Tag: sleep paralysis

Deep Dream State Arc 3 Episode 5 cover — Sitri Center: Cusp by Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Cusp | Sitri Center: Liminal Spaces Cycle

Cusp | Sitri Center: Liminal Spaces Cycle

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Between what you want and what you’ll admit.

Lyra Crosswell dreams in corridors. Mezzanines, transfer tunnels, platforms that lead nowhere she can name. She thought it was an aesthetic obsession. The Sitri Center thinks it’s a map.

Something is encoded in the Institute’s architecture, and Lyra’s subconscious has been tracing it all along.

Cast & Crew

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

Principal Cast

Explanation

Cusp is the episode where the Sitri Center stops being a research facility and starts being a place with a much older purpose.

The liminal space framework that runs through Lyra’s dreams describes Lyra’s psychological state with precision: sixteen variations of the same pattern, desire trained to hold itself at the edge indefinitely. But it’s also describing the Institute itself, which has been engineered to keep everyone inside it in exactly that condition. Subjects, researchers, and staff all occupy the same threshold. Nobody crosses.

That’s the design.

The Mesopotamian geography embedded in Lyra’s journals – Sippar, Kutha, Eanna, Ereshkigal, Ur – is the mythological architecture of descent. These are the gates of the underworld in Sumerian cosmology, the stations Inanna passes through on her way down, surrendering something at each threshold until she arrives stripped of everything she carried in. The Sitri Center has built those gates into its maintenance infrastructure and labeled them in shorthand. Lyra’s subconscious has been navigating the actual building in her sleep, which means her dreams aren’t symptoms of her psychology. They’re a map she’s been reading without knowing she could read it.

Full Summary (with spoilers)

Z opens the entry framing the evening around liminal spaces and thresholds.  They’re the in-between places where social rules loosen and the map runs out. Iris Vale follows with an in-world advertisement for Better Self, a wellness app that promises to guide users through the space between stress and serenity, offering breathwork sessions that slot into the cracks of the day. The language of the ad mirrors the Institute’s own: controlled entry, managed threshold, a destination reframed as a moment of recognition.

In the observation chamber, Elle Lawson appears in her new role as Lead Transitional Officer, bright and eager and several registers below the intelligence she once occupied. Tessa and Meg register this quietly. The alignment took weeks. Elle is very aligned now. Dr. June Lowell arrives and wastes no time: she reminds Meg that Elle, who once sounded exactly like her, is now her supervisor. Z defends Elle warmly, positioning himself as her guide through uncharted territory. The team monitors Lyra Crosswell, an urban photographer whose waking fixation on mezzanines and transfer tunnels has become infinite corridors in her sleep. Her liminal entry signature is a whispered phrase. Her dream patterns have signposts. The Institute is reading them.

In the dream chamber, Meg and Tessa speak directly to the sleeping Lyra, framing themselves as cartographers of territory that has no existing map. Lyra asks if she’s the terrain. They confirm it. The conversation turns personal: both researchers are on restriction protocols following their demotions, forbidden from release, their own dream states intensifying in the absence. Meg explains that forbidden places don’t disappear from the subconscious — when the waking world says no entry, the mind builds a tunnel. Tessa notes that the thresholds they used to leave blank on the map, the places where fear and wanting become the same thing, are precisely what they’re here to chart. Lyra agrees to go under. They’ll watch every signal.

Inside Lyra’s dream, she finds herself at Crossroads — a truck stop where she works alongside Nyra and Hespa in a hospitality unit. Elle and June arrive as inspectors, clinical and proprietary. The inspection has a protocol. Their minute expires before it concludes. Cael arrives as a familiar client, intrigued by the new talent. Nyra explains that the names change but the role doesn’t — it’s always the same. Lyra performs. The dream builds toward the familiar edge and stops there, as it always does.

