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 is organized into narrative arcs or seasons. Each contained plot within it is called a Cycle.

Each Cycle examines a documented psychological, sociological, or technological phenomenon. The arcs to date span cosmic horror, reality television surveillance, dream research, and advertising technology. Stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or via RSS.

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

Arc 1: The Chthonic

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

Maiden Cycle (Arrival)

  • Maiden Voyage: 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.
  • Cringetide: 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.

Ceremony Cycle (Descent)

  • Veil: Ritual Initiation. A glacial archaeological excursion pulls the wedding party into stone corridors where the carvings recognize them.
  • Asunder: Ecstatic Surrender. The midnight ceremony binds flesh and will in a covenant older than the ship or the civilization that built it.

Cloud Cycle (Selection)

  • Shower: 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.
  • Garter: Information Asymmetry. Sarah follows a planted note into the vault and is offered a controlled dose of what she’s been chasing.

Storm Cycle (Dissolution)

  • Tessellated: Architecture of Belief. The ship has no outside. Holly has found another tile.
  • Undergloom: Commodified Transcendence. The recording equipment was running the entire time.
  • Spiralstorm (Finale): Market Entropy. The system encounters something it cannot commodify and tries anyway.

Arc 2: Incognitoh

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

Ritual Cycle (Casting)

  • Violet (Premiere): Folk Horror. A wellness client follows her therapist’s instructions to a stone circle where a coven is already waiting.

Glass House Cycle (Challenge)

  • Glass Houses: Pelco. Five contestants move into a fully transparent competition space where going private looks suspicious and transparency feels like a choice.
  • Uniforms: Behavioral Modification. The Glass House issues icon-coded uniforms and Madison discovers she can run Hannah the same way Bella runs the system.
  • Deep Fake: Frankenbite. Zarah finds a backdoor to the archive and builds a strategy around judge profiles left easy to find on purpose.

Winner Cycle (Elimination)

  • Winner Winner: 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.
  • The Chain (Finale): 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.

Arc 3: Sitri Center

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

Threat Simulation Cycle

  • Drill (Premiere): Threat Simulation Theory. A dream research institute deploys its first experimental intervention and places a twelve million dollar wager on whose methodology is correct.
  • Adapt: 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.

Sleep Paralysis Cycle

  • Incubator: 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.
  • Gazes Back: 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.

Liminal Spaces Cycle

  • Cusp: 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.
  • Descendent: 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.

Collective Dreaming Cycle

  • Tether: Folie à 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.
  • Artifact: Server Architecture. The ancient temple turns out to be a blueprint.
  • Override: Hive Mind. Meg and Tessa enter the Hive, where synchronized subjects run on a loop trading doubt for dopamine.

False Awakenings Cycle

  • Center: 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.
  • Sync: False Awakening. Every apparent resolution collapses into another layer.
  • Arouse (Finale): Medium as Mechanism. The medium was always the mechanism.

Arc 4: Vale Four (Ongoing)

Hooks Cycle

  • Refrain (Premiere): Earworm. A remote island facility studies audio hooks on paid participants, and the hooks don’t stop when the lights go out.
  • Hook Line: 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.
  • Sinker: 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.

Tell Cycle

  • Slowplay: 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.
  • Raise: 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.
  • Pot Limit: 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.
  • The River (Finale): 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.