Tag: experimental sound design

Deep dream state arc 3 sitri center e6 descendent
Descendent | Sitri Center: Liminal Spaces Cycle

Descendent | Sitri Center: Liminal Spaces Cycle

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Here be dream dragons.

After Cusp mapped the threshold, Descendent crosses it. Meg and Tessa follow Lyra’s dream coordinates into the Sitri Institute’s buried architecture, tracing corridors that run older than the building above them.

The stations are real. The map is real. And somewhere at the end of it, behind a soundproofed door with a keypad neither of them can crack, something is running that neither of them can explain.

Cast & Crew

Written & Produced by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Directed by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns

Principal Cast

Explanation

Descendent is the episode where the Sitri Center stops being a research facility with a strange secret and becomes something that predates the research entirely. The Mesopotamian station sequence in the dream establishes this with precision: Sippar, Kutha, Eanna, Ereshkigal, and Ur are not metaphors for institutional control. They are the original architecture of it, the first recorded systems for organizing bodies, labor, desire, and compliance into something measurable and reproducible. The naditu were temple workers in ancient Sumer. The Sitri Center has not invented anything.  It has found the blueprint and built on top of it.

Tessa does not pitch the discovery as liberation or justice. She pitches it as a pre-IPO scandal, the kind of documented depravity that collapses investor confidence and triggers control reversion. Meg, the engineer, follows the logic before she follows the feeling. They’re complicit in what they find: they have dreamed these stations themselves, they feel the pull of each one as they walk the corridors, and they resist with effort rather than ease. The map they are following is also a map of their own desire, and they know it.

The soundproofed room at the end of the corridor is the final movement. Something is running behind that door. It leaks through the seal. Both researchers feel it standing close. They recognize the voice on the other side without naming it.   It establishes that Ur is real, that it is operational, and that the Institute has been running it the whole time underneath everything else.

Full Summary (with spoilers)

Z opens with a recap of the Cusp revelation: the Sitri Institute’s maintenance infrastructure encodes the same ancient Mesopotamian geography that Lyra Crosswell has been dreaming. Sippar, Kutha, Eanna, Ereshkigal, Ur. The stations are real. Iris Vale follows with the Better Self advertisement, promising to smooth the spaces between tasks and restore focus on demand.

The episode picks up in the unmonitored service corridors where Cusp ended, with Meg and Tessa processing what they’ve just found. Tessa pushes toward the implications: if the architecture is real and the map is real, then whatever is happening inside the Institute is documentable. In a heavily capitalized pre-IPO tech venture, documentation of this kind is leverage. Meg is slower to commit, but she has already dreamed it. When Tessa asks which station, Meg describes the ziggurat at Ereshkigal, the carvings, the wheel, and the naditu strapped to it together. She tells Tessa it was her in the dream. Their conversation is interrupted by June and Elle, who find them in the corridor and mock their cover story. Tessa and Meg retreat.

Inside Lyra’s dream, the stations present themselves not as mythology but as roles with physical memory. Cael, Nyra, and Hespa narrate each one: Sippar as the place of the first plow and the yoke, Kutha as the human terrarium, Eanna as the scribe hall where every training was marked, Ereshkigal as the wheel. Each station is a role Lyra has played before, in other echoes, other lives. When Lyra asks about Ur, the train cuts her off before she can finish the question. The Please Space midroll follows, selling ambient soundscapes for threshold moments: waiting in line, stepping off a train, closing a laptop. Real life happens in the spaces between. Back in the dream chamber, Meg and Tessa have five minutes before the dream fades. They work through the stations methodically, drawing Lyra’s memories out one node at a time. Eanna: wet stone, pulsing columns, instruction carved into the walls. Sippar: the yoke, the crawl, the presentation. Ereshkigal: the cord, the oath, the wheel. When Lyra asks for release by the Sumerian term ĝidru, Tessa tells her not yet. Kutha: kept under glass, treats through the surface, tapping. When Lyra asks for help at the end, Tessa tells her she has earned it. Meg tells her she is not stuck. She just needs yes.

Meg and Tessa enter the service corridors with the map from Lyra’s dream and follow it station by station. Sippar is recognizable and pulls at both of them. The wheels of Ereshkigal stop them both in their tracks. They resist and keep moving. At the end of the corridor they find a soundproofed room they cannot enter: the keypad sequence is unknown, and Lyra dreamed the numbers but was never asked. They hear something through the seal. It sounds spacy. Standing close to the door, they both feel it. Tessa notes they can go around, through an adjacent room. Meg recognizes the voice coming through the wall. They both do. That recognition is all the scandal they need. The episode closes with the map in hand, the door still locked, and something on the other side that knows the shape of everyone inside the Institute.

Listen & Explore

Human Made Art – free range!

Series artwork for this arc is from Vika Glitter, under the Pixabay license.

Additional artwork is provided by Echo Doll.