Back in the observation chamber, Meg and Tessa watch Lyra’s biometric data trace every physiological marker of climax without the release. This is the sixteenth variation. Lyra’s subconscious has trained itself to hold her at the threshold indefinitely — her limbic system firing and firing without discharge. They pull her dream journals: an elevator shaft with a brake panel she can never quite clear, a waiting room where every name gets called except hers, a subway turnstile that closes the moment the gates open. Then Meg reads the station names aloud. Sippar. Kutha. Eanna. Ereshkigal. Ur. Tessa’s voice catches. She asks Meg to read them again, slowly. This isn’t mythology. This is ritual. They exit the monitored chamber immediately.

In the unmonitored service corridors, Tessa explains: everything inside is recorded, which is why they couldn’t speak. The corridors are blind spots; Meg has used them before, for exactly that reason. Tessa tells her that Lyra’s dreams aren’t random associations. They’re maps to real locations. Meg pushes back: shared mythology, book club, coincidence. Tessa directs her to the brass maintenance panel on the wall behind her. Meg reads it aloud. IDF CLOSET 51P-PAR. Tessa asks her to read it again.

SIP-PAR. Sippar.

The ancient city from Lyra’s dreams is encoded in the Institute’s infrastructure. The Sitri Center’s architecture isn’t metaphorically connected to ancient ritual geography. It is ritual geography, built in concrete and labeled in maintenance shorthand, and Lyra’s subconscious has been tracing its blueprint through sixteen variations of the same unreleased dream.

Listen & Explore

Human Made Art

Series artwork for this arc is from Vika Glitter on Pixabay, under the Pixabay license. Deep Dream State uses human art at every stage of the creative supply chain.

Consent Declaration

Deep Dream State is a desire horror audio drama written and produced by Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns. It explores psychological fiction at the boundaries of control, identity, and complicity. Cusp contains liminal space horror, institutional surveillance, denial themes, power dynamics, and architectural horror. All performances are works of fiction and take place within a consensual creative context. ISNI 0000 0005 2877 6254

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Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns cover art, Deep Dream State Arc 3 Episode 4 Gazes Back
Gazes Back | Sitri Center: Sleep Paralysis Cycle

Gazes Back | Sitri Center: Sleep Paralysis Cycle

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The program needs that data – raw.

Elle’s dream training has become protocol. Tessa is running the sessions and the line between researcher and subject has moved again without anyone filing the paperwork. When Dr. Lowell declares the program a failure, Meg enters the chamber as a contrasting profile – and finds out she was always the template.

The Sitri Institute doesn’t just shape desire. It manufactures it, then hands you a pen.

Cast & Crew

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

Principal Cast

Analysis

The Sitri Center stops being a place things happen to subjects and becomes a place that happens to everyone inside it. Meg entered the chamber believing that choosing her own phrase gave her control over the variables. The phrase was never the variable. The institute was already running its pattern througha her before she agreed to anything, and the dream just made the data visible. Hespa’s correction – “You’re the template” – is the real takeaway: the researchers were always the most legible subjects, because they understood the mechanism well enough to internalize it completely.

The journal editing is the episode’s quietest horror. Tessa does not fabricate Meg’s desires. She curates them, selects the passages that show alignment and corrects the cadence of the ones that don’t, until the record reflects a coherent arc of willing participation. This is how panoptic control operates at its most effective.

The confession letter that closes the episode is the most precise description of complicity. Meg admits to everything – the unauthorized files, the simulations, the tampered logs, the attempts to discredit Tessa – and then asks to stay anyway. The horror is not that she was broken. The horror is that she was already this person before the chamber, and the institute simply gave her a form to fill out.

Full Summary (with spoilers)

The episode opens inside Elle’s dream. The figures mock her eagerness while rewarding her compliance. When Cael demands a second figure join her, Nyra summons Tessa – reimagined here as Teehee, a dream-self who introduces Elle to the lucid dreaming techniques MILD and VILD. In the Sitri Center’s hands these are not consciousness tools. They are compliance protocols.  When Cael summons them both into his chamber, their voices chant in unison, dream logic and institutional language fully merged.

Elle surfaces to find Tessa standing over her, having already overridden the monitoring feed to prevent the research team from seeing Elle’s physical reenactment. Tessa is not concerned. She is impressed. She describes her own conditioning in careful, almost fond detail.  Both women realize they have been appearing in each other’s dreams. Tessa does not treat this as a warning. She treats it as evidence the program is working.

