Yeah, basically everything about Trolls is wonky, which I blame on Hussie making up worldbuilding as he went along. Even after he went along in some cases, like Troll romancing, the Troll race being in a perpetual war against space or psychic clounn voodoo.
While my main beef is paradox cloning, as I have mentioned like 20 times already and will not further elaborate on, I also don't quite understand how dream selves are supposed to work: they are generated... how exactly? They were not created during ectobiology, the lab was destroyed shortly afterwards and to the Caraps the sleeping kids are mystic, timeless figures.
OK, after their...birth... they sleep in these towers. Their wakeselfs go about their days, go to sleep, their consciousness is transported into their second, also sleeping body and there they tend to have weird dreams. Makes one wonder what our 12 trolls needed sopor for, but PSYCHIC POWERS ARE MAGIC so ok.
The dreamself sleeps in a special room. This room shapes according to their subconsciousness, up to little dolls appearing out of thin air and themself going blind. This might explain where they come from: Their dream bodies are their selfimages projected into a place between reality and dream! Except they are also real bodies mostly identical to their waking ones, this doesn't explain where the rooms come from/how they work and how they are connected to a players (sub)consciousness. Must be the psychedelic paper hangings.
If the dreamself wakes up- which seems to have some sort of spiritual implications, but that may just be carapacian eschatology- they can move around on Derse/Prospit. Now people tend to go crazy, get brain damage and die of heart diseases when they can't sleep and dream correctly, but ok, the kids are barely human after all.
If the dreamself dies, its soul is transported to the Outer Ring, into the dream bubbles-in the flesh, into which a sleeping player may slip. It seems that accomodating to that transition is not pleasant(Jade: Enter, Karkat's first nap). And it may not be what actually happens since:
-Jade's dreamself(from the same timeline!) was dead for a long time and had its own memories and experiences
-Dreamprojections(for lack of a better term), when woken up, vanish instead of... falling asleep or somehing
-over half the inhabitants of the 'bubbles would have to be bodily asleep at any point in time since their dream/wakeselves are also there.
New(for me, eribody else probably had this figured out years ago) theory: The dreamself, originally a husk to host the players dreamconsciousness, develops a sort of imprint of the player which allows it to function on its own when the connection is severed, i. e. it dies. The player on the other hand, when trying to sleep, has his consciousness transported to a dead body, *dies*, is transported to the bubbles and is pulled back when his body awakes, which in turn may be triggered by suffering dream trauma. (fun fact: Traum means Dream in german) If the Horrorterrors can pull off something like this, which is not only a new mechanic but one that contradicts established... ok, entirely beyond human understanding, I get it.
Then there are oddities like Jade's dreambot and the godtier merge.
Also dreamselves can fly. Explain that one, Hussites.