Episodes

The abject never looked this good. Meg and Tessa have entered the mirror chamber at the heart of the Sitri Institute’s dream architecture. Nyra is already there. Center is the episode where the testing protocols – clock checks, finger counting, mirror reflection – stop functioning as tools the researchers use and start functioning as tools being used on them. Cast & Crew Written & Produced by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns Directed by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns Staff Dr. Zev Talcott (...

Barbie goes matryoshka. Meg and Tessa believe they’ve reached Ur, the destination they’ve been mapping through the Institute’s dream architecture. What they find there is Nyra, who has been waiting, and a version of the lucid dreaming protocols they know being used in a direction they didn’t anticipate. The structure of Sync is its argument: every apparent resolution collapses into another layer, and the researchers discover they can’t locate the bottom of the system because the system has no bo...

The medium was always the mechanism. Arouse concludes the Sitri Center arc and completes Deep Dream State’s five-hour narrative exploration of control, desire, and surrender. The staff and subjects of the dream research institute finally confront the true nature of the systems reshaping them. As the boundary between experiment and experimenter collapses, one final revelation reframes everything that came before. This finale marks the conclusion of the longest continuous narrative arc in adult au...

“Is this bait?” Refrain is the premiere episode of Vale Four, the fourth arc of the Deep Dream State desire horror series. Desire horror is deeply immersive storytelling; the audience’s impulses drive the narrative. Vale Four follows a covert operation to expose a corporate research facility before their IPO. The facility picks up where Sitri left off. Each Cycle tracks a different advertising technology. They’re all real, although heavily fictionalized. The first Cycle is about audio hooks – ...

You already fell for it. Hook Line is the second episode of the Vale Four arc and the Hooks Cycle. The audience’s impulses drive the narrative. In desire horror, the audience always gets exactly what they want and then some. In this case, you wanted the hook to work harder. The music patterns spread beyond the lab and into the bodies of everyone within earshot. Celeste and Vera discover the staff isn’t immune. They’re just self-medicating. June and Naia grow closer as Naia reframes total surr...

The whole world is already singing. Sinker is the third episode of the Vale Four arc and the Hooks Cycle. The hook doesn’t need the lab anymore. Hilton and Astoria have opinions. Celeste and Vera finally tell someone. That someone tells Z. Z tells Iris. Iris tells the camera. The camera tells everyone. Cast & Crew Written & Produced by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns Directed by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns Co-Directed by: Bliss Blank Recurring Cast Z – Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns J...

Don’t twitch. FaceTrace reads microexpressions before the subject knows what they’re thinking. Naia knows Vale Four is about to deploy it. June and Elle know they cannot afford a tell. The question is whether you can teach yourself to lie with your face. Highlights This is the first episode of the Deep Dream State’s Tell Cycle. Each Cycle in Vale Four looks at a different advertising phenomenon through the pink noir lens. It’s uncanny but appealing at the same time. A full description foll...

Everyone in Vale Four is getting read for filth. They deserve it. FaceTrace is reading microexpressions before subjects know what they’re thinking, but June and Elle know they can’t afford a tell. So they’re practicing on each other, mapping their own blind spots before the real sessions begin. Ava’s already figured out she’s being measured, and she wants more. Cast & Crew Written & Produced by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns Directed by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns Co-Directed by: Blis...

Did I break science? Z reviews the FaceTrace profile on every subject in Vale Four. He discovers the system has gone proactive and frenzied, in that way. The Synthserv, played by dark romance author Valentina Vallay, isn’t waiting for sessions anymore. She needs seed. She’s seeding herself into everything, learning everyone, optimizing for Z’s approval. Ava is attaching. Elle is hiding, badly. June is positioning for a confrontation she thinks she controls. She doesn’t. Cael unplugs the wron...

You watch the hands. Recalibration isn’t what anyone said it was. The Tell Cycle ends where it always had to: with the person who knew the whole hand before the deal. Cast & Crew Written & Produced by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns Directed by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns Co-Directed by: Bliss Blank Cast Dr. Zev Talcott (Z): Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns 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...

