2001) – in some ways a template for Downton Abbey, and also written by Julian Fellowes — was a mere aside from a doleful Smith as Constance Trentham turning to a neighbour on the sofa, as Jeremy Northam as Ivor Novello took a bow for the song he had just sung. “Don’t encourage him,” she warned, archly, “he’s got a very large repertoire.” Such a moment took us right back to the National in 1964 when, as the vamp Myra Arundel in Coward’s Hay Fever, she created an unprecedented (and un-equalled) gale of laughter on the single ejaculation at the breakfast table: “This haddock is disgusting.”

Born in Ilford, Essex, she was the daughter of Margaret (nee Hutton) and Nathaniel Smith, and educated at Oxford high school for girls (the family moved to Oxford at the start of the second world war because of her father’s work as a laboratory technician). Maggie decided to be an actor, joined the Oxford Playhouse school under the tutelage of Frank Shelley in 1951 and took roles in professional and student productions.

She acted as Margaret Smith until 1956, when Equity, the actors’ union, informed her that the name was double-booked. She played Viola with the Oxford University dramatic society in 1952 – John Wood was her undergraduate Malvolio – and appeared in revues directed by Ned Sherrin. “At that time in Oxford,” said Sherrin, “if you wanted a show to be a success, you had to try and get Margaret Smith in it.”

The Sunday Times critic of the day, Harold Hobson, spotted her in a play by Michael Meyer and she was soon working with the directors Peter Hall and Peter Wood. “I didn’t think she would develop the range that she subsequently has,” said Hall, “but I did think she had star quality.”

One of her many admirers at Oxford, the writer Beverley Cross, initiated a long-term campaign to marry Smith that was only fulfilled after the end of her tempestuous 10-year relationship with the actor Robert Stephens, with whom she fell in love at the National and whom she married in 1967. This was a golden decade, as Smith played a beautiful Desdemona to Olivier’s Othello; a clever and impetuous Hilde Wangel to first Michael Redgrave, then Olivier, in Ibsen’s The Master Builder; and an irrepressibly witty and playful Beatrice opposite Stephens as Benedick in Franco Zeffirelli’s Sicilian Much Ado About Nothing, spangled in coloured lights.

Her National “service” was book-ended by two particularly wonderful performances in Restoration comedies by George Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer (1963) and The Beaux’ Stratagem (1970), both directed by William Gaskill, whom she called “simply the best teacher”. In the first, in the travesty role of Sylvia, her bubbling, playful sexuality shone through a disguise of black cork moustache and thigh-high boots on a clear stage that acquired, said Bamber Gascoigne, an air of sharpened reality, “like life on a winter’s day with frost and sun”.

In the second, her Mrs Sullen, driven frantic by boredom and shrewish by a sodden, elderly husband, was a tight-laced beanpole, graceful, swaying and tender, drawing from Ronald Bryden a splendidly phrased comparison with some Henri Rousseau-style giraffe, peering nervously down her nose with huge, liquid eyes at the smaller creatures around, nibbling off her lines fastidiously in a surprisingly tiny nasal drawl.

With Stephens, she had two sons, Chris and Toby, who both became actors. When the marriage hit the rocks in 1975, after the couple had torn strips off each other to mixed reviews in John Gielgud’s 1973 revival of Coward’s Private Lives, Smith absconded to Canada with Cross – whom she quickly married – and relaunched her career there, far from the London hurly-burly, but with access to Hollywood.

She played not just Rosalind in Stratford, Ontario, but also Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra to critical acclaim, as well as Judith Bliss in Coward’s Hay Fever and Millamant in William Congreve’s The Way of the World (this latter role she repeated triumphantly in Chichester and London in 1984, again directed by Gaskill). But her films at this time especially reinforced her status as a comedian of flair and authority, none more than Neil Simon’s California Suite (1978), in which Smith was happily partnered by Michael Caine, and won her second Oscar in the role of Diana Barrie, an actor on her way to the Oscars (where she loses).

Smith’s comic genius was increasingly refracted through tales of sadness, retreat and isolation, notably in what is very possibly her greatest screen performance, in Clayton’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987), based on Brian Moore’s first novel, which charts the disintegration of an alcoholic Catholic spinster at guilty odds with her own sensuality.

