Show Notes
“Is this bait?”
Refrain is the premiere episode of Vale Four, the fourth arc of the Deep Dream State desire horror series. Desire horror is deeply immersive storytelling; the audience’s impulses drive the narrative.
Vale Four follows a covert operation to expose a corporate research facility before their IPO. The facility picks up where Sitri left off.
Each Cycle tracks a different advertising technology. They’re all real, although heavily fictionalized. The first Cycle is about audio hooks – those engineered songs you can’t get out of your head. (Noted examples include “Never Gonna Give You Up,” “Call Me Maybe,” and the Menard’s jingle.)
It is also about who built those systems, why, and what they were always actually for. Vale Four lands at a moment when algorithmic manipulation and attention engineering are subjects of public alarm (or they should be.) We take them seriously as horror and philosophy.
Refrain introduces the facility, the focus group, the founders, and the fracture lines that’ll run through the entire arc. It’s also an argument that the most unsettling thing a story can do is make you enjoy exactly what it is warning you about.
Cast & Crew
Written & Produced by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Directed by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Co-Directed by: Bliss Blank
Recurring Cast
Z – Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
June Lowell – Bliss Blank
Tessa Finn – Ring of Kees
Meg Aerin – Bun Li
Naia Anderson – Dizzy Dollie
Elle Lawson – Echo Doll
Iris Vale – Swirls and Twirls
Cael Yupp – Jericho Caine
Hespa Apate – Syndi Rella
Astoria – Dakota Dream
Hilton – Tickled Panda
Guest Stars
Vera – Fallen
Celeste – Panda Moanium
Episode Summary
Naia Anderson hits record and starts testifying for her future. Her future may well be ours.
Once the architect of a controversial neurological research program, Naia watched her work migrate from the academic shadows of Sitri into a sleek corporate project called Vale Four. Officially, Vale Four studies advertising. The sinister agenda might be below the surface – or it might be the surface itself.
On a remote island facility, paid participants believe they’re helping researchers study earworms and musical hooks. The experiment seems harmless at first, but the hooks don’t stop when the lights go out. They invade sleep, rewrite habits, and slowly erode the line between suggestion and control. When one subject suddenly wakes up from the conditioning, she discovers just how much of her identity has been quietly rewritten. Meanwhile, far from the lab, Naia watches the system she built evolve beyond its creators and begins planting the seeds for another kind of garden.
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Human Made Art
The poster image for this arc is from Sunrise Forever, under the Pixabay license. Layer art overlays are used to vary each iteration of the image. You can find the original here.
Consent Declaration
Deep Dream State is a desire horror audio drama written and produced by Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns. The series uses desire horror to explore psychological fiction at the boundaries of control, identity, and complicity. The manipulative elements depicted are fictional and intentional. This is a story about what happens when consent is algorithmically removed, not a celebration of that process. Vale Four explores audio conditioning and behavioral manipulation as horror. The hooks in this episode are fictional. The science behind them is not. All performances are works of fiction and take place within a consensual creative context.
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.