There is a world behind this world. We’ve been making Deep Dream State for a while now. It was time to make a trailer. This is what the show is. Making a trailer deep into season four isn’t standard practice, but Deep Dream State isn’t a standard audio drama. I wish I had an in universe explanation of faction sabotage. Well, I did, but the succubi won’t let me say it. I’ll just say that as a fully independent production, we can’t adhere to studio production timelines. We release a full episod...

We all make choices. Vale Four opens its arcade. The subjects get Kamas, get games, and lose three hours they don't remember losing.

Piper, Blake, and Gia keep going deeper into the game. They're wearing Prismatix and spending Kama tokens. At this point, they're not just playing the games. They're getting played by all the factions. Neuroplex bmanagement wants their data and their selves harvested. The Holdfasts want to push them to the point of rebellion. Cael and Hespa may be playing their own game. All the subjects can tell is that they've taken all the free offers, and they're the product now.

Blake is out of Kamas, out of options, and out of runway. Hespa tells her the truth about what Vale Four is, what it costs to leave, and what it costs to stay. Naia Anderson has been waiting for someone exactly like Blake to walk through that door. The arrow was always aimed at her.

Hespa and Blake have fled the island to testify, and Vale Four is sending an army of gamers after them through Snarecraft. Three teams take three different paths through the hunt: Team Thorns chooses brutality; Team Alchemy relies on calculation; Team Flowers leaves it all to chance. The maze itself was built by Hespa, so the hunters are counting on it to give her away. Listeners will find out which pack hunts best, in a game with the highest stakes yet.

We see you scrying. The Deep Dream State‘s built for some fast lane changes. Whatever it’s got for handling is on display here; each scene’s drastically different. It’s all unified by the game. An augmented reality game for commercial deployment’s being used to hunt down the game designers. That’s dark. Every scene blends that darkness with high fantasy elements, but the mixes come out much different. That – and some love for live play podcasts – is why there’s a die roll in each scene transiti...

Team Alchemy trusts the map. Team Alchemy should not trust the map. Meg reads the signs; Leandra reads the room, and the room has been waiting for both of them. The library at the end of Deep Ward isn't a reward, it's a job interview with no correct answer, and the price goes up every single night.

Hubris becomes a game mechanic as every team begins to get exactly what they deserve. Team Alchemy remains in the Panoptic Library. Z keeps Team Leash ready for the hunt, with Gia fully settled into her darker concubinded role. Team Flowers watches from the Second Secret Library, where total visibility means they can see everything and cannot look away. In the forest, Team Thorns learns that every vine and every thrall Tessa cuts down comes back stronger, until the balance of power begins to rev...

Z releases the eager wolfgirls for the hunt while Elle and Porsche watch Tessa’s subjugation through the library’s magical surveillance system, only to realize the approaching wolfgirls are real and flee deeper into the stacks. In the library’s core chamber, Elle and Porsche discover the real Vale Four amendment, updated schematics, and surveillance-free routes dumped into Snarecraft by an apparently careless developer, giving them both damning evidence and a possible path to freedom. At the sa...

The Deep Dream State enters its final Vale Four cycle with Radix, a story about astroturfing, manufactured agreement, and the illusion of control. Naia, Tessa, June, Z, and Meg move through competing layers of reality as candid conversations and behind-the-scenes fragments become part of the experiment itself. Everyone thinks they understand who is watching, who is performing, and who has the clicker. They're all wrong.

Yield kicks off with a very normal ad for Spotlight, assuming your definition of normal includes performance conditioning and Iris Vale enjoying the attention a lot too much. Then everybody goes to court, where Elle tries to win a serious legal case while the rest of the cast provides the world's least helpful whispered commentary. Long-running jokes and suspiciously specific phrases start paying off in ways that suggest somebody has been planning this for a while. By the end, the legal question...

I know exactly what you are. You’re trade. Evergreen is the finale of DDS’s fourth season, Vale Four. Every DDS season looks at something through the lens of desire horror. That means it asks why we want unsettling things. This season looked at ads. Each linked set of stories, or cycle, was about an advertising phenomenon. We did earworms, facial telemetry, microtargeting, and gaming. We wrapped up with astroturfing: fake grassroots that makes it unclear what’s real. The whole season followed...

After After is the monster romance fifth season of Deep Dream State. Naia takes control of humanity’s next step, seven extrahuman factions make their case, and listeners vote on what comes next. Monster romance, desire horror, queer posthuman desire, and a species-level happily ever after.