In the observation chamber, Dr. June Lowell declares the program a failure. Elle’s escalation is nonlinear. Her dream journals contain phrases written for hours at a stretch. When Meg deflects blame onto the subject, June asks who the perfect subject would actually be, and Tessa offers quietly that it should be someone who understands all of it. June proposes Meg enter the chamber herself to provide a contrasting profile. Meg agrees on the condition that she chooses her own phrase and anchor. Tessa offers to lace her in. Meg accepts with the resignation of someone who already knows the weight of what she is agreeing to.

Inside Meg’s dream, Nyra and Hespa greet her as someone who always comes back. Cael tells her she brought them with her. When Meg insists she is not a subject, Hespa corrects her without hesitation: she is the template. In the waking chamber, Z and Tessa enter while Meg lies paralyzed and aware, treating her presence as negligible. Tessa notices Meg’s physical response and hears her repeating a phrase back into the room.

The observation chamber confrontation that follows is conducted entirely on Tessa’s terms. June reads from Meg’s journals – journals Tessa has been quietly editing, correcting the cadence, cleaning up for clarity, showing alignment where Meg wrote resistance. Meg protests that the words have been twisted. Tessa notes cheerfully that she was quoting. Z frames the whole exchange as validation of Meg’s own scholarship: alignment is the most effective indicator of dream compliance, and Meg’s subconscious has been demonstrating it for weeks. The demotion is presented as realignment. The position structure has already been updated. The access codes have already been changed. Tessa offers to help with the letter.

The episode closes with Meg’s confession to the Sitri Institute’s adjudicating board. She admits to keeping unauthorized files, building simulations, annotating her own responses, and tampering with logs to make Tessa appear unstable. She confesses that she stopped pretending her work was clinical and acknowledges that she tried to manipulate records to reclaim control she never truly possessed. Her letter ends not with a resignation but with a plea to remain inside the protocol in any capacity. The final line is simply “Please. Let me stay.”

Listen & Explore

Human Made Art

Series artwork for this arc is from Vika Glitter on Pixabay, under the Pixabay license. Deep Dream State uses human art at every stage of the creative supply chain.

Consent Declaration

Deep Dream State is a desire horror audio drama written and produced by Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns. It explores psychological fiction at the boundaries of control, identity, and complicity. The elements depicted are fictional and intentional. Gazes Back contains adult scenes. All performances are works of fiction and take place within a consensual creative context. ISNI 0000 0005 2877 6254

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Deep Dream State Sitri Center Episode 3 Incubator cover art featuring a glass jar containing a shadowed demonic figure with wings against a dark background with the text Sitri Center E3 and Incubator in orange block lettering
Incubator | Sitri Center: Sleep Paralysis Cycle

Incubator | Sitri Center: Sleep Paralysis Cycle

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You’re not being graded. You’re being rewritten.

Elle Lawson is locked in REM paralysis. The dream figures are already inside. Meg Aerin is taking notes. The Construct is responsive and the journal is mandatory and the line between researcher and subject is getting harder to locate in the data.

Cast & Crew

Written & Produced by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Directed by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Co-Directed by: Bliss Blank

Principal Cast

Zev Talcott (Z) – Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
June Lowell – Bliss Blank
Tessa Finn – Ring of Kees
Meg Aerin – Bun Li
Elle Lawson – Echo Doll
Nyra – Dizzy Dollie
Cael – Jericho Caine
Hespa – Syndi Rella
Iris Vale – Swirls and Twirls
Lyra Crosswell – Flux Lynniegal
Phoebe Bosworth – Sofi Starship
Oona Reyes – Jade
Substitute Teacher – Korrupted Innocence
Reverie – Britt Reprogrammed

Explanation

Incubator is the first episode of Cycle 2 and the arc’s most direct engagement with the Ars Goetia. Sitri, a Prince of Hell with dominion over desire and the stripping bare of subjects, presides over a research institute that has reframed incubus and succubus mythology as clinical data. Meg’s observation log treats the shadow presence not as hallucination but as a functional myth.