Nyra deep dream state character ar
Nyra 

The Deep Dream State aims to use human art at every stage of the creative supply chain.

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.

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Illustration of a cruise ship with tentacles in stormy waters, smoke cloud text reading “chthonic e5: shower.”
Shower | The Chthonic: Cloud Cycle

Shower | The Chthonic: Cloud Cycle

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Aboard the Chthonic, the fog is warm and the whales are circling. A cosmic horror audio drama about what gets in when the self dissolves.

This is Episode Five of the dystopian fiction Deep Dream State, an audio drama exploring identity and desire.

(The Chthonic arc is classified as cosmic horror.)

 

Cast

Ship’s Crew

Guests

Credits

Deep Dream State is written and produced by Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns, with co-production by Bliss.
Sound design, editing, and scoring by Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns.

Episode Summary

Somewhere below decks, Amanda and Brittany are sharing a shower neither of them remembers turning on.  The crew watches on monitors and evaluates.  What the entity they serve actually wants is a mind that still pushes back, and Sara and Kara have spent the entire voyage doing exactly that in the ship’s library, chasing whale prophecies and binding rites down a trail the crew planted for them.  A hidden note sends Sara deeper into the ship alone.  Kara stays behind with a knife and a deadline and the growing suspicion that following the breadcrumbs and walking into the trap are the same thing.

Episode Synopsis

Shower opens in the Chthonic’s surveillance room, where Captain Dyer and her senior crew are reviewing the progress of a passenger named Emma.  She’s been through multiple cycles of adjustment, and she still isn’t what they need. She hesitated. In the world the Chthonic’s crew are building, hesitation is disqualifying. The conversation between Dyer, Alistair, Olivia, and Holly is the language of people running a program rather than a cruise.  What emerges from it is the outline of something with serious infrastructure behind it: trials, wipes, cycles, and a very specific end goal that Emma’s softness has put at risk.

Below decks, two other passengers are having a different kind of morning. Amanda was the responsible one in her social group, the woman who kept the sorority from burning down, and now she can’t string two thoughts together without giggling.  Brittany describes the feeling as pink fog, and Amanda finds she can’t argue. Their conversation loops and doubles, sentences finishing in unison, memories failing to reconstruct.  The shower in their cabin is already running when they notice it, and neither of them turned it on.  They work out slowly that they dreamed it at the same time: standing under the water while something hummed through everything. They’ve always heard it, they agree.  They’re not suffering and that’s precisely what makes it frightening.

Back in the surveillance room, Dyer and Alistair watch Amanda and Brittany on the monitors and write them off as too far gone to be useful. This is where Shower opens into something larger than a cruise ship drama. Holly, one of the crew, tells them that the entity the entire operation is designed to serve doesn’t want empty vessels. She knows because she hears it when she’s the offering. What it wants, she reports, is something left to corrupt: resistance, consciousness, the specific quality of a mind that hasn’t yet surrendered. Amanda and Brittany are kept aboard now as warnings rather than candidates, while the crew turns its attention to two other passengers currently in the ship’s library: Sara and Kara, who have spent the voyage chasing every strange thing they’ve noticed aboard the Chthonic and getting closer to the truth than the crew expected. The files they’ve been finding, the legends uploaded to their research feeds, the cryptic trails: none of it was accidental.

Sara and Kara have independently arrived at the same conclusion from different directions. Every coastal mythology they can find points toward the same structure: brides of the sea, offerings to the deep, binding rites that appear from Norse tradition to Polynesian sacred sites. A text called The Binding of Waters names it directly, referencing a bride, a vessel, and an entity it calls the Old Groom. The ritual cleansing passages explain what happened to Amanda and Brittany. The hundreds of whales circling the ship outside with no feeding pattern and no migration logic match the prophecy exactly. What Sara and Kara believe is an investigation is the final stage of their own selection. Their compulsion to understand, their refusal to stop pulling at the thread: these are the exact qualities that made the crew plant the trail for them in the first place.

When a handwritten note falls out of one of the archive books directing Sara toward a secondary archive elsewhere on the ship, Kara calls it immediately: it’s a trap, horror trope central, hard pass. Sara goes anyway because knowing less at this point feels worse than the risk. They split up, Sara heading deeper into the Chthonic’s interior while Kara waits in the library with a knife and a thirty minute deadline. Shower ends there, not with a revelation but with a door opening further in, Sara walking toward whatever the Old Groom has been patient enough to wait for, and Kara alone in the library with the realization that understanding a trap and escaping it are not the same thing.

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Content Advisory

Deep Dream State is an explicit adult production containing cosmic horror, erotic content, and scenes of ritual transformation. Devotional surrender, boundary dissolution, and encounters with ancient non-human entities. Not for the faint of heart or the firmly landlocked.

Official IMDb Episode Link


Deep Dream State – S1.E5 on IMDb

Official IMDb episode page for Deep Dream State Season 1, Episode 5.

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