This tragic dimension to her comedy, was seen on stage, too, in Edna O’Brien’s Virginia (1980), a haunting portrait of Virginia Woolf; and in Bennett’s The Lady in the Van (1999), in which she was the eccentric tramp Miss Shepherd. Miss Shepherd was a former nun who had driven ambulances during blackouts in the second world war and ended up as a tolerated squatter in the playwright’s front garden. Smith brought something both demonic and celestial to this critical, ungrateful, dun-caked crone and it was impossible to imagine any other actor in the role, which she reprised, developed and explored further in Nicholas Hytner’s delightful 2015 movie based on the play.

She scored two big successes in Edward Albee’s work on the London stage in the 1990s, first in Three Tall Women (1994, the playwright’s return to form), and then in one of his best plays, A Delicate Balance (1997), in which she played alongside Eileen Atkins who, like Dench, could give Smith as good as she got.

The Dench partnership lay fallow after their early years at the Old Vic together, but these two great stars made up for lost time. They appeared together not only on stage, in David Hare’s The Breath of Life (2002), playing the wife and mistress of the same dead man, but also on film, in the Merchant-Ivory A Room With a View (1985), Zeffirelli’s Tea With Mussolini (1999) and as a pair of grey-haired sisters in Charles Dance’s debut film as a director, Ladies in Lavender (2004). Smith referred to this latter film as “The Lavender Bags”. She had a name for everyone. Vanessa Redgrave she dubbed “the Red Snapper”, while Michael Palin, with whom she made two films, was simply “the Saint”.

With Palin, she appeared in Bennett’s A Private Function (1984), directed by Malcolm Mowbray – “Moaner Mowbray” he became – in which an unlicensed pig is slaughtered in a Yorkshire village for the royal wedding celebrations of 1947. Smith was Joyce Chilvers, married to Palin, who carries on snobbishly like a Lady Macbeth of Ilkley, deciding to throw caution to the winds and have a sweet sherry, or informing her husband matter-of-factly that sexual intercourse is in order.

She had also acted with Palin in The Missionary (1982), directed by Richard Loncraine, who was responsible for the film of Ian McKellen’s Richard III (1995, in which she played a memorably rebarbative Duchess of York) and My House in Umbria (2003), a much-underrated film, adapted by Hugh Whitemore from a William Trevor novella. This last brought out the very best in her special line in glamorous whimsy and iron-clad star status under pressure. She played Emily Delahunty, a romantic novelist opening her glorious house in Umbria to her three fellow survivors in a bomb blast on a train to Milan. One of these was played by Ronnie Barker, who had been at architectural college with Smith’s two brothers and had left them to join her at the Oxford Playhouse. Delahunty finds her new metier as an adoptive parent to a little orphaned American girl.

She was Mother Superior in the very popular Sister Act (1992) and its sequel, and her recent films included a “funny turn” as a disruptive housekeeper in Keeping Mum (2005), a vintage portrait of old age revisited by the past in Stephen Poliakoff’s Capturing Mary (on television in 2007) and as a solicitous grandmother of a boy uncovering a ghost story in Fellowes’s From Time to Time (2009).

As this latter film was released she confirmed that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had undergone an intensive course of chemotherapy, but had been given the all-clear – only to be struck down by a painful attack of shingles, a typical Maggie Smith example of good news never coming unadulterated with a bit of bad.

Her stage appearance as the title character in Albee’s The Lady from Dubuque at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in 2007 was, ironically, about death from cancer. She returned to the stage for the last time in 2019, as Brunhilde Pomsel in Christopher Hampton’s one-woman play A German Life, at the Bridge theatre, London.

Cross, who was a real rock, and helped protect her from the outside world, died in 1998. But Smith picked herself up, and went on to perform as sensationally and beguilingly as she had done all her life, including memorable appearances in the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films (2011 and 2015) and two Downton Abbey movie spin-offs (2019 and 2022). Her final film role was in The Miracle Club (2023), co-starring Kathy Bates and Laura Linney.

She had been made CBE in 1970 and a dame in 1990, and in 2014 she was made a Companion of Honour. Her pleasure would have been laced with mild incredulity. A world without Smith recoiling from it in mock horror, and real distaste, will never seem the same again.

She is survived by Chris and Toby, and by five grandchildren.

🔔 Maggie Smith (Margaret Natalie Smith), actor, born 28 December 1934; died 27 September 2024

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#just for books #Maggie Smith #in memoriam

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