Episodes

Episodes

Welcome to Deep Dream State, the longest running active erotic audio drama on the open web. Deep Dream State is a full-cast serialized audio drama built at the intersection of desire horror, dystopian science fiction, and surreal psychological thriller.

The show runs in seasons. Each season is also called an Arc — they mean the same thing. Episodes inside a season are grouped into Cycles, which are thematic clusters. Cycles are just extra context. If you find them confusing, ignore them and navigate by Season and Episode number instead.

Each season examines a documented psychological, sociological, or technological phenomenon. The arcs to date span cosmic horror, reality television surveillance, dream research, and advertising technology.

The Global Episode number (GE) is a simple running count across the entire series, like you see on IMDb and MusicBrainz.

Stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or via RSS. Wikidata | MusicBrainz

Created by Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns. ISNI: 0000 0005 2877 6254 | IPI: 01346215468 | IPI: 01346215566 | KG: /g/11zjw94pww

 

Jump to: Arc 1: The Chthonic | Arc 2: Incognitoh | Arc 3: Sitri Center | Arc 4: Vale Four

Trailer

We did the trailer late in the series. Things go at a different timetable in indie production.

That said, I think it was worth the wait.

Arc 1: The Chthonic

A luxury cruise ship sails into an older ceremony. The sea does not forget.

More: Arc 1 Hub | Deep Dream State on NNPP

  • Maiden Voyage | NNPP | IMDb | MB: S1:E1 | GE1 | Target Selection. A luxury cruise ship embarks under the banner of the Dagon Dream Group and begins identifying its first candidates among the wedding party. Maiden Cycle
  • Cringetide | NNPP | IMDb | MB: S1:E2 | GE2 | Indebtedness. Debt and surveillance pull a crew member deeper into the ship’s true operations as the bachelorette party goes looking for the eldritch thing at the end of the corridor. Maiden Cycle
  • Veil | NNPP | IMDb | MB: S1:E3 | GE3 | Ritual Initiation. A glacial archaeological excursion pulls the wedding party into stone corridors where the carvings recognize them. Ceremony Cycle
  • Asunder | NNPP | IMDb | MB: S1:E4 | GE4 | Ecstatic Surrender. The midnight ceremony binds flesh and will in a covenant older than the ship or the civilization that built it. Ceremony Cycle
  • Shower | NNPP | IMDb | MB: S1:E5 | GE5 | Ritual Selection. The crew redirects its attention toward the passengers who keep asking questions, while two others surface from shared dreams with no memory of turning the shower on. Cloud Cycle
  • Garter | NNPP | IMDb | MB: S1:E6 | GE6 | Information Asymmetry. Sarah follows a planted note into the vault and is offered a controlled dose of what she’s been chasing. Cloud Cycle
  • Tessellated | NNPP | IMDb | MB: S1:E7 | GE7 | Architecture of Belief. The ship has no outside. Holly has found another tile. Storm Cycle
  • Undergloom | NNPP | IMDb | MB: S1:E8 | GE8 | Commodified Transcendence. The recording equipment was running the entire time. Storm Cycle
  • Spiralstorm (Finale) | NNPP | IMDb | MB: S1:E9 | GE9 | Market Entropy. The system encounters something it cannot commodify and tries anyway. Storm Cycle

Arc 2: Incognitoh

A reality competition that rewrites its players. The prize is influence. The cost is memory.

More: Arc 2 Hub | Deep Dream State on NNPP

  • Violet (Premiere) | NNPP | MB: S2:E1 | GE10 | Folk Horror. A wellness client follows her therapist’s instructions to a stone circle where a coven is already waiting. Ritual Cycle
  • Glass Houses | NNPP | MB: S2:E2 | GE11 | Pelco. Five contestants move into a fully transparent competition space where going private looks suspicious and transparency feels like a choice. Glass House Cycle
  • Uniforms | NNPP | MB: S2:E3 | GE12 | Behavioral Modification. The Glass House issues icon-coded uniforms and Madison discovers she can run Hannah the same way Bella runs the system. Glass House Cycle
  • Deep Fake | NNPP | MB: S2:E4 | GE13 | Frankenbite. Zarah finds a backdoor to the archive and builds a strategy around judge profiles left easy to find on purpose. Glass House Cycle
  • Winner Winner | NNPP | MB: S2:E5 | GE14 | Immunity Challenge. The floors aren’t optimized for upright locomotion and the uniform that reflects back at Madison isn’t a punishment — it’s a mirror. Winner Cycle
  • The Chain (Finale) | NNPP | MB: S2:E6 | GE15 | Participation Loop. The final challenge connects every contestant through a chain of haptic triggers and the prize is a permanent position inside the system she thought she was playing. Winner Cycle

Arc 3: Sitri Center

A secluded dream research institute where the experiment is always already running.

