Show Notes
The abject never looked this good.
Meg and Tessa have entered the mirror chamber at the heart of the Sitri Institute’s dream architecture. Nyra is already there. Center is the episode where the testing protocols – clock checks, finger counting, mirror reflection – stop functioning as tools the researchers use and start functioning as tools being used on them.
Cast & Crew
Written & Produced by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Directed by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Staff
Dr. Zev Talcott (Z): Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Dr. June Lowell: Bliss Blank
Dr. Tessa Finn: Ring of Kees
Dr. Meg Aerin: Bun Li
Elle Lawson: Echo Doll
Iris Vale: Swirls and Twirls
Dream Team
Cael: Jericho Caine
Nyra: Dizzy Dollie
Hespa: Syndi Rella
Reverie: Britt Reprogrammed
Subjects
Oona Reyes: Jade
Phoebe Bosworth: Sofi Starship
Lyra Crosswell: Flux Lynniegal
Episode Synopsis (Caution: Spoilers)
Meg and Tessa enter the mirror chamber with the shedding Oona required of them at Ur’s threshold: no pride, no independent thought, nothing they were still holding. Nyra receives them as someone who has been running this station across a considerable span of time and recognizes the difference between subjects who’ve been sent and subjects who’ve arrived. She speaks what Meg and Tessa have internalized and concealed — not as accusation but as inventory, with the precision of someone who catalogued it long before they did.
The clinical reality-testing protocols the researchers know – clock checks, finger counting, mirror reflection – function in this chamber as Nyra intends rather than as the researchers intend. Each test designed to establish wakefulness establishes instead how thoroughly the framework has been internalized. The researchers can’t step outside it to check. The framework is the inside.
Center closes on recognition rather than resistance. Meg and Tessa discover they’re already inscribed with the identities and purposes the Sitri Center designed, not through force but through the accumulated logic of every choice they made that felt like their own. Nyra names this not as an ending but as a beginning. The apparatus continues. The researchers will emerge. The question the episode leaves open is whether emerging and being released are the same thing.
Listen & Explore
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Podcasts
RSS Feed
Support the creator on Patreon
Creator bio & portfolio
All episodes archive
Canonical Tumblr Page
View this series on IMDb
View this episode on IMDb
MusicBrainz for Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
BookBrainz for Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns, including show script books
Producer ISNI
Human Made Art
Series artwork for this arc is from Vika Glitter on Pixabay, under the Pixabay license. Deep Dream State uses human art at every stage of the creative supply chain.
Hespa – Deep Dream State Character Art, from Echo Doll
Content Warnings
Dream research, mirror chamber, identity dissolution, mythology, institutional horror, suggestive content.
Consent Declaration
Deep Dream State is a desire horror audio drama written and produced by Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns. It explores psychological fiction at the boundaries of control, identity, and complicity. The elements depicted are fictional and intentional. Center contains dream research horror, identity dissolution, mythological content, and suggestive themes. All performances are works of fiction and take place within a consensual creative context. ISNI 0000 0005 2877 6254
Source
More from Deep Dream State
After After is the monster romance fifth season of Deep Dream State. Naia takes control of humanity’s next step, seven extrahuman factions make their case, and listeners vote on what comes next. Monster romance, desire horror, queer posthuman desire, and a species-level happily ever after.
I know exactly what you are. You’re trade.
Yield kicks off with a very normal ad for Spotlight, assuming your definition of normal includes performance conditioning and Iris Vale enjoying the attention a lot too much. Then everybody goes to court, where Elle tries to win a serious legal case while the rest of the cast provides the world's least helpful whispered commentary. Long-running jokes and suspiciously specific phrases start paying off in ways that suggest somebody has been planning this for a while. By the end, the legal question may be settled, but the show is still very interested in asking whether all of this was theater, which is exactly the sort of question you want answered one episode before the finale.
The Deep Dream State enters its final Vale Four cycle with Radix, a story about astroturfing, manufactured agreement, and the illusion of control. Naia, Tessa, June, Z, and Meg move through competing layers of reality as candid conversations and behind-the-scenes fragments become part of the experiment itself. Everyone thinks they understand who is watching, who is performing, and who has the clicker. They're all wrong.
Z releases the eager wolfgirls for the hunt while Elle and Porsche watch Tessa’s subjugation through the library’s magical surveillance system, only to realize the approaching wolfgirls are real and flee deeper into the stacks.