It persists because it works, and the subject learns to receive. The Sitri Center isn’t debunking the mythology; It is operationalizing it.

The fake advertisements continue Better Self promises you should decide what belongs in your dreams, which is the autonomy the Construct is designed to redirect. Please Space promises to rewrite your calm, with the name Namaah embedded as an underlay in the opening instruction. (Namaah is a figure from Kabbalistic demonology associated with seduction and the corruption of sleep, and her name appears in the advertisement for a meditation app designed to help you rest.)

The advertisements are not interruptions. They are the system explaining itself in a warmer register.

The VILD and MILD techniques Meg prescribes to Elle are genuine lucid dreaming methods used in sleep research. The show is not misrepresenting them. What the show is doing is placing them in the hands of a researcher who is simultaneously losing her own grip on the distinction between observation and participation, and asking what it means to be taught to recognize absurdity inside a dream by someone who has stopped recognizing it outside one. Meg’s journal entries answer that question with the precision of someone trained to document and the candor of someone who stopped redacting.

Full Summary

Intro

Z introduces the episode with characteristic directness. Tonight’s story is called Incubator and it concerns sleep paralysis, incubi, and succubi, which as the episode will demonstrate are sometimes the same phenomenon.

Ad: Better Self

Iris Vale opens with the Better Self advertisement, presenting the app not merely as a meditation tool but as a boundary, a science-backed method for sleeping deeper while maintaining control over what enters your unconscious. The first seven nights are free, which is just enough time to relearn how to sleep on your own terms. You should decide what belongs in your dreams.

Observation Lab

Meg Aerin records her project log while Elle Lawson remains in stabilized REM paralysis in the adjacent chamber, her fragmented vocalizations suggesting an experience that is intensifying rather than resolving. Elle is part of the Forty-Four cluster, a group of subjects presenting with invasive dream penetration and persistent paralysis states, and Meg has begun theorizing the phenomenon in mythological terms: the shadow at the foot of the bed, the weight on the chest, the breath at the neck, the ancient figures that persist across cultures because they function. The subject learns to receive, Meg notes in her log, with the calm of someone who finds this observation clinically useful.

Tessa attempts to contribute to the session and is dismissed efficiently. June arrives demanding metrics rather than mythology, names a seven-night deadline for neurocompliance benchmarks, and threatens Tessa with reassignment to the walk-ins if she speaks out of turn again during an active log. The funding is precarious and the funders are predators and the poetry, however good Z finds it, will not keep them patient. Elle’s dream vocalizations continue over the intercom throughout the confrontation, running underneath the professional exchange like a persistent signal nobody is quite willing to address directly.

Dream Sequence

Elle’s dream places her in a house where Nyra and Hespa are already hiding when she arrives, which is the first indication that the dream has run this script before. They warn her that he is already inside and that she keeps asking him back, which Elle resists acknowledging but cannot quite deny. Cael arrives. Mercy is available at a price Nyra already knows how to pay. Elle discovers she cannot move, which is the dream’s defining characteristic and also, the dream figures suggest, its defining appeal. The script runs.

Dream Chamber

Elle surfaces gasping and immediately mortified to learn she had been speaking aloud, a phenomenon Meg identifies as residual suggestion and frames as biology rather than something requiring shame. Elle confesses that she knew she was dreaming and did not want to stop, which Meg receives as useful data rather than a confession. What follows is a clinical introduction to VILD and MILD, Visual Induction and Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams: techniques involving the deliberate rehearsal of dream scenarios before sleep and the repetition of a phrase like a prayer at the threshold of consciousness. The goal is recognition, the moment inside the dream when absurdity becomes visible and the dreamer wakes up within it. The dream journal is mandatory, to be written every morning regardless of what is remembered, because the brain must be trained to treat these dreams as important. Skip a day and the Construct’s responsiveness means the dreams will intensify in compensation. Elle asks if Meg uses these techniques herself. Meg says of course, from a distance that suggests the answer is more complicated than the word.

