Scooch onto a floor pillow under a cozy lamp. Per instruction, call out, “I get it!” whenever a moment resonates with you. Keep your cell phone on, even turn your ringtone up so everyone can hear it better, though maybe that last part was a joke. The serious part: Help the cast build a time machine.

For “How We Spend Our Days,” CounterPulse has transformed into the den (real or fantasized about) of your childhood: a site of make-believe and shadow-casting, where everyday objects acquire totemic significance through force of imagination, where every frisson of whimsy gets honored and incubated like a precious little egg.

The show, a coproduction by CounterPulse and eight-year-old ensemble Klanghaus that opened Thursday, June 29, is probably not for the literal-minded, or those inclined to dismiss things they don’t understand as “weird for weird’s sake.” If your mind won’t rest until you understand who the Eiegh of Creef (Dylan Waite) is, why he looks like a crucified Christ perched on a ladder with a crab in one hand and a tennis ball scepter in the other, monologuing to something like the World Economic Forum about thousands of years of Eieghs of Creef and time travel, “How We Spend Our Days” might put you off.

But if you can relish the sheer gravelly splendor of Waite’s voice as, laden with clause upon clause, it gathers a locomotive’s momentum and careens in a spectacular explosion off a cliff, then the show should be manna for you and your fellow odd ducks.

Hopefully, it’s clear by this point that I can’t give you a tidy synopsis, much as I’d like to, but here are a few of the piece’s disparate threads, which your creativity can plait together or not as it sees fit: There are three brothers, the bedridden, poetic Eugene (Willie Caldwell); the nutty, tinkering Dodge (Evan Johnson) and the intense but inept Hermann (Teddy Hulsker), who all live on a failing farm with Dodge’s wife Evelyn (Waite). There are a robot with stars for eyes (Julie Phelps), a gimp (Caldwell), glowing green goo in a jar with secret messages that lucky members of the audience get to read aloud and a monster wriggling on the floor that bears startling resemblance to Admiral Ackbar from “Star Wars.”

There are metatheatrical, confessional meditations on the foolishness yet necessity of making the piece we’re seeing; a card game with members of the audience, as hastily abandoned as it is begun; and simple tunes with lyrics that seem to unlatch the horizon — “You dream the same dream that I do” — sung by Hulsker in ghoulish, slack-jawed whispers and drawls with swooping register changes.

What makes the whole thing sing is a spirit of play and improvisation, the feeling that you and the performers might start building a fort together out of couch cushions.

In the scenes with the brothers and Evelyn, ensemble members perform with a total lack of affect, which has the effect of making them seem deadly serious and like a burlesque all at once. The brothers’ plights — nearly bankrupt property, precarious crops, encroaching technology, thwarted artistic ambition, the steamy possibilities of affairs — feel like a flipbook of the American theater canon. “How We Spend Our Days” shows we can take that literary baggage and graft Mylar and blow bubbles onto it. It’s our playground, and everything’s open.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com