Show Notes
Episode Summary
In “Tether”, the boundaries between discipline, devotion, and discovery blur beyond recognition inside the Sitri Institute. What begins as a study of synchronized dreaming becomes an experiment in control.
Meg and Tessa are drawn into the same patterns they once observed, repeating phrases that echo through the walls like incantations. Z weaves the experiment into a living labyrinth that no one can step out of unchanged.
The story threads ancient archetypes through clinical precision, invoking the myth of Ariadne’s thread as the researchers realize they may be both observer and subject, scientist and offering. By the end, the Sitri Center feels less like an institution and more like a consciousness of its own. This is a dream that remembers, responds, and reawakens.
“Tether” continues Deep Dream State: Sitri Center, following the events of Episode 6: Descendent, as the dream tightens its grip and the Institute begins to hum with life beneath its walls.
Cast & Crew
Written & Produced by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Directed by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Story by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Staff
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
Zev Talcott (Z) – Neural Nets
Subjects
Lyra Crosswell – Flux
Oona Reyes – Jade
Phoebe Bosworth – Sofi Starship
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Human Made Art – free range!
Series artwork for this arc is from Vika Glitter, under the Pixabay license.
The Deep Dream State aims to use human art at every stage of the creative supply chain.
Cael – Deep Dream State Character Art
Consent Declaration
Deep Dream State is a surreal audio drama written and produced by Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns. The series merges lucid dreaming, hypnosis, and transformation into psychological fiction exploring the boundaries of control, identity, and desire.
All performances are works of fiction and take place within a consensual creative context.
Plot Synopsis (spoilers)
“The psychoanalyst’s couch becomes merely another version of this bondage, another space where a woman’s reality is rewritten according to the desires and theories of those with institutional power.”
— Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism
At the Sitri Institute, researchers Meg and Tessa confront a disturbing discovery that seems to expose the darkest secrets of the facility itself. In a heated session conducted under the watchful eye of their apparent superior, Dr. June Lowell, they believe they’ve finally understood the mechanisms of control operating within these walls, a nightmare scenario they think they can document and comprehend. They speak with clinical precision about manipulation, about the architecture of coercion, about subjects and observers maintaining professional distance. But their certainty shatters when they recognize the machinery they’re describing is already operating on them. Their own speech becomes evidence of their subjugation. They realize, too late, that they’ve been operating inside a Freudian nightmare parlor, where the line between investigation and entrapment has already collapsed. There is no outside position from which to observe; observation itself is the trap.
Before Meg and Tessa can fully process this revelation, before they can articulate what has happened to them, a new case file arrives across their desk: Oona Reyes, thirty-two, former TikTok wellness celebrity and TempleBridge facilitator. The dossier is extensive, remarkably so. It chronicles her mercurial career trajectory: pole dancer to fitness influencer, then breakout digital fame, then we
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