Observation Chamber

The professional log continues from the observation chamber while Elle dreams in the room adjacent, the two of them running in a parallel that Meg’s entries make increasingly difficult to describe as coincidental. The journal entries that surface in the log are Meg’s own: Z, the cable looped around the thighs, the calibration sessions framed as clinical edging, the instruction to recite the consent protocol until she stutters the word revocation at which point he says not yours anymore. She has started dreaming about Tessa. She has stopped thinking critically during the sessions. She wrote the word noise to describe everything that is not her body and her data and she found she meant it.
June enters and finds Meg in a state that is not, technically, real-time correlation tracking. Elle’s voice continues from the dream chamber asking to be seen, asking to fill the protocol, asking to understand what she is for. June observes that Elle has become quite the echo chamber and informs Meg that her continued participation in the project depends on performance and discretion, that she will review Elle’s journal in the morning, and that she is quite sure Elle will have edited it.

Midroll Ad: Please Space

Iris Vale closes the episode with the Please Space advertisement, a meditation program engineered by sleep scientists for people whose racing thoughts and restless nights have become unmanageable. The soundscaping adapts to your rhythms, the sessions reset and rewire and rewrite your calm, and the first seven nights are free. Underneath the opening instruction, barely audible before the warmth of the sales voice reasserts itself, the name Namaah appears as a spoken underlay.

We ensure you will be saying it. Please.

Listen & Explore

Human Made Art

Series artwork for this arc is from Vika Glitter on Pixabay, under the Pixabay license. Deep Dream State uses human art at every stage of the creative supply chain.

Consent Declaration

Deep Dream State is a desire horror audio drama written and produced by Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns. It explores psychological fiction at the boundaries of control, identity, and complicity. The elements depicted are fictional and intentional. Incubator contains adult themes, dream manipulation, sleep paralysis imagery, and institutional power dynamics. All performances are works of fiction and take place within a consensual creative context.

ISNI 0000 0005 2877 6254

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Deep Dream State Sitri Center Episode 1 Drill cover art featuring a silhouetted figure suspended inside a luminous amber ring against a deep space nebula background in blue and purple with the text Sitri Center E1 Drill
Drill (Premiere) | Sitri Center: Threat Simulation Cycle

Drill (Premiere) | Sitri Center: Threat Simulation Cycle

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Everyone sees what you are.

The Sitri Center is a dream research institute where scientists do more than study subconscious fears. They engineer them. Tonight’s first subject is Phoebe Bosworth. Her dreams have already started escalating.

The experiment has already begun.

Cast & Crew

Written & Produced by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Directed by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
Co-Directed by: Bliss Blank

Principal Cast

Zev Talcott (Z) – Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns
June Lowell – Bliss Blank
Tessa Finn – Ring of Kees
Meg Aerin – Bun Li
Phoebe Bosworth – Sofi Starship
Nyra – Dizzy Dollie
Cael – Jericho Caine
Hespa – Syndi Rella
Iris Vale – Swirls and Twirls
Oona Spectral – Jade
Meridiana – Britt Reprogrammed

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Explanation

Drill establishes the Sitri Center arc’s central tension in the first observation lab scene: the difference between what the institute claims it is doing and what it is actually doing. Tessa believes she is deploying a therapeutic intervention. Meg believes the intervention will accelerate dependency rather than resolve it. Both of them are right about different things, and the arc will spend twelve episodes demonstrating how a research environment can contain two contradictory true statements simultaneously as long as the funding holds.

The fake advertisements voiced by Iris Vale are doing more than setting tone. Better Self and Please Space are products that promise exactly what the Sitri Center promises: sleep optimization, subconscious reshaping, personalized sessions tailored to your rhythms. Iris Vale, who appears in the Sitri arc as a performer and later becomes a named character in Vale Four, is the connective tissue between the institute’s therapeutic framing and its commercial applications.

The advertisements are not interruptions. They are the argument.