  • Drill (Premiere) | MB: S3:E1 | GE16 | Threat Simulation Theory. A dream research institute deploys its first experimental intervention and places a twelve million dollar wager on whose methodology is correct. Threat Simulation Cycle
  • Adapt | MB: S3:E2 | GE17 | Reward Loop. Construct 37 produces the outcome Meg predicted and Tessa writes her confession to the committee with the precision of someone trained to document. Threat Simulation Cycle
  • Incubator | MB: S3:E3 | GE18 | Sleep Paralysis. Elle Lawson enters stabilized REM paralysis and learns lucid dreaming protocols from a researcher who stopped applying them to herself some time ago. Sleep Paralysis Cycle
  • Gazes Back | MB: S3:E4 | GE19 | MILD and VILD. Elle Lawson’s increasingly intense dreams are opportunities. The Mnemonic and Visual Induction protocols stitch the boundary between research and conditioning until it disappears. When June Lowell questions the program’s efficacy, her solution is to put Meg Aerin in the chamber as a subject. Sleep Paralysis Cycle
  • Cusp | MB: S3:E5 | GE20 | Transitional Architecture. An urban photographer whose waking obsession with threshold spaces has become a recurring nightmare discovers her subconscious has been tracing the same places through variations of the same dream — and the researchers recognize them. Liminal Spaces Cycle
  • Descendent | MB: S3:E6 | GE21 | Sacred Geography. Meg and Tessa follow Lyra’s dream map through the service corridors station by station, extracting sensory memories of each location until they reach a soundproofed chamber at the end of the corridor. Liminal Spaces Cycle
  • Tether | MB: S3:E7 | GE22 | Folie a deux. Meg and Tessa realize the control is already operating on them. When Oona Reyes’ case file arrives, the architecture of her dream-linking retreats turns out to be indistinguishable from the institution. They’re back in the Freudian nightmare parlor again. Collective Dreaming Cycle
  • Artifact | MB: S3:E8 | GE23 | Server Architecture. The ancient temple turns out to be a blueprint. Collective Dreaming Cycle
  • Override | MB: S3:E9 | GE24 | Hive Mind. Meg and Tessa enter the Hive, where synchronized subjects run on a loop trading doubt for dopamine. Collective Dreaming Cycle
  • Center | MB: S3:E10 | GE25 | Mirror Test. Nyra receives Meg and Tessa in the mirror chamber and uses the lucid dreaming protocols they know as tools they didn’t anticipate. False Awakenings Cycle
  • Sync | MB: S3:E11 | GE26 | False Awakening. Every apparent resolution collapses into another layer. False Awakenings Cycle
  • Arouse (Finale) | MB: S3:E12 | GE27 | Medium as Mechanism. The medium was always the mechanism. False Awakenings Cycle

Arc 4: Vale Four (Ongoing)

  • Refrain (Premiere) | MB: S4:E1 | GE28 | Earworm. A remote island facility studies audio hooks on paid participants, and the hooks don’t stop when the lights go out. Hooks Cycle
  • Hook Line | MB: S4:E2 | GE29 | Neuromarketing. The music patterns spread beyond the lab and into the bodies of everyone within earshot, and the staff turns out not to be immune. Hooks Cycle
  • Sinker | MB: S4:E3 | GE30 | Involuntary Musical Imagery. Elle and Cael find something buried in the walls of Vale Four that shouldn’t exist: the document that could bring the whole IPO crashing down. Hooks Cycle
  • Slowplay | MB: S4:E4 | GE31 | Behavioral Economics. Vale Four deploys FaceTrace and the holdfasts inside the facility learn what it means to operate under a system that reads resistance before it surfaces. Tell Cycle
  • Raise | MB: S4:E5 | GE32 | Microexpression Detection. FaceTrace reads what subjects want before they can articulate or conceal it, and Ava asks for solo access so she can be honest without anyone watching her be honest. Tell Cycle
  • Pot Limit | MB: S4:E6 | GE33 | Behavioral Telemetry. Z reviews the complete FaceTrace profile on every subject in Vale Four and discovers the system has gone proactive. June thinks she’s positioning for a reveal. The system already had it. Tell Cycle
  • The River (Finale) | MB: S4:E7 | GE34 | Recalibration. The Tell Cycle ends where it always had to. Z clocked every tell, every steered session, every whispered instruction. June was the play. Ava says yes to something she doesn’t understand. The hands were the thing to watch. Tell Cycle
  • Quiver | IMDb | NNPP | MB: S4:E8 | GE35 | Microtargeting. Vale Four opens the Valescape. The subjects get Kamas, get games, and lose three hours they do not remember losing. Blake sees the architecture. Nobody listens. Targeted Cycle
  • Nock | IMDb | MB: S4:E9 | GE36 | Microtargeting. The Kama economy tightens. Blake names what Vale Four is doing and can’t stop playing anyway. The factions decide to let the system recruit her for them. Targeted Cycle