Threat simulation theory, the scientific framework underlying Construct 37, is a genuine area of dream research: the hypothesis that certain dreams function as adaptive rehearsal for threatening scenarios. The Sitri Center’s intervention is premised on the possibility that these rehearsals can be redirected. Meg’s counter-argument, that Phoebe’s dreams are not rehearsal but reward-seeking, is also grounded in real neuroscience. The show is not choosing between them. It is asking what happens when an institution with a financial stake in the outcome gets to decide which theory is correct.

Human Made Art

Series artwork for this arc is from Vika Glitter on Pixabay, under the Pixabay license. Deep Dream State uses human art at every stage of the creative supply chain.

Consent Declaration

Deep Dream State is a desire horror audio drama written and produced by Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns. It explores psychological fiction at the boundaries of control, identity, and complicity. The Sitri Center arc draws on real research in threat simulation theory, sleep paralysis, and REM synchronization as a speculative fiction foundation.

The Sitri Center does not exist.  The technologies and conditioning protocols depicted are creative inventions for narrative purposes. Drill contains adult themes and suggestive content. All performances are works of fiction and take place within a consensual creative context. ISNI 0000 0005 2877 6254

Full Summary (spoilers)

Intro

Z introduces the series and the setting directly. This is Deep Dream State. Inside this story, he is Z. Tonight’s story comes from inside the Sitri Center, a place where dreams are analyzed, made, and sometimes broken.

Ad: Better Self

Iris Vale delivers the first advertisement in the register she will carry through the arc. Better Self is a science-backed mindfulness app for dreamers, doers, and night owls.

Observation Lab

Tessa Finn records her procedural notes for the first active intervention trial. Subject P-09 is Phoebe Bosworth, a twenty-seven-year-old journalism graduate whose shame-saturated dreams have developed a significant erotic component. Tessa has designed Construct 37, a mastery prototype intended to disrupt the recursive shame loops, and tonight is the first deployment.

Meg Aerin is less optimistic. She argues that Phoebe is not rehearsing adaptive responses but cycling through a neurochemical reward loop, and that Tessa’s corporate-sector methodology mistakes branding for scholarship. The argument escalates into a formal wager: one week of intervention, objective metrics, with the winner recording a full-throated endorsement of the loser’s methodology for the committee. The stakes are a twelve million dollar budget, automatic tenure, and sole PI status on a five year mandate. June Lowell, as Chief Scientific Officer, will oversee data validation personally. Z defuses the immediate tension without resolving the underlying one.

Dream Chamber

Tessa meets with Phoebe directly following the session. Phoebe reports that the dreams are getting louder, more vivid, more specifically sexual, and that she suspects she may be generating them intentionally. Tessa offers clinical reassurance. Z interrupts with a more human approach, mentioning that Tessa herself was once a subject, and that everyone carries unusual corners. Tessa removes Z from the room and is immediately confronted with Z’s precise read on what drives her. The conversation moves from professional to personal faster than Tessa intends. Z names the parking lot. Then the temple. Then the vending machine.

Dream Sequence: Classroom

Phoebe’s dream places her in a classroom where Cael, Nyra, and Hespa enact the embarrassment scenario her subconscious keeps rehearsing. She is simultaneously the subject of evaluation and the object of observation. The dream logic runs on its own rules: being seen is the threat, being seen is the reward, and Construct 37 has not yet changed the equation.

Ad: Please Space

Iris Vale returns for the midroll. Please Space is a scientifically validated meditation program for silence, the luxury kind. Personalized sessions tailored to your worries and your dreams.  The voice shifts register slightly toward the end.

Dream Chamber to Corridor

Phoebe tells Meg the dreams are getting worse. Meg clarifies what DDS actually promises: insight and data, not guaranteed outcomes. She explains that the sleep hygiene protocols restricting certain behaviors tend to intensify subconscious imagery as the mind seeks alternative avenues. Phoebe understands. Meg is saved from a personal question by a conveniently timed phone call.

Z is waiting in the corridor. He has been listening. The conversation that follows between Z and Meg covers Tessa’s obvious indiscretion, June’s likely response if she finds out, and the precise nature of what Meg believes she offers that Tessa does not. Meg is confident she is better.  They agree that June cannot know.

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